SymphonyAI Advances Strategic Generative AI Collaboration With Microsoft For Next-Generation Connected Retail

Robust collaboration extends to SymphonyAI Retail Copilots on Microsoft Azure to increase productivity, collaboration, and business performance for category managers and supply chain demand planners

PALO ALTO, Calif. & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SymphonyAI, a leader in predictive and generative enterprise AI SaaS, has teamed with Microsoft to bring leading retail AI software applications using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to retailers and CPGs worldwide, delivering rapid, in-depth insights, and paving the way for truly connected end-to-end retail. The collaboration was announced today at NRF 2024: Retail’s Big Show in New York City.

SymphonyAI’s retail applications combine deep retail domain expertise with predictive and generative AI capabilities on Azure so retailers can make more effective decisions faster. SymphonyAI retail AI applications are built on fine-tuned, retail-specific LLMs and use Azure OpenAI Service to provide secure insight into customer datasets and linked external sources. With the recent announcement of the SymphonyAI Category Manager Copilot and Demand Planner Copilot, SymphonyAI is enabling retailers to tackle the toughest retail challenges faster and better.

The SymphonyAI Category Manager Copilot uses SymphonyAI’s extensive retail LLM capabilities, combining decades of retail and CPG knowledge, processes, content, and customer segmentation to provide rapid insights into current customer merchandising and sales data. As a result, the Category Manager Copilot understands the intent of a user’s questions to rapidly identify all performance-affecting factors in a product category and make recommendations about best actions to take. The copilot uses both text and graphics to quickly communicate insights and summaries, guiding users through different potential scenarios and assembling clear next steps. Using rapid insights from SymphonyAI Category Manager Copilot, category managers make better decisions faster, bringing category strategies to life and giving shoppers the items they want, when and where they want them.

The Demand Planner Copilot gives demand planners the ability to more accurately forecast optimized inventory quantities with a prioritized approach to understand, act, and communicate inventory requirements based on highly accurate AI-based forecasts. A retail demand planner is responsible for ensuring the right quantities of items are ordered to satisfy customer demands while minimizing waste. Because demand planners face time constraints on top of balancing inventory and supply chain issues, rapid decision making based on up-to-date information is critically important.

When unforeseen demand shifts occur, demand planners are often unable to analyze, understand and mitigate the demand anomalies in time to offset the negative impact. The Demand Planner Copilot performs deep, rapid analysis to accurately pinpoint the cause of increased or decreased demand and provides mitigation recommendations. When new items are introduced into the assortment with no demand history to inform the forecast, the Demand Planner Copilot rapidly indexes master item repositories to match attributes of like items to generate forecasts that the planner could not have created without extensive manual research and incomplete assumptions.

“Leading retailers and CPGs worldwide have enthusiastically greeted the SymphonyAI Retail Copilots, inspired by their power to leapfrog current technology with game-changing productivity, collaboration, accuracy, and connectedness,” said Manish Choudhary, President of SymphonyAI’s Retail CPG division. “At the end of the day, the copilots deliver the holy grail of retail effectiveness: increased customer engagement, enterprise-wide consistency localized for each store, and improved bottom-line results.”

“SymphonyAI’s retail solutions combine deep retail domain expertise with leading AI capabilities to deliver transformative, quantifiable business impact,” said Kumar Abhimanyu, SVP of strategic partnerships at SymphonyAI. “Exquisitely crafted to deliver success in today’s challenging retail landscape, this innovative collaboration leverages predictive and generative AI on the Microsoft Azure platform to deliver a powerful productivity and efficiency boost for innovative retailers worldwide.”

“Through integration with Azure OpenAI Service, SymphonyAI’s retail applications will deliver measurable value to retailers and CPGs,” said Keith Mercier, General Manager, Worldwide Retail & Consumer Goods, Microsoft. “Next-generation predictive and generative AI tools can help transform retail by enhancing operational efficiency and supporting end-to-end connectivity from the store to corporate. We look forward to continuing our work with SymphonyAI to bring transformational productivity, accuracy, and shopper engagement to the retail and CPG industries with generative AI.”

Retailers and CPGs attending NRF can request a meeting and demo with SymphonyAI in booth #1441 to learn more about the collaboration with Microsoft and the power of predictive and generative AI solutions for retail.

About SymphonyAI

SymphonyAI is building the leading enterprise AI SaaS company for digital transformation across the most critical and resilient growth verticals, including retail, consumer packaged goods, finance, manufacturing, media, and IT/enterprise service management. SymphonyAI verticals have many leading enterprises as clients. Since its founding in 2017, SymphonyAI has grown rapidly to 3,000 talented leaders, data scientists, and other professionals. SymphonyAI is a SAIGroup company, backed by a $1 billion commitment from successful entrepreneur and philanthropist Dr. Romesh Wadhwani. Learn more at www.symphonyai.com.

Contacts

Jenna Jordan
Ketner Group Communications (for SymphonyAI)
jenna@ketnergroup.com