Retail runs on data—but it’s not always easy. Application sprawl across each retail line of business remains a real challenge, often resulting in data chaos amid escalating tech costs.  

Key concepts like the value of a comprehensive data fabric and making analytics access even easier with generative AI (Gen AI) are turning the tide by helping workers at the very edges of the organization act not on instinct, but on real, reliable, near real-time information.  

We recently partnered with industry SMEs to assess common leadership priorities and catalog our top retail solutions leveraged by our customers. Here’s a sampling of top trends we found most compelling—along with how MicroStrategy customers tackle data challenges to win the retail game.   

The Customer Is (Still) King

Many industries live by this age-old adage—and retail is no exception. One colleague recently shared some insights about The Top Retail Commerce Initiatives for 2024 according to Forrester Research. Their top three points all speak to the outsized importance of customer experience initiatives in a highly competitive, rapidly changing retail landscape.  

Forrester Research: The Top Retail Commerce Initiatives for 2024, February 2024 

We see similar emphasis on customer experience in the real-world retail solutions our customers use. A quarter of our 12 most popular retail solutions focus on loyalty analytics, omnichannel experience management, and 360-degree value chain visibility. These impactful retail solutions focus on helping customers build customized apps to drive significant business growth through personalized recommendations and loyalty programs.

Ultimately, retailers need holistic solutions that integrate vast information pipelines into a trusted data fabric capable of delivering the insights workers need to hyperfocus on the 5 P’s: product, price, placement, promotion, and people empowerment. Retail technology leaders who invest in solutions built on a trusted foundation for actionable analytics consistently empower more people across their organizations to leverage insights in a meaningful way.  

Data Insights Are Ever So Essential

Perhaps that’s why data analytics and BI are often among the top tech investment priorities for leading retailers worldwide. In fact, according to a recent study by Gartner, nearly 9 of 10 retail CIOs plan to increase their data analytics and BI investments over the next year.  

MicroStrategy customers achieve significant BI impact through custom-built mobile apps that unify data from dozens of sources and third-party applications, enabling workers to act with ease. Victoria’s Secret, Sainsbury’s, Wawa, and Lidl parent company, the Schwarz Group, are among the many retailers with similar empowering thousands with actionable insights at their fingertips.  

These solutions streamline insights across supply chains, distribution center networks, and in-store locations to empower tens of thousands of frontline workers to focus on how best to do their jobs. A key benefit of these apps is that they free employees from their devices—allowing them to “look up” and engage with customers—to provide the best possible face-to-face experience.   

Gen AI Delivers Deeper Data Meaning

Rapid advancements in generative AI play a crucial role in further enabling retail workers to rapidly understand the data, work smarter, and ultimately spend more time serving customers. However, for Gen AI to succeed with data insights and analytics, a trusted data foundation has proven essential.  

A recent Forbes article about How AI Is Revolutionizing Retail describes why having a unified data model underpinning any Gen AI initiative is essential for its long-term success—and we completely agree. When we introduced our first-to-market Gen AI solution for data analytics early in the LLM craze, we knew that a trusted data foundation would be key to successfully providing specific answers for natural language questions. 

At our NRF breakout session in January, and at our annual user conference in May, several customers shared the outsized potential they saw with MicroStrategy AI as they had started exploring its possible impact. Since then, numerous customers have proven that potential with exciting speed—drastically accelerating the time to value for launching new Gen AI chatbots using the trusted data fabric offered by our native Semantic Graph. 

The Warehouse Group, New Zealand’s largest non-food retailer and our customer award winner for innovation, earned the accolade in part for their leadership in accelerating data-powered decision making among users who don’t typically delve into their data reporting tools. Federated Co-operatives Limited, a manufacturing and wholesale co-operative serving 160 Co-op associations and communities across Western Canada, has explored use cases that accelerate time-to-insight for different personas spanning back-office business analysts and executives.  

GUESS is also among the many customers we’ve partnered with to launch GenAI bots this year. Often keen to embrace cutting-edge technologies, this long-time MicroStrategy customer continuously innovates to use the platform to get the right information where and when they need it—on mobile apps, embedded in third-party systems, or as custom-built applications. Using "game-changing" technology like MicroStrategy AI, they continue to break down the last remaining barriers between end users and access to data, allowing them to get data-backed answers to the questions they ask conversationally in natural language. 

Two GUESS leaders will join MicroStrategy’s Chief Product Officer Saurabh Abhyankar at our NRF 2025 session to share how they transform data and AI into real-time insights with MicroStrategy ONE. Together, we’ll explore how their supply chain and customer insights bots are accelerating access to meaningful insights for the business. Don’t miss Revolutionizing Retail with Data and AI That Helps You ‘Look Up!’ to learn how this premium brand empowers employees worldwide with instant answers—helping them "look up" from screens to focus on providing exceptional service.  

Many more retail customers have implemented impactful AI bots to empower business users. In fact, free AI trial and AI Ramp Up program participants go from idea to impact in under six weeks due to the powerful combination of integrated LLM technologies with the platform’s inherent data foundation and governance. Today, our retail customers leverage MicroStrategy AI bots for sales, merchandising, supply chain, customer experience, loyalty program management, and more.  

ROI-Ready Retail

Hundreds of customers worldwide leverage the MicroStrategy ONE platform to build data analytics and AI solutions that help them run a better retail business. These solutions have empowered tens of thousands of frontline workers to provide better customer service on the store floor and saved millions by avoiding costly integration projects. The myriad benefits of MicroStrategy ONE retail solutions are amplified with a common data fabric as the foundation for each suite of solutions. Visit us online to learn more.