Retail giant Walmart have entered into a strategic partnership with Microsoft in order to leverage the latter’s wide range of cloud solutions. With this five-year deal, Walmart aims to create a better shopping experience for customers and compete with Amazon by focusing on machine learning, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and data analytics platforms.
According to Walmart, cloud technology and AI have the potential to accelerate business-critical workloads. They believe that this acceleration can not only catapult the online presence of a company but also reduce the time it takes to reach business goals.
Having understood this benefit, Walmart say that they decided to partner with Microsoft to build a strong online presence by eliminating cashiers and checkout lines from retail stores. They say that this move will allow Walmart to keep pace with Amazon Go, the automated e-Commerce store format.
As per the terms of the five-year deal, Walmart and Microsoft engineers will collaborate on the assessment, development, and support phase of moving hundreds of existing applications to cloud-native architectures. Speaking about the alliance, Doug McMillon, CEO at Walmart, commented:
Walmart’s commitment to technology is centered around creating incredibly convenient ways for customers to shop and empowering associates to do their best work.
Whether it’s combined with our agile cloud platform or leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to work smarter, we believe Microsoft will be a strong partner in driving our ability to innovate even further and faster.