Tag: Business Applications

  • From Chatbots To Digital Workers: Why NiCE’s AI Focuses On Execution

    From Chatbots To Digital Workers: Why NiCE’s AI Focuses On Execution

    NiCE is betting that AI agents that complete tasks—not just conversations—will separate winners from pretenders in the enterprise AI race

    The artificial intelligence hype cycle has reached peak saturation, with technology vendors scrambling to slap “AI-powered” labels on everything from refrigerator recipe suggestions to chatbots that rely on simple keyword matching. Yet, for all the breathless marketing rhetoric, most business leaders are still waiting for AI that simplifies operations and improves data analysis.

    NiCE, a customer experience platform provider, is making a calculated bet that the next phase of enterprise AI won’t be about making chatbots sound more human. The next wave of business outcomes will leverage AI agents that can navigate complex business processes from start to finish with minimal human intervention. 

    NiCE’s CEO, Scott Russell said, “Optimizing knowledge is not just critical for AI to truly thrive in your environment, but it’s also the key for transforming service from reactive to proactive, identifying opportunities to solve issues and predict future needs.” NiCE’s recent product launches and strategic moves reveal a move toward enhanced automation and agentic AI.

    From AI Data Access to Intelligent Action

    The first wave of enterprise AI focused primarily on making data more accessible through conversational interfaces—essentially putting a chat layer on top of existing applications and knowledge repositories. 

    While this represented significant progress in democratizing data access, it only scratched the surface of AI’s potential business value. Organizations could ask questions and get answers, but the burden of reasoning through complex decisions and taking action remained entirely on human operators.

    Going forward, technology vendors, such as NiCE, will use AI to deliver solutions that can reason through multifaceted problems and take semi or fully autonomous action. This evolution from conversational AI to agentic AI represents the difference between AI that informs and AI that performs. Agentic AI enhances a company’s ability to analyze context, weigh multiple variables, make informed decisions based on key business performance indicators, and execute actions across interconnected systems.

    Traditional conversational AI helps a customer service representative find relevant information. Still, agentic AI can help a representative evaluate a customer’s complete history more easily, assess risk factors, determine appropriate responses based on business rules, and automatically trigger the necessary workflows to resolve issues end-to-end. “There’s a big difference between AI that talks and AI that gets things done,” explains Barry Cooper, President of NiCE’s CX Division. “While others are building agents that mimic conversations, we’re building agents that fulfill customer needs—end to end.” 

    This distinction becomes crucial when examining NiCE’s CXone Mpower Agents. Traditional AI chatbots had limited access to data, offered scripted responses, and were confined to specific areas of the business, such as front-office or back-office operations. NiCE’s AI agent platform aim to break through these constraints by operating across the entire enterprise ecosystem—from initial customer contact through mid-office approvals to back-end fulfillment systems. Admittedly, Agentic AI is the AI buzzword of 2025, but early, well-scoped use cases show promise. 

    Speeding Up Time to AI Agent Creation

    Technology companies are increasingly working to streamline AI deployment as traditional approaches require extensive technical resources, custom development, and lengthy implementation cycles. NiCE’s model simplifies AI agent creation while maintaining enterprise-grade sophistication through what they call vibe coding, allowing business users to tailor each agent’s personality and communication style without requiring technical expertise.

    While the concept of vibe coding remains ill-defined, and its merits are hotly debated within the enterprise software community, there is a broad consensus around the underlying goal of making AI agents easier to code and deploy. The specific term matters less than the fundamental shift toward empowering business users to create and customize AI functionality without requiring deep technical expertise.

    Breaking Down Data and Function Silos With Strategic Partnerships

    In a rapidly evolving tech landscape, no single vendor can deliver everything an enterprise needs to succeed with AI, cloud, data, and digital transformation. Today, companies are no longer looking for isolated solutions—they need interconnected ecosystems. That’s why strategic partnerships are essential. By working together, enterprise technology vendors can bridge data and function silos, improving workflows and accelerating innovation. Just as importantly, these alliances help enterprises extract greater value from existing technology investments by ensuring that new capabilities work in concert with the tools already in place. Over the past several months, NiCE has expanded its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and added ServiceNow and Snowflake to the mix.

    NICE and AWS Tackle AI Integration at Enterprise Scale

    At Interactions 2025, NiCE announced an expanded collaboration with AWS, bringing together NiCE’s domain expertise and rich interaction data with AWS’s cloud infrastructure and generative AI services, including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, and the Amazon Nova family of large language models. The partnership addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing enterprise AI deployments: fragmented workflows, disconnected data, and inconsistent global performance. 

    The partnership focuses on three core pillars. First, content-aware automation ensures that AI-generated responses are highly relevant and context-specific. Using the Amazon Q Index, Mpower Agents are equipped with up-to-date business content—from product documentation to policy details and case histories—enabling them to respond accurately and confidently in real time.

    Second, the integration delivers enterprise-wide orchestration by bridging front, middle, and back-office operations. NiCE’s CXone Mpower Orchestrator automates workflows across functional teams, while Amazon Q Business extends this reach into a broader set of enterprise applications—eliminating silos and streamlining complex processes.

    Additionally, global scalability is made possible through AWS’s robust cloud infrastructure. With low-latency performance and high availability across regions, multinational organizations can deploy and scale AI-driven customer service experiences quickly and consistently around the world. NiCE’s partnership strategy also extends beyond AWS to include other critical enterprise platforms, such as ServiceNow and Snowflake. 

    NiCE and ServiceNow Partner to Automate the Full Customer Journey

    NiCE’s latest partnership with ServiceNow aims to eliminate long-standing service gaps by tightly integrating real-time customer engagement with enterprise workflow automation. Announced at ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2025 event, the collaboration integrates NiCE’s customer service platform with ServiceNow’s AI and Customer Service Management (CSM) tools to streamline operations across the entire organization, from the front office to the back.

    The goal: fully automated customer service fulfillment. The combined solution routes inquiries based on sentiment, intent, and service-level agreements (SLAs)—bridging siloed departments to accelerate resolution times and enhance both customer and employee experiences. Role-based AI copilots assist agents and back-office teams with real-time insights and next-best actions, while continuous optimization tools flag issues and launch workflows automatically.

    These relationships provide access to complementary technologies and customer bases, allowing NiCE to integrate with the broader enterprise software ecosystem that companies rely on for operations, data management, and workflow automation.

    NICE and Snowflake Partner to Turn Customer Interaction Data Into Enterprise Intelligence

    NiCE’s strategic collaboration with Snowflake aims to unlock the full value of customer interaction data by making it accessible, secure, and actionable across the enterprise. By integrating Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud with CXone Mpower, NICE can improve data sharing, breaking down silos that have traditionally limited the impact of customer insights. Snowflake serves as the backbone of the CXone Mpower data lake, centralizing interaction data and enriching it with information from other enterprise systems. This unified data foundation allows organizations to automate key processes—from billing to claims handling—while powering AI-driven analytics, dashboards, and decision-making. The result: faster fulfillment, greater accuracy, and a deeper, organization-wide understanding of the customer experience.

    The Strategic Imperative of Brand Evolution in an AI Era

    Apparently, 2025 is the year of the brand refresh. The technology industry has witnessed updates from Five9, Google’s G, Hitachi HPE, and Qualcomm’s introduction of Dragonwing, alongside NiCE’s own transformation. Every brand refresh has its own story to tell, but NiCE’s new logo and marketing campaign represent more than a desire for fresh typography and color schemes.

    The rebrand indicates the company’s strategic desire to expand its AI vision beyond the contact center to encompass its broader portfolio of finance and security solutions. The company describes the rebrand as positioning “NICE to empower brands to deliver AI-powered experiences that are proactive, human-centered and intuitive—whether connecting with customers, protecting communities or combatting financial crime.”

    NiCE’s solution involves partnering with actress Kristen Bell, who serves as the face of the company’s “NiCE World” brand campaign. The initiative positions Bell as the “NiCEst Person in the World,” NiCE said the campaign “builds on NiCE’s reimagined brand, championing a future where AI isn’t just intelligent – it’s connected, intuitive and working behind the scenes to make life better.

    Key Takeaways

    The enterprise AI market remains in flux, with new entrants and existing players continually repositioning themselves. NiCE’s focus on domain expertise, integration depth, strategic partnerships, and automation suggests a company that understands both the technical and implementation requirements necessary for large-scale AI adoption.

    As enterprises increasingly demand AI that delivers results, NiCE’s bet on fulfillment-focused automation may prove prescient. Of course, there’s still the matter of  cost and return on investment. Most companies struggle to understand and plan for the true product and operational costs of AI. Organizations need to work with their technology vendors to deploy well-scoped use case that deliver measurable return on investment, fast. The question isn’t whether AI will transform customer experience—it’s which companies will build AI that completes the transformation rather than just talking about it.

  • SAP Modernization Gains Momentum: Customer Success Stories From Sapphire

    SAP Modernization Gains Momentum: Customer Success Stories From Sapphire

    For nearly two decades, Lopez Research has tracked SAP customers’ struggles when transitioning to standardized, cloud-based solutions. The reality of enterprise IT deployments is undeniable: SAP powers critical business operations—from finance and human resources to sales, marketing, and supply chain management—making any transition extraordinarily complex.

    Lopez Research has consistently heard these concerns from organizations across industries. However, we’re witnessing a significant shift as customers finally embrace modernization. Two key factors drive the modernization momentum: substantially improved SAP offerings and an urgent desire to capitalize on artificial intelligence capabilities that require modern infrastructure.

    Migrating business software from on-premises to cloud environments is like changing a car’s tires while driving at full speed. This challenge gets amplified by years of customizations that make simple drop-in replacements to modern cloud offerings impossible. The path to a new business suite is inevitably costly, complex, and time-consuming.

    Simplifying Business with SAP

    At Sapphire 2025, SAP’s message was unmistakable: they’re committed to simplifying how customers engage with their products—whether through faster, more cost-effective modernization of existing solutions, embracing AI innovations, or building solutions with partners. This comprehensive transformation has been years in the making.

    On day one, Christian Klein introduced a new transition guidance tool to accelerate migrations with fewer resources. SAP is streamlining AI deployment by embedding intelligence directly into its products. The company expects to deliver more than 400 embedded AI scenarios by year-end, with Joule functioning as a CoPilot interface across the entire suite. Multi-agent frameworks are this year’s dominant theme, and SAP has embraced agentic AI capabilities. A key objective is providing tools that reduce custom application and AI development costs throughout the entire lifecycle. SAP is enhancing customer experience through several key initiatives:

    • Line-of-business specific solution packages tailored to different buying centers (finance, HR, supply chain, sales, procurement, services)
    • Simplified commercial terms and contracts
    • Out-of-the-box AI packages with managed integration
    • Pre-packaged, SAP-managed industry-specific content
    • Inclusion of SAP Build to extend applications while maintaining a clean core

    With these changes, SAP aims to create solutions that deliver a “best of suite as a service” approach, significantly reducing complexity and implementation costs for companies adopting SAP’s business suite.

    At Sapphire 2025, SAP also announced new partnerships with AWS and Perplexity.ai. The Perplexity answer engine is being embedded directly into SAP Joule. It allows companies to integrate accurate, trusted, real-time answers on public web data with their SAP data for enhanced decision-making. The AWS collaboration establishes a dedicated AI co-innovation program and fund to support the development and deployment of generative AI applications on the SAP Business Technology Platform for cloud ERP workloads.

    SAP Responds to Customer Challenges

    On day two of SAP’s Sapphire conference, Thomas Saueressig acknowledged these customer challenges and highlighted the company’s progress over the past year. At last year’s Sapphire, SAP introduced its simplified engagement model, the RISE with SAP offering, and an integrated tool chain to streamline transformation processes. This year, Saueressig revealed that “customers using the RISE with SAP methodology and the integrated tool chain saved up to 30% of the cost for their transformations.”

    The RISE with SAP offering helps businesses transition their SAP ERP systems from on-premises to the cloud. Rather than a new standalone product, it’s a bundled package of software, platform, infrastructure, and services, marketed as “Business Transformation as a Service.” The RISE with SAP methodology encompasses SAP S/4HANA Cloud and the SAP Business Suite, enabling customers to progress from fit-to-standard to fit-to-suite implementations.

    SAP also offers GROW with SAP, a program tailored for small to medium-sized businesses seeking rapid cloud ERP adoption. It delivers a comprehensive package of solutions, best practices, adoption services, community access, and learning resources for smooth cloud implementation. The company now supports 8,500 RISE with SAP customers and manages over 146,000 systems with an impressive five-nines (99.999%) availability service level agreement.

    While companies recognize data as their strategic asset, unlocking its value has remained challenging. In February 2025, SAP announced the SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC)—a next-generation, fully managed Software-as-a-Service platform that unifies, governs, and analyzes business data across SAP and third-party sources. This solution represents the evolution of SAP’s data and analytics offerings, integrating capabilities from SAP BW, SAP Datasphere, SAP Analytics Cloud, and new AI features enabled through a strategic partnership with Databricks.

    Real-World Customer Success Stories

    The critical question remains: Will SAP’s efforts yield meaningful results? This year’s Sapphire showcased customers sharing their modernization journeys and the value they’re creating through SAP solutions and artificial intelligence.

    Mercedes-Benz: Navigating Complex Transformation

    Mercedes-Benz decided to adopt RISE with SAP in 2024. Katrin Lehmann, CIO of Mercedes-Benz Group, explained, “I took on that role just a year ago, and the first thing you do is assess what you have. I have over 10,000 applications in the system landscape, and 1,200 of those are SAP applications. Most of them (SAP apps) are still on ECC. How did we tackle that topic? We bought LeanIX.”

    SAP’s LeanIX software provides comprehensive visibility into an organization’s entire software estate—whether purchased, planned, or custom-built. By offering detailed insights into the current IT landscape and all interdependencies, SAP LeanIX helps companies plan and navigate both technical and business aspects of ERP transformation.

    Lehmann continued, “We implemented LeanIX and sorted the systems by importance. We used the time methodology, transform, invest, migrate, eliminate, to plan where we need to go. We took the most important systems, and we’re migrating those to RISE right now.”

    She emphasized that “Moving to RISE also means that we can leverage innovation, and AI is very important to us. But, AI is not new to us at all.” Mercedes-Benz engineers have been using GitHub Copilot for several years throughout their supply chain and value chain. The company has developed its own internal ChatGPT called MRS GPT, which is used across finance, HR, and manufacturing plants. When quality issues arise, workers can use natural language to ask MRS GPT for resolution assistance. The company is now looking to incorporate Joule and other SAP AI capabilities.

    Metal Services: Transformation During Crisis

    Jeff Suellentrop, CITO of Metal Services LLC, shared how his company grew too quickly and needed to reinvent its business during bankruptcy, which followed rapid growth. “We wanted to reimagine how we do business. We selected GROW with SAP, and an all-best practice implementation to replace every system in the entire company. Now there are other subsystems, but we got rid of the paper and pencil. And not only do we use the best practices for simplification, but also to level up. The (SAP) best practices were better than many existing processes. It was a few huge lifts, and we went live within eight months of initiating that process.”

    He added, “We’ve built out our full data model, which is one of the big unlocks (of value). We have the ability with a standardized, out-of-the-box core product to deploy to multiple sites, and then we can continuously innovate on top of that. We use SAP maintenance to maintain all our equipment, and we’ve returned millions and millions of dollars back into the business. Our profitability and utilization are up. We have some other AI models as well, and we’ve just scratched the surface.”

    Mars: Multi-Business Unit Strategy

    Large multinational companies face unique challenges when designing systems that can’t follow a one-size-fits-all approach. Will Beery, Global CIO of Mars Snacking, outlined the company’s digital strategy to create an architecture that is “global, standardized, scalable, and has the ability to make it easier to plug in acquisitions.”

    “We’re using the public cloud to house True Fruit, Nature’s Bakery, and now KIND. For my retail business, we’ve deployed a retail-specific RISE instance that will run M&M stores but also be fit-for-purpose (solution) for Hotel Chocolat. For Mars Wrigley, we’re developing a more customized, complex template for the rest of Mars Incorporated. The three-tier model allows us the agility to support smaller businesses like KIND. It allows us interoperability across all businesses, to drive scale and efficiency where it makes sense. It’s also going to enable a massive integration if we were to acquire a sizable snacking business in the future. SAP and RISE are a massive partner, helping us do that fast and at a lower total cost of ownership.”

    Praveen Moturu, Global Vice President – Digital Platforms at Mars Information Services, elaborated, “We took a model-driven approach from our business capabilities, business processes, data, applications, and technology, and put those models in the SAP Business Suite. It has helped us to build a cleaner platform for the future, which is resilient, and that’s one of the key cornerstones of our transformation.”

    Starting with what SAP calls a “clean core” is challenging but potentially rewarding. Moturu explained, “The productivity from the business suite is enormous for us. We started with leveraging the automation that’s already available in the (SAP) Business Suite to reduce manual interactions, human errors, and give our associates time back. Real-time data and embedded analytics helped us to drive productivity and make accurate and timely decisions that help us to drive quality. And last, but not least, the AI components that the business we introduced with Joule have increased productivity across the company. We have deployed it in our public and private cloud, and it helped us onboard new users, change management, and learning.”

    NBCUniversal: From Project to Platform Mindset

    How you start the transformation journey will shape how resilient and flexible your company becomes as market dynamics change. Abhinav Gupta, SVP of Enterprise Product at NBCUniversal, shared how his company approached transformation and offered advice for business leaders.

    “The fundamental premise of our strategy is to consolidate disparate technology platforms supporting similar processes onto a common technology platform with a standardized set of processes. It sounds easy, right? This is hard to do because this is not about the technology. It requires driving a significant mindset shift within the company. The way I like to verbalize this mindset shift is this concept of moving from a project mindset to a product or platform mindset.”

    Gupta explained how NBCUniversal structured its governance to drive this mindset shift: “One of the ways we are driving this mindset shift within NBC Universal is in the way that we have structured our governance model. The steering committee for our finance transformation effort has representation across the entire breadth of the company. We have the four CFOs who represent each of the four divisions. We have our chief accounting officer, our corporate Financial Planning and Analysis leader, our global CIO, our CTO, and our head of AI on the steering committee as well. We also have representation from EY, our primary Systems Integrator in this effort, and SAP.”

    He praised SAP’s collaborative approach, noting that SAP “brought its top product and engineering folks that have collaborated with our teams, and collectively, we have overcome some significant problem statements.”

    Despite the successes, NBCUniversal acknowledged the ongoing challenges of transformation. Gupta emphasized, “In spite of the incredible wins that I’ve shared with all of you today, we still have a long way ahead of us. The one key takeaway for the audience is this. It’s important to bake in incremental wins across your long transformation journeys. This is helpful to keep your organization and people energized, which is crucial to your success.”

    Expanding Success Stories

    Saueressig highlighted additional customer achievements, including PHP’s creation of $500 million in value using Signavio for business process transformation, enabling the company to reinvent its shared service center model. SAP Signavio is a comprehensive suite for business process transformation that helps organizations design, analyze, improve, manage, and monitor process changes.

    Nestlé saved over 5 million hours using solutions like SAP’s WalkMe—a digital adoption platform providing in-app guidance, automation, and analytics—to drive enablement and digital adoption for 270,000 people across more than 200 applications. First Abu Dhabi Bank achieved a 25% reduction in application count.

    Jan Gilg, Chief Revenue Officer for SAP Americas and SAP Business Suite, and Member of the SAP Extended Board, emphasized, “An integrated, harmonized enterprise foundation is the key, and that’s the reimagined SAP Business Suite. It is data-driven, AI-powered, and can democratize access to business AI. I’m convinced that this will then truly unlock the next wave of productivity, and the time is now.”

    Lopez Research Perspective

    Lopez Research believes we’re witnessing a critical inflection point in enterprise software modernization. After years of hesitation, SAP customers are accelerating their transformation journeys, driven by more flexible migration options and the compelling business case for AI-powered operations. While the path remains challenging, the potential benefits in operational efficiency, data-driven decision making, and competitive differentiation are becoming too significant to ignore.

    SAP customers have long viewed their relationship with the software provider as a partnership rather than a typical vendor arrangement. They expect SAP to innovate on their behalf but adopt these innovations cautiously, recognizing the potential business disruption of hasty implementation. This balanced approach to modernization—combining thoughtful planning with strategic ambition—appears to be gaining traction as organizations seek the agility needed to thrive in increasingly digital markets.

  • Microsoft Showcases How Companies Are Using Technology To Thrive During A Pandemic

    Microsoft Showcases How Companies Are Using Technology To Thrive During A Pandemic

    The COVID-19 pandemic forced companies of all sizes to shift business practices. Technology plays an increasingly important role as organizations enable remote work and contactless engagement. Microsoft showcased many examples of how companies were transforming their business at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit. Alysa Taylor, Corporate Vice President Microsoft Business Applications & Global Industry, launched her keynote with a discussion of how the world and Microsoft have changed. “This is a whole new era for us. Historically, big transformation initiatives that would happen over the years have condensed out of necessity to weeks or even in days.”

    Systems that enable agility are critical. Microsoft’s Taylor described how L’Oreal expanded from manufacturing beauty products to creating hand sanitizers as an example of how technology can support adaptive, flexible businesses.  Companies are also moving faster with their deployments. For example, C3.ai  moved from selecting to deploying Dynamics 365 within several weeks.

    Taylor spoke of how Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform were helping companies move from reactive to proactive business workflows where employees could take intelligent actions based on data. Today, everything from connected devices to data in the supply chain and collaborative applications is a source of potential insight.  Microsoft describes this as a digital feedback loop that captures and utilizes information from products, assets, customers and people (employees). Each touchpoint offers more data that enhances the feedback. Microsoft also highlighted the importance of having a cloud strategy where you can securely store data and comply with nation-state regulations.

    Enter Microsoft with the mega stack.

    Unfortunately, IT struggles to incorporate this type of context into legacy apps. Companies need to redesign or purchase solutions that can integrate and analyze data from a wide range of sources.

    None of these concepts are new. What’s different today is that vendors, such as Microsoft, are delivering more comprehensive portfolios. In the past two years, Microsoft integrated various assets from app development to customer engagement into what it calls the Power Platform, which includes Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agent. Many of the tools were design to allow everyone, not just professional developers and data scientists, to create applications and analyze data. Additionally, Microsoft integrated these functions with the Dynamics 365 applications and Azure to enable a closed-loop process from data collection through insight and action.

    Leading companies are delivering rich customer experiences.

    The Microsoft Business Applications Summit is typically an event where customers come to showcase and share ideas on how to use Microsoft’s technology. With the change to a virtual event, Microsoft took the lead in sharing how its customers are delivering proactive and intelligent engagement. For example:

    Chipotle creates a data-driven customer profile.

    It uses a combination of Microsoft’s Power Platform, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Azure to unify the company’s current customer information and enrich the customer profile with proprietary signals from the Microsoft Graph. Chipotle leveraged its existing investment and third-party sources using connectors in the Microsoft platform to create a 360 view of the customer from multiple data sources, such as the point of sale transactions, digital transactions, reward information, web, and mobile usage data.

    With a unified customer profile, Chipotle can create segments that provide important insights, such as loyalty members and frequent repeat customers. Chipotle can analyze the average spend across regions and use that data to prioritization decisions. Additionally, Chipotle can connect to Microsoft power automate to trigger workflows, in response to customer actions and signals in real-time. For example, when a customer places an order and completes the purchase on a mobile app, the customer profile is instantly updated. These customer profiles and new engagement models are even more important in a world where Chipolte has to deliver contactless engagement.

    Companies want to provide the right information to their employees at the right-time. Lopez Research calls these a right-time experience (RTE). For example, by scanning a customer’s QR code in the app, the store associate can see the full purchase history, and all past activities, all in one place. This information enables the store associate to provide the next best actions, such as a pre-delivery for the following order, based on analyzing contextual data stored in the cloud for scalable processing. Using tools such as Azure synapse analytics, organizations can ingest operations and other streaming data at petabyte scale, allowing them to develop custom AI and machine learning models.

    Chateau St. Michelle uses Dynamics 365 to shift from in-winery to online sales.

    Cloud computing and SaaS services have been critical in allowing companies to work remotely and offer new services. Chateau St Michelle talked of how it had to shut down and move to a new facility during the COVID crisis, which it said would have been impossible if they were using homegrown customer systems. Initially, 90% of the direct consumer was through the wineries, and 10% was via e-commerce. In the last couple of weeks, Chateau St Michelle flipped to 90% via e-commerce, completely changing its distribution model within a few hours using the Microsoft suite.

    IKEA improves the multi-channel sales process and workforce management.

    IKEA uses the power platform and Dynamics 365 to create a better omnichannel experience. Microsoft showcased how IKEA combined online kitchen cabinet configuration, virtual agents, power automate and Dynamics 365 resource scheduling to improve the customer’s kitchen design experience. In creating conversation interfaces, IKEA was able to use the Microsoft tracing feature that allows the app developer to simulate what a customer would experience and then see how a chatbot would respond.

    IKEA employees use power apps on a tablet to improve the customer’s in-store experience. IKEA used power apps data connectors so it could leverage existing systems. Microsoft’s UI flow provided the capability to connect legacy application data and new data into a business process. It took the project a step further by using mixed reality, which meant it could add kitchen visualization to the app without the team needing to understand AR Kit, 3D models, and writing code.

    While the focus on the customer is vital, the solution must provide the right information to IKEA’s employees as well. For example, IKEA’s store managers can use Power BI to visualize all the booked appointments, where the appointments originated (online or in-store), and view the close rate for in-store appointments. It also uses Microsoft’s resource scheduling to ensure it has the right number of employees to support demand at various times.

    Are we there yet?

    Microsoft upped its game in Dynamics 365 and made itself more relevant by integrating with other products in its portfolio, such as the Power Platform and Azure cloud services. Yet, this brings up a consistent technology buyer lament where the buyer says it only works if they purchase many products from a single vendor. In truth, the buyers have a solid point. Vendor lock-in is a legitimate concern. However, the counterpoint is that it takes significant integration across multiple products to deliver an accurate 365-degree view of the customer. The integration work is time-consuming, challenging and quickly breaks down if any one piece of the puzzle changes.

    A company can’t and shouldn’t source everything from one vendor. However, a company should be looking for a modern suite of pre-integrated products that allow them to leverage legacy apps through connectors where necessary. Companies have multiple CRM, ERP and homegrown systems. Microsoft spoke on how it can use the hundreds of connectors it created in the Power Platform to help companies build specific business process workflows that pull together legacy systems and solve problems off-the-shelf applications can’t. A new suite should also provide enhancements such as machine learning, visualization, and easy workflow creation. Ideally, it would be modular and cloud-native.

    Is everything as easy as Microsoft made it sound? Probably not. It never is easy for an organization to make these transformations. However, Microsoft made its solutions more powerful and easier to use. At the summit, Microsoft said over half of the Fortune 500 are leveraging Dynamics 365, and the company achieved a 50% year over year growth in the Dynamics 365 business. It would be hard to argue that the company’s strategy isn’t working.

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