Microsoft showed how the Internet of Things (IoT) can transform the retail industry with a demonstration this week of helpful tools at the National Retail Federation convention.

The demo illustrated an end-to-end scenario that can “help retailers take their business to the next level of profitability and customer service,” according to a post on the Internet of Thing blog.

Through Microsoft Azure HDInsight and Power BI for Office 365, businesses can track revenue and customer behavior with easy-to-use dashboards. Power Map for Excel can help businesses analyze and respond to customers geographically. Azure Machine Learning can make inventory tasks simpler, by predicting what customers will want.

Microsoft showed how Kinect sensors can track customer movement in a store and send data to the Azure cloud for real-time analysis. That allows businesses to quickly know how to position products and sales associates.

“IoT technology enables a richer, deeper level of analysis than ever before, enabling retailers to combine historical sales data with information about how the weather or social media have influenced shopper behavior, opening up tremendous possibilities for business insight and decision-making,” says the IOT team in the blog report.

For more information, go to the Internet of Things blog.

Vanessa Ho
Microsoft News Center staff