APAC retailers struggling to unite data from online, offline realms ZDNet

Retailers in Asia-Pacific are struggling to unite online and offline data and this will hinder their ability to recognise customers who engage with their brands across both channels. Furthermore, while most acknowledge the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) to their organisation's competitiveness, few have started to deploy such tools. While some retail organisations recognised the need to straddle both the online and offline channels, the biggest challenge these omnichannel retailers faced today was pulling data from both realms to establish a common view of their customers, said Raj Raguneethan, Microsoft's Asia regional business lead for retail and consumer goods. This gap hindered their ability, for instance, to recognise customers who had engaged the brand online when they walked into a physical store. To plug the gap, Raguneethan said retailers should establish a data management platform to pull together all customer information and stitch these together to provide unified profiles of their customers. With the launch of its national artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, alongside a slew of initiatives, the Singapore government aims to fuel AI adoption to generate economic value and provide a global platform on which to develop and testbed AI applications.