Strategic collaboration to boost productivity through improved business operations and drive growth through enhanced customer shopping and employee workplace experiences.
Currys, a leading international omnichannel retailer of technology products and services, has selected Accenture and Microsoft to deliver its core cloud technology infrastructure that will enable the retailer to leverage the latest AI technologies to enhance operations, elevate the shopping experience and improve the colleague experience for its 25,000 people.
Accenture and Microsoft, together with their joint venture Avanade, will work closely with Currys to modernise, secure and simplify its technology estate, enabling Currys to accelerate the adoption of Microsoft AI technologies such as Azure OpenAI Service.
By leveraging these Microsoft AI technologies, Currys can unlock value across every part of the business. The expected benefits, include:
- Making it easier to shop: Through personalised relevant product information and suggestions tailored to the consumer’s needs in the moment.
- Building customers for life: By providing Currys’ customers with an improved post-sales experience and warranty services.
- Enhance the colleague experience: By equipping colleagues with faster and easier access to information such as product availability, delivery costs and add-on services so they can better serve customers, while also identifying potential cross and upselling opportunities.
- Drive future growth and profitability: Through integrating AI into marketing, HR, finance and legal processes, Currys will benefit from increased productivity across core business functions. The retailer will look to harness AI for opportunities to improve omnichannel experiences.
The transition will also accelerate Currys’ journey to net zero emissions by 2040 by moving nine existing data centres with more than 2000 servers and 200 applications onto Azure to create a more energy efficient infrastructure.
Alex Baldock, Group CEO, Currys, said: “AI is the biggest technological leap of our life time. Currys exists to help everyone enjoy amazing technology, so as well as bringing the benefits of AI to millions of customers, we’ll do the same to our own business. We couldn’t have better partners for this, and together we aim to put Currys at the forefront of Digital Transformation in retail. We’re just starting out here, but the possibilities are vast. I’m looking forward to unlocking big benefits for our colleagues, customers and shareholders.”
Julie Sweet, chair and CEO, Accenture, said: “Building a strong digital core will enable Currys to take its customer service and employee experience to the next level, and more quickly harness the potential of AI and Generative AI to drive its ongoing reinvention. Together with Microsoft, we are helping Currys raise the bar in the retail industry, reach new frontiers of performance and efficiency, and create new value and growth.”
Ralph Haupter, President, EMEA at Microsoft, said: “AI is rapidly unlocking new opportunities for every organisation and every industry around the world. By deploying the latest cloud and AI technologies, Currys can enhance the shopping experience for millions of customers, both in-store and online, whilst ensuring its 25,000 employees have the insights at their fingertips to unlock value across the entire business.”
We asked Andy Gamble, Chief Information Officer, Currys, further questions to find out more.
How will the partnership with Accenture and Microsoft facilitate Currys in leveraging the latest AI technologies to enhance its operations and improve the shopping experience?
Our partnership with Accenture and Microsoft is aiming to put Currys at the forefront of Digital Transformation in retail.
We are in the early days of this partnership, however, it’s important to recognise that unlocking the potential of Generative AI requires a strong foundation of robust, high-quality data. We have been making significant strides in recent years to consolidate our data, to give us this solid grounding. Our strategy of collecting, protecting and using our data to help everyone enjoy amazing technology has laid the groundwork for our work with Accenture and Microsoft to be built on. This progress in data has meant we have already been able to execute AI and Machine Learning at scale.
And now, working with these partners, we are just beginning to see the impact Generative AI can have on our business, through a small number of initiatives that we believe will accelerate our existing plans as a retailer.
We have started relatively broad in our assessment of the opportunity with a strong customer and colleague value focus, but as we mature, we are breaking our AI work into four logical groupings:
- The first is Colleague Productivity, where we’re trialling AI enabled productivity tools such as Microsoft CoPilot to monitor how they can support colleagues.
These trials apply right across the business: from investigating how AI tools can improve our colleagues’ performance in stores by providing them with quicker and easier access to info such as product availability and add-on details, through to integrating AI into marketing, HR, finance and legal processes in our corporate teams.
What’s more, the technology is evolving rapidly with tools that enable bespoke use cases to be delivered without an in-depth knowledge of code. This has the potential to increase the scope and scale of what we are able to achieve with Gen AI at Currys and we’re trialling options here.
- We have our Priority Use Cases:
Targeted investment to integrate AI more significantly into our core capabilities.
We’ve done a lot of discovery work internally to identify where we think AI can add most value to us and now we need to prove that.
We can’t reveal everything right now, but a couple of use cases stand out. For instance, we have a very important circular operation at Currys – based out of our repair centre in Newark, Nottinghamshire, which is the largest of its kind in Europe. This 500,000 sq ft facility helps us to complete 1.4 million repairs a year, but there are still many cases where our engineers don’t find any fault with the product. Many of these will have come about as a result of the user not being able to troubleshoot the issue on their own. AI can help those customers overcome such errors and save us the cost of manually transporting and inspecting those items.
- The third pillar is around the longer-term opportunity, looking at our existing roadmap of opportunities and assessing how AI can support these use cases whilst also ensuring we have the right standards to implement AI responsibly.
Although we have a backlog of ideas from our initial discovery period that we are continuing to investigate, we are keen to maintain the balance of not biting off more than we can chew, and focusing our investment in areas where we know it can drive the most value.
- And finally, as the leading tech retailer in the UKI and Nordics (where for every £4 spent on tech, £1 is spent at Currys alone), we want to be seen as the Home of AI, where consumers can come to find the latest and greatest in AI-enabled technology.
For example, we’re super excited about the range of CoPilot-enabled laptops we’re selling, amongst many other fantastic products.
We’ve worked very closely with Microsoft to bring these devices to UK consumers – in fact, we were the first UK retailer to make them available to pre-order and proudly offer nationwide exclusivity on 10 of 24 CoPilot-enabled laptops.
And I do believe, as our CEO Alex Baldock has said, that becoming this ‘Home of AI’ can be of real commercial significance, as consumers buy into the most significant product refresh cycle since the arrival of the iPad in 2010.
How will Accenture’s expertise contribute to Currys’ Digital Transformation journey, particularly in terms of modernising, securing and simplifying its technology estate?
Accenture has been a strategic technology partner of Currys for over a decade now, supporting around 60% of our application estate, and has a deep knowledge of our organisation and existing IT landscape.
This pre-existing awareness of our business, combined with their wider drive in AI adoption – demonstrated by their recent multi-billion-dollar investment in AI and data practices – sets us up to work together incredibly effectively. What’s great is that this expertise is matched by the enthusiasm and passion of our tech-loving colleagues too. Together, we are making great strides across the four pillars mentioned above.
Can you explain how Accenture’s collaboration with Microsoft will help Currys raise the bar for the whole retail industry?
As with any major tech innovation, there has been a tremendous amount of excitement – and debate – about the power of AI.
The retail sector is no different, with some remarkable use cases being explored across many different sub-sectors. Whilst we always have half an eye on the industry, many of these use-cases will be bespoke to a certain retailer’s needs. That’s why, for the most part, we are focused on how Currys can take advantage of this amazing technology and thankfully we could not have better partners to help us make these decisions.
That being said, we do recognise the value in sharing with our peers what has worked, and what hasn’t. Especially given the combination of both power and risk that can come with AI. We’re continuing to look into this and how we can connect and knowledge share with the industry.
Could you elaborate on how the transition to Microsoft AI technologies, such as Azure OpenAI Service, will specifically benefit Currys in terms of personalised product information and post-sales services for customers?
We know that stores are a vital touchpoint for many shoppers who want to come in and understand, test and buy technology that is often expensive and complicated (AI products included!).
We’d like to be able to support our colleagues with AI – giving them quicker, more accurate access to product information, stock availability, relevant add-on services and bundling recommendations – so that we can supercharge the excellence of our colleagues to ultimately better serve our customers.
It goes beyond shopping in store too, AI can also help us improve the post-sale experience for customers, providing them with quicker and easier self-serve access to information on, for example, warranty services.
Microsoft are one of the biggest drivers of change in AI at the moment, and we believe they are well positioned to drive real value to Currys services and processes. Our migration of more applications and services to Azure underpins the above improvements to pre- and post-sales services, by allowing us to take advantage of OpenAI services, such as ChatGTP-4o. But, as we have said previously, we are very much at the beginning of this journey and remain incredibly excited to see what we can do together in the future.
As Group CIO, how do you envision the implementation of AI technologies transforming the colleague experience at Currys, particularly in terms of access to information and identifying cross-selling opportunities?
We’re still only at the beginning of this process, but we do hope that implementing a small number of AI tools will enhance our colleagues’ experiences in-stores, across our supply chain and at a corporate level too.
We’re testing how we can provide our store colleagues – as well as those supporting customers online through our digital channels –with quicker and easier access to info such as product information, stock availability, relevant add-on services and bundling recommendations. We believe that being able to accelerate these recommendations will offer a better customer experience, and also help reach our commercial goals.
For supply chain, it could have a positive impact on how we are able to proactively forecast product demand and availability, empowering our colleagues to better interpret buying patterns.
Again, looking at our work in the circular economy with repairs, refurbishments and recycling. We have thousands of colleagues assessing millions of faulty/damaged products a year, before repairing them or stripping them for valuable component parts. These operations are finely balanced. For instance, repairs need to be carried out incredibly efficiently for them to be affordable for the customer, and profitable for us. So, there could be a role for AI to play in further finetuning our processes here.
And in a corporate sense, we’re carrying out a small range of trials across our marketing, HR, finance, legal and technology processes. As we all know, if AI is deployed effectively in these business areas, it could have a real effect on our colleagues’ productivity.
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