Turning headwinds into tailwinds for Australia’s retail industry: Why I joined Microsoft

As we welcome our new ANZ Industry Director for Retail, Sanjay Prakash, we sat down to understand a little more about why such a passionate retail professional joined Microsoft.  

I’m very excited to share that I recently joined Microsoft Australia as Industry Director for Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods and Travel. Essentially, my role is to understand where these sectors are heading in their digital transformation journeys and make sure that businesses are aware of the many ways Microsoft can help. 

I’m a retail professional at heart, having worked at Tesco for more than five years. I lived a pretty nomadic life while I was at Tesco, spending four to five months at a time in various countries across Europe, Asia and North America. It gave me great insight into how different retail markets operate, and I owe a lot of where I am today to that experience. 

I then joined Coles in 2011 and held various roles that focused on the company’s supply chain and merchandising operations. Immediately before joining Microsoft, I also worked at the supply chain and merchandising software leader Blue Yonder as Senior Director for Pre-sales across the Asia-Pacific region. 

What really attracted me to Microsoft was its ability to help Australian retailers navigate current headwinds such as supply chain constraints and inflationary cost pressures. Going forward, retailers will need to be more agile and adopt a ‘fail fast, recover quickly’ mindset so that they can continue to satisfy their customers. Microsoft is the only company that can help with this across the breadth of an organisation. It is critical that customers are not making decisions in silos so they can optimise their operations holistically. 

Understanding the priorities of our retail customers 

One of the things that I’m really looking forward to over the next 12 months is connecting with more of our customers to find out what their short-, medium- and long-term priorities are. 

The next two to three years are going to be fascinating for Australia’s retail industry. Inflationary cost pressures will continue for at least the next 12 months, and this will weigh on consumer sentiment. Also, supply chain issues aren’t expected to ease until the first half of 2023, which will continue to shape retailers’ short-term thinking. 

Broadly speaking, I think there will be two groups of businesses. One group will ‘play offence’ and view the challenging conditions as an opportunity to win some more market share by introducing new products and new ways of selling to customers. 

The other group will take more of a ‘wait and see’ approach. They won’t want to invest a lot in growing their business but might try out a few things and look for step changes. 

So, the choice is very clear for businesses: do they want to view this period as an opportunity, or just wait and watch? It’s going to be very tricky to navigate. 

Regardless of which way retailers choose to go, sustainability will continue to be a top priority. It’s something that Microsoft is very passionate about, and I look forward to working more closely with our customers to help them build more sustainable supply chains and achieve their net zero goals. 

Creating a collaborative ecosystem for retailers to thrive 

One of our goals at Microsoft is to help our customers become more efficient – to achieve more with less. We understand the challenges that retailers are going through at the moment, so we want to help them in any way possible. That might be something as big as a full digital transformation journey or as small as introducing a new mobile app. 

One specific way that we can help is through Microsoft Cloud for Retail. It’s a powerful end-to-end platform that offers a complete set of retail-specific capabilities that help retailers seamlessly connect their customers, their employees and their data. 

Microsoft Cloud for Retail is all about creating a collaborative ecosystem for retailers to thrive. No one company can do everything, so we work together with our best-of-breed partners to help our retail customers succeed. 

It’s this collaborative culture at Microsoft that makes me excited about the future of Australia’s retail industry. I look forward to getting to know our customers and our partners better over the next 12 months so that we can turn the current retail headwinds into tailwinds together.