ASOS has signed a new three-year deal with Microsoft to extend its use of AI for customer experiences and internal operations.
The aim is to free up time to allow staff to focus on higher value work, save time through automation, and use AI assistants to present themes, sentiments, suggestions, and recommendations.
"A core part of our business strategy is driving operational excellence within ASOS: making sure we’re as fast, efficient, and effective as we can be, and investing our time and resources in the projects that matter,” said Victoria Arden, director of technology operations for ASOS.
"Under this new agreement, we’re helping ASOSers safely experiment with generative AI tools that can remove ‘busy work’ from their day, freeing them up to unlock greater creativity and insights and focus on delighting our customers."
ASOS has been using Microsoft Copilot, including Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Copilot for GitHub, since early 2023, to support its engineering teams to produce code effectively and efficiently.
Its HR team has also used Copilot for 365 to analyze responses to its annual employee engagement survey, creating a summary of common themes and trends.
And one of the company's Trade teams is running proof of concepts using Microsoft Copilot in Power BI to unlock greater insights across large data sets.
This is also now being piloted to support the summarization of performance week on week.
ASOS and Microsoft have deep ties
In 2022, ASOS signed a five-year agreement to continue using Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform, deploying it to power its digital platforms and support its focus on data-driven decision-making, speed, and efficiency.
Similarly, earlier this year the online retailer launched customer testing for its AI Stylist - an Azure OpenAI-powered tool that helps customers discover new looks through a conversational interface - built using early access to Microsoft’s generative AI tools.
RELATED WHITEPAPER
The company said it now plans to broaden the rollout of some of its existing tools.
"AI and machine learning are already transforming how we work at ASOS, whether it’s supporting better demand forecasting, helping with data-driven decision-making, or powering our recommendation system – delivering billions of product recommendations to our customers per day," said Papinder Dosanjh, the company's director of AI and machine learning.
"Working with Microsoft, we continue to drive innovation in this area, always aligned to our principles of safe and responsible experimentation and development."
-
Cyber resilience in the UK: learning to take the punchesColumn UK law now puts resilience at the centre of cybersecurity strategies – but is legislation simply catching up with enterprise understanding that resilience is more than just an IT issue?
-
CISPE claims European Commission gave Broadcom a ‘blank cheque to raise prices, lock-in, and squeeze customers’ with VMware dealNews Cloud providers have issued a formal response to the General Court of the European Union after the Commission defended its approval of the deal
-
Microsoft quietly launches Fara-7B, a new 'agentic' small language model that lives on your PC — and it’s more powerful than GPT-4oNews The new Fara-7B model is designed to takeover your mouse and keyboard
-
Microsoft is hell-bent on making Windows an ‘agentic OS’ – forgive me if I don’t want inescapable AI features shoehorned into every part of the operating systemOpinion We don’t need an ‘agentic OS’ filled with pointless features, we need an operating system that works
-
Microsoft's new Agent 365 platform is a one-stop shop for deploying, securing, and keeping tabs on AI agentsNews The new platform looks to shore up visibility and security for enterprises using AI agents
-
'It's slop': OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy pours cold water on agentic AI hype – so your jobs are safe, at least for nowNews Despite the hype surrounding agentic AI, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy isn't convinced and says there's still a long way to go until the tech delivers real benefits.
-
This new Microsoft tool lets enterprises track internal AI adoption rates – and even how rival companies are using the technologyNews Microsoft's new Benchmarks feature lets managers track and monitor internal Copilot adoption and usage rates – and even how rival companies are using the tool.
-
Satya Nadella says “our multi-model approach goes beyond choice’ as Microsoft adds Claude AI models to 365 CopilotNews Users can choose between both OpenAI and Anthropic models in Microsoft 365 Copilot
-
Is the honeymoon period over for Microsoft and OpenAI? Strained relations and deals with competitors spell trouble for the partnership that transformed the AI industryAnalysis Microsoft and OpenAI are slowly drifting apart as both forge closer ties with respective rivals and reevaluate their long-running partnership.
-
Microsoft says these 10 jobs are at highest risk of being upended by AI – but experts say there's nothing to worry about yetNews Microsoft thinks AI is going to destroy jobs across a range of industries – while experts aren't fully convinced, maybe it's time to start preparing.
