Walmart Inc. announced it is establishing a strategic partnership with Microsoft Corp. to further accelerate Walmart’s digital transformation in retail, empower its associates worldwide and make shopping faster and easier for customers around the world. 

Walmart is already using Microsoft services for critical applications and workloads, and is now embarking on a broad set of cloud innovation projects that leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence and data platform solutions for external customer-facing services and internal business applications. The flexible, secure and rapidly scalable global technology will significantly accelerate Walmart’s ability to execute in three key areas:

Digital transformation: In a five-year agreement, Walmart has selected the full range of Microsoft cloud solutions, including Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 for enterprise-wide use to help standardize across the company’s family of brands. As part of the partnership, Walmart and Microsoft engineers will collaborate on the assessment, development and support phase of moving hundreds of existing applications to cloud native architectures. 

Innovation: There are also massive benefits to operating at scale as Walmart builds a global IoT platform on Azure—from connected HVAC and refrigeration units to reduce energy usage in thousands of U.S. stores or applying machine learning when routing thousands of trucks in the supply chain.

Changing how we work: Through this partnership, Walmart is investing in its people with a phased rollout of Microsoft 365 providing associates with productivity tools to foster a culture of collaboration, creativity and communication including Microsoft Workplace Analytics, Microsoft Stream and Microsoft OneDrive.