Reflections of Microsoft's presence at NRF Big Show over the years

At NRF Europe next week, Microsoft for Startups will showcase a curated group of startups solving the biggest challenges in retail. Together, they form an end-to-end story from inspiring shoppers with personalization, to optimizing merchandising and supplychains, protecting product integrity, and future-proofing operations with AI and automation.If you’re a retailer or brand, this is your chance to see how these solutions connect into one powerful vision of the store of the future.📍 Join us in Paris for private meetings with the startups and our team. Let’s reimagine what’s possible in retail.

Chatbots are evolving fast, from scripted text boxes to lifelike digital humans powered by GenAI, LLMs, and avatars. We explore how D-ID, a Microsoft for Startups Pegasus Partner, is transforming customer engagement in Retail, CPG, and Travel with virtual humans that can provide expertise, recommendations, and 24/7 multilingual support.From a Virtual Sommelier in the grocery aisle to a Flight Concierge at the airport, the future of customer experience is here, and it’s more human than ever.

Retail isn’t defined by steady, predictable flows of demand: it’s shaped by moments. A handful of holidays and seasonal cycles consistently account for disproportionate revenue and consumer attention.

This is where the Microsoft for Startups Pegasus Portfolio becomes highly relevant. Each startup addresses a piece of the seasonal execution puzzle.

Choosing winners with Sequoia Capital’s Arc PMF and scaling with Pull. Why some “mature” categories are still Hair-on-Fire, and how AgenticAI unlocks step-change value.

YDISTRI is reshaping retail logistics with smart tech that gives unsellable inventory a second chance. Born in the Czech Republic, their AI-driven platform helps retailers reroute dead stock to locations where it’s more likely to sell—cutting waste, boosting margins, and skipping the discount bin. In this episode, we explore how YDISTRI turns overlooked products into unexpected wins.

Getbee is reimagining e-commerce by enabling live, human-to-human conversations inside online stores, bringing the trust of in-store shopping to digital channels.

Planogram solutions aren’t new in retail, but Omnistream is reimagining them.

Instead of one-size-fits-all templates, Omnistream uses AI to generate hyperlocal, store-specific planograms, runs real-time simulations, and integrates seamlessly with existing systems. Retailers benefit from 4–11% incremental sales, faster decisions, and outcome-based pricing that aligns incentives.

CPG teams struggle with fragmented signals, retailer feeds, spreadsheets, web data, reviews, shelf photos, that rarely connect into action. In this podcast, we share how five Microsoft for Startups partners: Nimble, Dataloop, Harmonya, Tembi, and Osmos, can work together to turn scattered data into execution at shelf and online.

The CPG industry is at a critical juncture: squeezed by cost inflation, competition, and regulatory complexity. Energy, often treated as a fixed overhead, can be transformed into a strategic lever for competitiveness and resilience. enSights enables manufacturers to treat energy not as a commodity cost but as a controllable performance variable, unlocking both near-term savings and long-term ESG advantage.