Hummingbird

Industries · Consumer Goods & Retail

More revenue, better margin, sharper execution — from the plan to the shelf

Margin pressure, retailer demands, and supply chain volatility are forcing Retail and CPG leaders to do more with less. We connect planning, operations, and customer engagement on Microsoft — and deploy AI where it improves revenue, margin, and execution.

A merchandising team reviewing shelf plans and live retail performance dashboards

Who we work with

GroceryBeverageConsumer Packaged GoodsSpecialty RetailHome GoodsBuilding Products DistributionApparel

What's on the leadership agenda

Whether you run stores or sell into them, the pressure lands in the same four places.

Retail

  • Margin pressure
  • Inventory position
  • Workforce productivity
  • Customer retention

Consumer goods

  • Trade spend effectiveness
  • Retailer relationships
  • Forecast accuracy
  • Promotional performance

Where we're different

Plans the retailer, the brand and the shopper all win from

AI-enabled joint business planning

Triple Win

Cross-analyses shopper, retailer and brand needs, then proposes a joint business plan that works for all three — so the account team walks into the retailer meeting with a plan the buyer wants to sign.

  • Planning, data and workflow in one place
  • Planning spreadsheets retired
  • Account plans built the same way every time

Shopper insight, in the plan

Voice of Shopper

Consolidates shopper research, panel data and customer feedback, then writes the narrative a category team can act on — while the promotion, the forecast or the range review is still open.

  • Research consolidated in one narrative
  • Insight reaches the plan in days, not quarters
  • Paired with Voice of Customer for your largest retailers

For retailers

Store to doorstep

For VPs of Stores and Operations: the store floor, the stockroom and the fulfilment promise, run on the same platform as the rest of the business.

Store operations

Task management, store audits and field visits on one platform, so head office and the store floor work from the same list.

Inventory visibility

One view of stock across stores, DCs and in transit — fed by point-of-sale integration so replenishment runs off what actually sold.

Workforce & labor

Copilot and agents take the admin off store managers, and scheduling follows footfall rather than habit.

Merchandising execution

Planograms, promotions and resets tracked through to the shelf, with photo evidence and exceptions routed to the right person.

Omnichannel service

A contact center and store associates who see the same orders, returns and loyalty history — whichever channel the shopper picked.

Returns & fulfillment

Buy online, pick up in store, ship-from-store and returns orchestrated by Intelligent Order Management, not by phone call.

Retail media

First-party shopper data on Customer Insights, segmented and activated for retail media and brand partners.

Loss prevention

Anomaly-detection agents flag unusual refunds, voids and stock movements for review before they become shrink.

Where we win

The business outcome first — and the Microsoft platform that delivers it.

One view of the customer

Sell and serve from one customer record

Sales, service and marketing working from one account history instead of three — replacing Salesforce, ServiceNow and homegrown CRM with a single estate and the change management to make it stick.

  • One customer record across regions
  • Licence spend consolidated
  • Adoption that survives go-live

Built on Dynamics 365 Sales · Customer Service · Contact Center · Dataverse · Power Automate

Margin, protected

AI where it moves revenue and margin

Most consumer goods businesses have a shelf of stalled AI experiments. We ship the two that matter into the day job — pricing, quoting, planning — governed and measured.

  • Pricing turnaround in minutes
  • Margins protected through better visibility
  • ROI you can report

Quotes in minutes instead of days — a homebuilding and building products quotation agent

Built on Copilot Studio · Microsoft 365 Copilot · Azure AI Foundry · AI Builder

Perfect orders

Orders, inventory and finance you can see

Finance, supply chain and order orchestration on one platform — replacing aging ERP and the spreadsheet layer that grew around it.

  • Fewer perfect-order failures
  • Supply chain you can see
  • Reconciliation handled by agents

Built on D365 Finance & Supply Chain · Intelligent Order Management · Power BI · Microsoft Fabric

Earn the shopper

Shoppers who come back

Segmentation, journeys and loyalty nudges that run off live behaviour rather than last quarter's export.

  • Personalization at scale
  • Retention you can measure
  • Marketing and service telling one story

Built on Customer Insights — Data · Customer Insights — Journeys · Power Pages · Copilot

A consumer goods distribution centre aisle stacked with palletised product

What good looks like

One connected platform means the shopper signal, the joint business plan and the order that ships on Friday are finally the same conversation.

End to end, on one platform

Marketing, service, sales and operations sharing one data model — so a shopper insight reaches the plan and the plan reaches the order.

Marketing

  • Personalized journeys at scale
  • Shopper segmentation on Customer Insights
  • Loyalty and retention nudges
  • Retail media activation

Customer service

  • Omnichannel contact center
  • Copilot agent assist
  • Order and returns case management
  • Self-service knowledge

Sales & growth

  • Joint business planning
  • Account and broker management
  • Guided B2B and wholesale selling
  • Quote-to-cash workflows

Operations

  • Supply chain resilience
  • Intelligent order management
  • Point-of-sale integration
  • Store and field operations

More from our agent library

Agents already built for consumer goods

Built on Copilot Studio, Power Automate and Dataverse — adapted to your data rather than started from scratch.

Insight

Voice of Customer

Summarizes the top priorities of your largest retail customers across markets, in one place.

Planning

Customer Categorization

Scores accounts by will, skill and strategic importance so coverage models are based on evidence.

Supply chain

Supplier Communications

Reads vendor email, applies purchase order changes and chases the follow-ups nobody enjoys.

Finance

Account Reconciliation

Reconciles ledger to subledger, flags exceptions and recommends the correction.

Operations

Approvals

Structures and routes internal asks — trade spend, pricing, project sign-off — for quick action.

Operations

Expense & Time

Drafts time entries and expense reports from calendars, receipts and shared mailboxes.

The AI Flight Path

Fewer than one in five AI initiatives ever reach core processes. Five pillars are how we close that gap.

1

Embedded AI training

Your people learn on your use cases, not a generic course.

2

Rapid delivery of use cases

Working capability in weeks, iterated in production.

3

Enterprise governance

Security, data boundaries and responsible AI signed off before scale.

4

Structured adoption

Champions, comms and workflow changes so the tools get used.

5

Measurable ROI

Reporting that shows what the AI programme returned, by use case.

Britt Pangerl

Most Retail and CPG organizations already have the data. The challenge is turning that insight into decisions fast enough to impact the next promotion, forecast, or customer conversation. That's where AI starts creating measurable value.

Britt PangerlBusiness Development, Retail & CPG

Consumer goods & retail reading

All insights

Meet the consumer goods & retail team

Bring us a real retail or consumer goods problem

Not a sales call — a working session with the people who would actually do the work.

Talk to us