Innovation of the Week: Pets at Home partners with Microsoft to implement AI for profit protection

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Innovation of the Week is a series highlighting retail initiatives that have caught the eye of our team. Every week, we will bring you new ideas and case studies across consumer, technology, sustainability, economy, policy, and industry sectors.

Pets at Home

Source: Pets at Home

The new AI agent will enhance productivity through automation

What is it?

Pets at Home has teamed up with Microsoft to develop an autonomous AI agent for their profit protection team.

The retailer is an early adopter of Microsoft Copilot Studio which allows a business to create AI agents to support various business areas.

Microsoft mentioned that the autonomous agent is designed to build cases more efficiently for “skilled human review” which could lead to annual cost savings.

The automation of common tasks means the team can turn their attention to more strategic, complex tasks for improved productivity and effectiveness.

Pets at Home is planning on creating other agents to help staff in other areas.

Why does it matter?

Pets at Home is already using AI across several parts of the business and launched a new digital platform this year, and the autonomous agent is the next step.

For the Vets for Pets department and colleagues, this partnership means time can be saved on administrative tasks and enables staff to spend more time focused on patients.

With early access to Microsoft’s Copliot Studio, the retailer created an AI agent to help its retail fraud detection team look into suspicious transactions.

The team said it had been a “rapid and seamless process”, as the agent doesn’t require difficult coding skills to integrate the service into existing systems.

Strategic implications

Leveraging data and AI to take on monotonous tasks enables colleagues to put their focus on more demanding tasks and improve the customer experience.

“We’re using AI to do the time-consuming work so (staff) can use their resources and expertise to make decisions quickly based on the data available.”

“It’s truly helped us empower colleagues through both the level of information at their fingertips and in time spent on more nuanced and insightful work”, William Hewish, chief information officer at Pets at Home said.

He adds that the profit protection team can now “more effectively” assess cases for potential profit loss and use their time for skilled analysis instead of spending time gathering information.