‘When the magic starts to happen’: ASDA’s cloud-first mission to sharpen value and competitiveness
ASDA has renewed and expanded its collaboration with Microsoft in one of UK retail’s largest technology deals to date. With Microsoft Azure as its digital backbone and Microsoft 365 Copilot in colleagues’ hands, the retailer is accelerating a cloud-first strategy designed to sharpen price leadership, improve product availability, and free its people to focus on higher-value work.
ASDA, one of the UK’s biggest and best-known supermarket brands with more than 1,200 stores and around 140,000 employees, is on a mission to become a cloud-first, AI-powered retailer.
Four years ago, it began separating from its former owner, Walmart, creating a generational opportunity to rebuild the company’s digital architecture from the ground up. Project Future, as the programme became known, established a best-of-breed “digital core” of specialist systems based on a clear principle: cloud-first.
“When you’re cloud-first, you can flex, you can optimise“
“We wanted world-class partners to look after the digital core, so we could focus on what we’re really good at: retailing and using data to deliver propositions for customers,” says Matt Kelleher, ASDA’s Chief Digital Officer.
“When you’re cloud-first, you can flex, you can optimise, and you can trust your partners to customise, update, maintain and protect the systems. That’s a real advantage.”
This isn’t just about IT infrastructure, but more like an operating system and an application suite for the supermarket business, he says.
“We’ve built an ecosystem of systems that helps us develop, manage, tune and change our propositions for customers,” Kelleher explains.
“That might be products, our price position, our price architectures, our range assortments, or what we’re learning about customer trends.”
Integration and acceleration
The renewed agreement with Microsoft is the next step in the journey.
Azure expands its role as ASDA’s primary cloud platform, underpinning everything from data and analytics to security and integration. Data analytics from Azure Databricks and Microsoft Fabric helps turn data from across the core platforms into the prices and deals it presents to customers, while Microsoft Defender provides security for the whole digital core.
For Kelleher, the logic is straightforward: most of ASDA’s selected strategic platforms – from planning to service management – are built by vendors that also operate on Azure. Azure Integration Services acts as the stitching that brings them together.
“We needed to leverage Microsoft’s integration layer, Azure Integration Services, to make sure that all of those core providers spoke to each other,” he says. “So much data has to flow to make availability feel simple for customers.
“Why would we not deepen our partnership to accelerate our growth, given we have all of those component parts, not only in our business, but within our partners?”
Simplifying, streamlining
A big part of the value is being felt in day-to-day work, he says. Microsoft 365 Copilot is already helping ASDA colleagues – from executives to store teams – simplify tasks and reclaim time.
“Copilot is with me from the moment I come into the office,” Kelleher explains. “I can ask ‘what have I missed?’, ‘what is it that I need to know?’, ‘what do I need to prioritise?’”
That same power is helping teams quickly draft job descriptions, edit department policies, or summarise meetings and email threads.
“It’s personal productivity transformation,” he says. “But it needs senior leaders to lead by example – to use these tools ourselves – and say to the business that this is how we work now.”
This top-down adoption is meeting bottom-up momentum from younger, AI-savvy colleagues.
“We’ve got Gen Z coming into the business who are already fluent with generative AI,” says Kelleher. “When their curiosity meets leadership role modelling, that’s when the culture really starts to shift and the magic starts to happen.”
Price and availability
Ask ASDA shoppers what matters most, and the answer is consistent: price and availability. The cloud-first technology stack gives the company the tools to deliver both.
Decisions about pricing and product lines draw on ASDA’s Azure-stored customer data that show what sells, where and why. Instant access to these data insights enables ASDA to respond faster to trends and create rules around how retail prices should change over time, taking into account factors like wholesale buying prices, demand, and competitor positioning.
“We’re the UK’s price leader in multiple retail [sellers with physical and online shops] and we’re very proud of that,” Kelleher says.
“We want to maintain that competitive advantage. And AI and technology are helping us to keep winning.”
Availability benefits from the same data clarity. Using Azure Integration Services, ASDA’s systems process millions of data points daily – from stock positions and depot orders to store adjustments and dispatches – so the right amount of stock lands in the right place at the right time.
The retailer is also exploring how AI-powered computer vision applications could help them understand how different layouts impact purchase behaviour, so that teams can optimise the positioning of products and enhance customer experiences.
Collaboration for growth
The agreement also includes joint investment to bring new technologies into the business quickly, and skills initiatives so colleagues can build confident careers in an AI-enabled workplace.
“Microsoft is a critical partner in helping us create that growth“
That combination – a unified platform, shared investment, and a strong skills pipeline – “puts the burden of proof on both Microsoft and ASDA to work together,” Kelleher says.
“We’re incentivised to be more productive, create better value for customers, and to grow.”
ASDA’s commitment to technology investment also sends a clear message to new talent, Kelleher believes.
“We want the best people in tech, in data, in AI – and they want to see that we’re investing for the long term.”
With the digital foundations in place, and AI already making a serious impact, ASDA is looking to the next stage of its transformation: cloud-first, data-led, and growth-orientated.
“We’re now post divestiture and into growth mode,” Kelleher says. “And Microsoft is a critical partner in helping us create that growth.”