CP Axtra, operator of Thailand’s top wholesaler Makro and leading retailer Lotus is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to boost productivity and meet the demands of changing customer behaviour.
The company was one of the early adopters of Copilot for Microsoft 365 to increase organisational agility.
Soon after the launch in February this year, 300 employees of CP Axtra across marketing, finance and strategy had began to use Copilot for their routine tasks such like summarising meeting points, paraphrasing email chains, and highlighting key action items within a few clicks.
The marketing team had used AI to save time from going back and forth creating elaborate briefs for agencies and audit teams.
Makro Wholesale Business Group Chief Digital Officer, Tirayu Songvetkasem said Microsoft helped them develop best use cases and even customised to get the most out of the solution.
He added that time-consuming tasks including making presentations, generating plans, and analysing data happens faster.
“When conducting interviews, I have a team member who uses AI to make sure he’s covered all the key areas and even generate questions tailored to each customer,” Tirayu said.
Increasing productivity
CP Axtra is one of the most preferred food supplier for more than 4 million registered customers comprising of small food retailers, hotels, restaurants, small businesses, caterers, and private individuals in Thailand.
The company has embarked on digital transformation journey with focus to use AI driven solutions to underpin business-to-business and business-to-customer big data and upskill employees’ digital capabilities.
CP Axtra's group chief transformation officer said, “In the past, we could only do so much based on a fixed dataset. But with AI, we can look at data across our entire value chain in a multitude of different ways—not only to react and respond quickly but also to try a whole new array of strategies."
“The beauty of AI is that we can test ideas out before implementation, which minimises the risk," he added.
Employees at CP Axtra are boosting communication efficiency by with Copilot’s translation capabilities, as not every staff use English as their first language.
“They can obtain quick and accurate translations during various communications, enabling them to work comfortably in their preferred language,” Tirayu explained.
He believes this transformation will help the firm better adapt to evolving customer needs, enabling to focus on its value chain and boost customer value.
Tirayu said Copilot enables a multitude of solutions to improve the quality of customer interactions with custom chatbot minimising repetitive answers and upgrading call centre to take a more "proactive" approach to customer needs.
Wong added that Copilot deployed along other AI tools and functionalities, helps the firm analyse the entire journey from supply to delivery along the intent value chain.
He added it is significant for them to gain better understanding of their customers and personalise interactions at a very hyper-scale.
