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Day: January 8, 2026

Microsoft announces agentic AI capabilities for retail

Microsoft announced a set of agentic AI capabilities aimed at supporting automation and decision-making across retail operations, including merchandising, marketing, store operations, and fulfillment. The tools are designed to connect data and workflows so teams can act on context in real time.

Copilot Checkout, now available in the U.S. on Copilot.com, allows shoppers to complete purchases directly within Copilot without being redirected to a retailer’s website, while merchants remain the merchant of record. The service integrates with partners including PayPal, Shopify, and Stripe, and supports participating retailers such as Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Ashley Furniture, and Etsy sellers.

Microsoft also introduced Brand Agents for Shopify merchants and a personalized shopping agent template in Copilot Studio. These tools enable conversational shopping experiences using a retailer’s product catalog, with options ranging from turnkey deployment to fully customizable implementations.

In public preview, a catalog enrichment agent template automates product onboarding and categorization by extracting attributes from images and enriching data for search and recommendations.

For physical stores, a store operations agent template provides natural-language access to inventory, policies, and operational insights, helping staff manage workflows, staffing, and day-to-day decisions using internal and external data signals.

https://news.microsoft.com/source/2026/01/08/microsoft-propels-retail-forward-with-agentic-ai-capabilities-that-power-intelligent-automation-for-every-retail-function

Snowflake to acquire Observe

Snowflake, an AI Data Cloud company, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Observe, a provider of AI-powered observability. With this acquisition, Snowflake will deliver their next generation of AI-powered observability, built on open standards and designed for the scale, complexity, and economics required by modern AI-driven enterprises. Snowflake and Observe will provide enterprises with: 

  • Agentic AI for faster troubleshooting: The combination of Observe’s AI-powered Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with data in Snowflake enables a shift from reactive monitoring to proactive, automated troubleshooting. Observe’s AI SRE leverages a unified context graph that correlates logs, metrics, and traces, allowing teams to detect anomalies earlier, identify root causes, and resolve production issues faster.
  • An open-standard architecture built for scale: The acquisition also establishes a unified, open-standard observability architecture based on Apache Iceberg and OpenTelemetry. Enterprises can manage massive telemetry volumes using economical object storage, elastic compute, and interoperable standards.
  • Full telemetry data retention with efficient economics: As AI-driven applications generate volumes of logs, metrics, and traces, enterprises have increasingly been forced to rely on sampling and short retention windows to manage cost. By unifying Observe’s AI-powered observability platform with Snowflake’s scalable data foundation, organizations may eliminate these tradeoffs.

https://www.snowflake.com/en/news/press-releases/snowflake-announces-intent-to-acquire-observe-to-deliver-ai-powered-observability-at-enterprise-scale

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