Last week, as retail rival Amazon dominated headlines in the run up to, shaky start of and ultimate success from its Prime Day promotion, Walmart wasn’t sleeping on the job.

The company announced a new five-year deal with fellow Amazon competitor Microsoft, whose Azure cloud-computing platform is a distant second to the market leader, Amazon Web Services.

The partnership is designed to more closely link the two companies and boost Walmart’s digital transformation to establish a retail formula for the future based on AI and cloud capabilities.

First up is a joint project to migrate Walmart.com and Samsclub.com to the cloud using the Azure platform. However, the partnership extends into every facet of Walmart’s operations, including leveraging AI to mitigate energy consumption at the store level.

If it’s your business’s best interest to connect with technology teams at America’s largest retailers, CSG’s Retail Technology Database can help.