Technology Record - Issue 22: Autumn 2021

61 experience,” says Alam. “They’re moving towards a more holistic and intelligent set of solutions that allow them to truly understand their cus- tomers wherever they are and engage them in an immersive and personalised way at the channel of their choice.” And Dynamics 365 is part of this. “Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps organisations accomplish this goal by bringing massive amounts of siloed data into a single store, unify- ing profiles across customers and then, through AI, determining a much deeper understand- ing of their behaviours and preferences,” he explains. “Once you know your customer, you need to engage with them, and this is where Customer Journey Orchestration capabilities that we launched with Dynamics 365 Marketing is resonating really well. It allows businesses to reach out to their customers in a real-time, event-driven and hyper-personalised manner.” In addition to changing attitudes towards customer experiences, the need for resilient supply chains is greater than ever before. The pandemic has exposed the fragility and ineffi- ciencies in all kinds of supply chains. “Hence, we are seeing a dramatic increase in organisa- tions wanting better visibility across their sup- ply chains,” says Alam. “Businesses want to be able to plan in a more real-time and agile way for unforeseen events.” But this goes beyond resiliency. “Organisations are also now prioritising sustainability,” he adds. “We recently announced Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability that is in direct response to this acute and growing need of our customers to be able to better track and report their emis- sions and then undertake initiatives to reduce and remove their emissions to become a more responsible organisation. That’s what their cus- tomers are demanding of them, and that’s the need we are working to address.” According to Accenture, 94 per cent of top CEOs cite sustainability as important or very important to the future success of their busi- nesses. “The world faces an urgent need to dra- matically reduce its carbon consumption,” says