MicroStrategy Wins Two VIP Awards at NRF 2025

By: MicroStrategy Incorporated via Business Wire

January 13, 2025 at 09:05 AM EST

Vendors in Partnership (VIP) honors MicroStrategy at retail’s biggest conference with Partner of the Year and AI Innovation & Application

MicroStrategy^® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a pioneer in AI-powered business intelligence, today announced that it has won two VIP Awards at the 2025 NRF conference in New York City: Partner of the Year and AI Innovation & Application. Awards were determined in part by customer testimonials about the business value the vendor provided to them.

“The VIP Awards shine the spotlight on the solution providers that drive innovation and impact behind retailers’ success,” said Vicki Cantrell, CEO of Vendors in Partnership and founder of the VIP Awards. “By celebrating good partners and innovative solutions, we are changing how vendors are valued and setting the standard for transformative retail partnerships.”

Partner of the Year - This award honors companies that deliver exceptional service to their retail customers, foster a positive workplace culture and remain committed to customer success.

“We’ve chosen MicroStrategy again and again for 20 years,” says Keryn McKenzie, Chapter Area Lead for Data, Insights & Services for The Warehouse Group, New Zealand's largest non-food retailer. “The reason is simple: they help us solve our business problems.”

In her presentation at World 2024, McKenzie detailed how MicroStrategy and The Warehouse Group collaborated to launch a custom generative AI “Budget Bot” that provides traders with information they need to make quick decisions about at-risk sales targets.

Another long-time customer, GUESS, uses MicroStrategy to get the right information where and when they need it—on mobile apps, embedded in third-party systems, or as custom-built applications.

“Today we leverage MicroStrategy solutions across our entire organization to better understand customer needs and market trend insights,” said Bruce Yen, Vice President of Retail Applications at GUESS. “Our long-standing partnership with MicroStrategy offers our business a trusted source of information and helps us embrace innovations as new technologies shape the market. We’ve recently been exploring MicroStrategy AI to accelerate access to insights for our end users. These bots can be force-multipliers to help organizations ‘free’ their data.”

VIP Challenge: AI Innovation & Application - This award recognizes unique partnerships with leading retailers on new solutions or materially enhanced products, to supercharge their efficiency and experience through AI.

In October 2023, MicroStrategy became the first BI platform to offer fully integrated GenAI. As a result, enterprises can make insights from their trusted data easily available to everyone, with customers around the world reaping the benefits ever since. MicroStrategy empowers pervasive insights for broad-ranging business value, with a GenAI bot that is simple and natural to use and supports a wide range of deployment capabilities—on mobile, embedded in apps or integrated with the Web browser.

Federated Co-Operatives, a retailer in Western Canada, uses the MicroStrategy Auto bot to provide natural language support to users.

“Time-to-insight is another unlock with MicroStrategy AI. We're not digging around in data trying to get to a root cause—we can ask questions and get insight right away,” said Nena Pidskalny, Director of Supply Chain Strategy at Federated Co-Operatives.

“We collaborate closely with retailers to empower every employee with easy-to-access, accurate, contextual insights so they can focus on customers and deliver great experiences,” said Carla Fitzgerald, EVP and chief marketing officer at MicroStrategy. “It’s such an honor to receive these two awards from VIP at NRF, and an even greater honor to have been such a long-term partner with so many incredible retail brands.”

Yen and Lance Tamanaha, Director of Customer Experience Management at GUESS, will join MicroStrategy EVP & Chief Product Officer Saurabh Abhyankar to share their story at Retail’s Big Show: NRF 2025 in New York City. Their session entitled Revolutionizing Retail with Data & AI That Helps You “Look Up” will take place on January 13 from 9:15-10:00 a.m. at Expo Level 1, Stage 1.

About MicroStrategy Incorporated

MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is the world's first and largest Bitcoin Treasury Company, and the largest independent, publicly traded business intelligence company. We provide cloud-native, AI-powered enterprise analytics software to thousands of global customers, and leverage 35 years of software expertise to explore innovation in Bitcoin applications. We believe the combination of our operating structure, Bitcoin strategy, and focus on technology innovation provides a unique opportunity for value creation.

MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy AI, MicroStrategy Auto, and MicroStrategy ONE are either trademarks or registered trademarks of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.