Tight margins, rising costs, and fierce competition pushed The ODP Corporation to find a smarter way to serve customers, support employees, and stay competitive.
The company uses Azure AI Foundry and services like OpenAI, AI Search, and Document Intelligence to build secure, scalable chatbots for HR, sales, and retail teams.
The ODP Corporation chatbots now support 16,000-plus associates. Prompt volume grew 431% YoY and sales reps saved 25-plus hours with automated quotes.
Inflation, supply chain disruptions, and labor shortages have intensified pressure on already slim margins in the highly competitive retail industry. Facing intense competition, The ODP Corporation (NASDAQ: ODP), which includes Office Depot, ODP Business Solutions, and VEYER, needed more than incremental improvements to remain competitive. Protecting its market share became an urgent imperative. To address these pressures, The ODP Corporation strategically embraced generative AI—not simply to streamline workflows, but to accelerate innovation, increase agility, and strengthen its competitive edge without increasing costs.
To accelerate its AI journey, The ODP Corporation chose a unified development framework that combines Azure AI Foundry products such as Azure AI Search, Azure AI Document Intelligence, Azure OpenAI, and Azure AI Language. These became the foundation for building an enterprise AI environment at The ODP Corporation, supporting development of the ODP Personal Assistant and tailored assistants for HR, sales, and retail operations.
“Having the guarantee that our data would remain in our tenant and that models would not be trained on it was a big differentiator for us,” says Richard Coggins, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at The ODP Corporation. These assurances were critical in securing leadership support and driving confidence in a company-wide rollout.
Azure AI Foundry connects key services into one pipeline, simplifying data prep, indexing, and model interaction. The ODP Corporation used Azure AI Document Intelligence to structure 10,000-plus documents, index them with Azure AI Search, and flag PII with Azure AI Language. Azure OpenAI powers the conversational interface, helping teams quickly move from idea to prototype without infrastructure complexity. “With Azure AI Foundry, we can move from concept to prototype in weeks,” says Carl Brisco, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President at The ODP Corporation. Coggins agrees. “These tools worked together out of the box—we didn’t need to spend time wiring up infrastructure. With Azure AI Foundry, we can focus on building applications with real business impact.”
The ODP Corporation quickly formed a cross-functional team to deliver custom AI solutions that support productivity and address business challenges across departments.
“These tools worked together out of the box—we didn’t need to spend time wiring up infrastructure. With Azure AI Foundry, we can focus on building applications with real business impact.”
Richard Coggins, VP and Distinguished Engineer, The ODP Corporation
In just six weeks, the team launched its foundational, internally developed ODP Personal Assistant, available for all associates. Building on that momentum, the team moved fast to deliver tailored solutions across the organization, including custom chatbots for retail, sales, and HR associates. Though each assistant addressed a different area of the business, all were built on the same architecture of Azure AI Foundry products to accelerate delivery and simplify management.
The ODP Corporation launched its first AI-powered assistant for retail, supporting over 12,000 retail associates across nearly 900 stores and delivering instant answers on handheld devices. It draws from documents processed by Azure AI Document Intelligence and indexed in Azure AI Search.
The HR assistant answers associates’ questions about PTO, leave, benefits, and training. Built on the Azure AI app platform—which includes AI, data, and app services—the HR assistant interprets prompts, retrieves HR info, and manages chat history. “We use Azure Cosmos DB to store HR data at the profile level,” says Mick Feller, Distinguished Engineer at The ODP Corporation. “It’s the glue between our back end and front end—everyone who logs in gets a profile, and the model reads and writes to it in real time to maintain context.”
The sales assistant helps reps generate quotes using natural language. Its SKU matching feature cross-references large product lists in minutes, versus days, and produces quote-ready summaries and tables.
From HR to sales to retail, The ODP Corporation’s chatbots are helping employees work faster, make better decisions, and support customers in real time.
With chatbots in place, The ODP Corporation shifted its focus to scaling the platform and extending its capabilities through agentic AI. The ODP Corporation containerized its platform on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), scaling compute on demand with a pay-as-you-go model that reduced costs and sped up rollout. “We’ve been running Kubernetes since 2017,” says Coggins. “AKS let us fast forward with a variable cost model. Instead of one or two services per VM, we could run 20 or 30 microservices.” That scalability supported multiple chatbots, faster testing, and lower infrastructure costs.
With the platform scaled and optimized, The ODP Corporation began exploring what agentic AI could unlock. The team is now building a multi-agent system with Azure AI Foundry, using AutoGen by Microsoft Research with Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Search for an agentic RAG solution. Early use cases include sales prospecting, deep research, and complex document search. “We’re building agents that can perform long-running processes and check back with humans when needed,” says Coggins. “We’re running AutoGen v0.4 on AKS, and the entire experience is hosted within Azure AI Foundry.”
These early systems are laying the groundwork for self-service intelligence, allowing teams to focus on strategy while an AI agent handles repetitive work. “The AI agent is a single pane of glass for many applications across the enterprise,” says Brisco. “Azure’s breadth and depth lets us create something that delivers real value across every part of our business.”
Adoption has spread beyond technical teams. The ODP Corporation launched its own AI Champions network and monthly AI Connect events to share updates, gather feedback, and spark innovation. More than 700 employees joined the initial sessions. “We started with just three of us,” says Patti Mooney, Director of Product and Technology at The ODP Corporation. “Now we have more than 50 AI champions and a huge appetite for what’s next.”
“Azure’s breadth and depth lets us create something that delivers real value across every part of our business.”
Carl Brisco, Chief Technology Officer and Senior VP, The ODP Corporation
The ODP Corporation’s AI assistants now support more than 16,000 associates across departments, with more than 7,500 active users across Office Depot, ODP Business Solutions, and VEYER. These tools are saving time, increasing speed, and opening new revenue streams across the business.
The HR assistant has reduced routine ticket volume by instantly resolving questions about benefits, leave, and training. It now handles an average of 172 prompts per week, replacing a 24-hour turnaround with real-time answers.
In retail, associates using the ODP Personal Assistant on handheld devices resolve customer questions on the spot. Across the organization, prompt volume has grown 431% year over year, and users have logged over one million prompt interactions and more than 100,000 unique threads.
One ODP Business Solutions sales representative used the sales assistant to analyze 1,000 SKUs in under an hour—a process that previously required manual analyst support over multiple days. Another sales representative was able to respond to a pricing bid during a customer call. A third representative cross-referenced 4,000 competitor items, saving 25-plus hours and helping to drive $800,000 in net new annual business. With pricing bids now delivered in hours—which previously required one–two days—and tailored quotes saving reps five-eight hours a week, the sales assistant is driving 20% more sales opportunities each quarter.
These aren’t isolated gains. The ODP Corporation has reshaped work across sales, service, HR, and retail and plans to extend Azure AI Foundry to supply chain and procurement.
New agentic AI prototypes are also underway, designed to handle more complex, long-running tasks across teams. “This technology has changed how we work,” says Brisco. “And we’re just getting started.”
Discover more about The ODP Corporation on LinkedIn.
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