Levi Strauss & Co. builds a more resilient, AI-enabled business with Azure

In 1873, Levi Strauss & Co. patented the use of copper rivets to reinforce blue jeans and make them extra-durable. The company hasn’t stopped innovating since. “Retail is about change,” says Jason Gowans, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Levi Strauss & Co. The latest change? Transforming a traditional wholesale business to a direct-to-consumer first model, an innovation that requires a renewed level of speed, insight, and agility. Much like the humble copper rivet, the right technology is crucial for innovation. “The right technology underpins everything we plan to do for this next chapter of growth,” says Gowans.

Simplification leads to modern capabilities

While Levi Strauss & Co. changed the apparel industry and expanded globally, it picked up a fair amount of technical debt. “A challenge we faced was a lack of consistency that made it difficult to create agility,” reflects Michael Womack, Senior Director of Global Infrastructure and Engineering, Levi Strauss & Co. Longstanding systems, datacenters, 160-some applications, and varying processes across 110 countries created a tremendous opportunity for simplification.

Today, the company is five years into a seven-year digital transformation journey aimed at remaining competitive in the ever-changing retail industry. “We are trying to accomplish a single global platform for ERP that drives standardization of processes, a high degree of automation, and new capability enablement such as AI and agentic AI,” explains Saravana Ramaratnam, Vice President of Global ERP and Enterprise Platforms, Levi Strauss & Co. Gowans confirms that acting fast and using leading-edge tools is key to the company’s vision to become a USD10 billion direct-to-consumer brand. “As a best-in-class, direct-to-consumer retailer, the biggest change is the speed that we need to operate at,” he says.

Moving to the cloud drives business value and saves annual costs

To accomplish its goal, Levi Strauss & Co. joined 85% of Fortune 500 companies by embracing Microsoft Azure. Shawn Harris, Senior Director for Enterprise Platform Services, Levi Strauss & Co., knew that the move to the Azure cloud platform had financial and business benefits. “It was becoming too expensive to own and operate our own datacenters,” he says. “We’re going to see significant yearly savings by migrating out of our datacenters and into Azure.”

Azure Migrate served as the backbone of the company’s datacenter exit strategy. Harris describes the tool in a single word: “awesome.” He says, “Originally, we had a nine-month goal for migrating out of our datacenter. That was reduced to about six months. Azure Migrate made that possible.” This was proof that Levi’s focus on velocity had reached every area of the business.

Harris and his team found that the tool helped reduce downtimes on the high-stakes day of final migration. “Azure Migrate created a seamless migration experience because it handled all the replication,” he explains. “All told, we saved two or three hours per server migration and reduced our overhead.”

Adopting Azure Arc, Harris amplified the impact of migration. “We used Azure Arc to expand the capability of Azure Update Manager on-premises, and extend and simplify the way that we use extended security updates on our servers,” says Harris. Harris and his team also took advantage of Azure SQL Managed Instance to simplify even further. The fully managed database service helped Harris’s team refocus on providing services for the business, faster. Says Harris, “Since moving to the Next-gen General Purpose service tier of Azure SQL Managed Instance, we’re seeing a two times improvement in latency and a 60% improvement in our max IOPS, which frees up our teams to focus on higher value work.”

Consolidation boosts security, reduces latency, and improves responsiveness by 60%

The business also consolidated nine global ERP systems onto a single, standardized platform in the Microsoft Cloud, bringing cohesive data to the organization. Says Womack, “There are a lot of statistics now available that allow us to see that we are utilizing our resources to drive business value.”

Performance has also improved. “There are Azure regions all over the world,” says Womack. “Now we, as a global company, can place the compute as close to the customer as possible and improve response times.”

Using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) has also contributed to better scalability and performance. Says Harris, “Running third-party workloads on AKS through a vendor-managed runtime, we’re able to decrease the server overhead associated with those applications, simplify the environment, and create a scalable infrastructure that our employees can consume on demand.”

The company is also experiencing greater disaster recovery since its cloud migration to Azure. “We have a much stronger backup and disaster recovery protocol for our global ERP environment in the cloud than we had in our own datacenters,” says Ramaratnam. With Azure, Womack notes, data is mirrored between datacenters regions apart. “That resiliency is built from the ground up with Microsoft,” he says. Another benefit is a zero-trust environment. “It’s highly secure,” says Womack.

Embracing what’s next with a cloud foundation

With trusted, unified data across a standardized platform, Levi Strauss & Co. created a critical foundation to scale AI and continue innovating. “The move to Azure has been a huge unlock for our business,” says Ramaratnam. Harris and his team immediately embraced Fabric IQ, a semantic intelligence layer in Fabric, to enrich the unified data available via OneLake. The technology has had a profound effect on analysis and forecasting, along with simplifying processes and saving valuable employee hours. “We use Fabric IQ to deliver all the end-to-end reporting for our cost data for the whole company,” Harris explains. “We have simplified it to the point that I have one employee with a digital buddy that manages cost for this entire company.” 

Today, Levi’s has more than 1000 agents deployed, and counting, and is hosting training sessions and hackathons to help employees explore the transformational potential of Copilot. Jennifer Patchen, Senior Director of Shared Platforms and Services, Levi Strauss & Co., sees GitHub Copilot as a “great new addition to our technology stack to support our engineers and drive immediate value.”

For Harris, GitHub Copilot has altered the scope of his roughly 40-person team. “GitHub Copilot has turned every single person on the team into a developer,” he says. These newfound capabilities helped streamline migration. “We use GitHub Copilot as part of our migrations to write infrastructure as code. Prior to the implementation of GitHub Copilot, we had very few people who do that.” Next, Harris plans to deploy more agents. “We want to expand the scope of work that our team is doing without drastically growing the size of our team,” he says. “We feel that Azure agents are going to allow us to do that.”

It’s an example of the modernization mindset that Gowans cites as key to Levi’s continued growth. ”From the moment we think of designing a product to the moment it shows up on the shelf, that entire go-to-market process is being completely rewired to serve our fans better with agility,“ he says. Whether it’s agents helping teams stay streamlined or reducing latency, the next chapter in the company’s history is supported by a foundation of cloud migration. “I don’t think any of these latest innovations would have happened if we didn’t move to the cloud,” says Ramaratnam.

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