Today we’re launching the Almanac plugin for Microsoft Copilot, bringing PassBy’s foot traffic and retail intelligence data directly into the tools your team already works in — Copilot chat, Teams, and Excel.
It’s a meaningful shift in how Almanac can be used, and it’s worth explaining the thinking behind it.
The retail and real estate teams we work with don’t lack access to data. Most of them have Almanac open in a browser tab, or pull exports into spreadsheets, or build reports in BI tools. The data is there.
What’s slow is the distance between a question and an answer. Someone in a strategy meeting asks how a competitor’s traffic trended last quarter, or wants to know which of their stores is underperforming on a demographic basis. Someone else has to pull it up, format it, share their screen, or send a file. That friction, as small as it seems, compounds across dozens of decisions every week.
The teams getting the most value from Almanac aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated dashboards. They’re the ones where the data is closest to the conversations where decisions actually happen.
Microsoft 365 is where most of our customers spend their day. Meetings run in Teams. Analysis lives in Excel. If Almanac data is going to be genuinely useful, not just available, it needs to be in those environments.
This release allows our customers to connect Almanac to any Copilot-compatible surface. Once your admin completes a one-time setup, the entire organization has access, no per-user installs, no additional logins.
The plugin gives you natural language access to three core areas of Almanac data. For brands, you can query foot traffic trends over any date range, compare year-over-year performance, rank individual stores by visit volume, and understand visitor demographics benchmarked against state or national averages. For specific locations, you can find any store by address or proximity search, pull visit trends, and analyze who’s visiting. For malls and retail clusters, you can check foot traffic trends, pull the full tenant directory, and understand the demographic profile of visitors. All results include a direct link back to the Almanac platform for deeper exploration.
The Almanac platform itself isn’t going anywhere. The full interface: maps, dashboards, exports, trend analysis remains the primary environment for deep research. The Copilot plugin is for the moment when you need a quick answer in context.
If you’re an existing Almanac customer, your account manager can walk you through the setup. Full instructions are in our help center article here.