Tesco’s business solutions CEO, Sumit Mitra, told the media that the company hasn’t let go of any employees in six years despite seeing a 35–40% increase in operational efficiency because to artificial intelligence (AI) platforms at its Bengaluru global capabilities center (GCC).
The development occurs at a time when productivity gains from AI are causing large tech corporations to lay off thousands of workers.
“We are looking at AI as a means to drive efficiency… over the last four-five years, we’ve delivered 35-40 percent efficiency within our business… we haven’t made any redundancies in the last six years,” Mitra said.
Tesco said earlier this year that it was “simplifying” processes by laying off 400 employees from both the head office and retail locations.
Engineers make up around 80% of the 5,000 employees of the grocery and goods retailer’s India captive center, which it likes to refer to as Global Business Solutions.
As Tesco outsourced complicated procedures from all over the world to Bengaluru, the business, which has its headquarters in Welwyn Garden City, retrained its workforce for higher-order tasks.
Mitra went on to say that the India team is applying AI while having a thorough awareness of the business environment of the 105-year-old organization. “You can get AI talent in India but what’s hard to find is people who understand both business content and context,” Mitra added.
As a result, it has assisted the team in developing tools to analyze inflation and deflation of product ingredients to support supplier negotiations that have resulted in savings of millions of pounds and mine over 10 million real-time consumer sentiment signals for product quality.
Tesco’s income for the fiscal year 2024–2025 was approximately 65.5 billion British pounds, or over Rs 7,500 crore.
Built in-house
Tesco develops technology mostly in-house, in contrast to other major retailers. In addition to building a unique retail data platform that houses all card and customer data, it has switched shop billing systems from hardware to cloud-based solutions.
Third-party vendors may access customers through Tesco’s digital app and physical shops thanks to the Marketplace platform, which was developed in India. Furthermore, the hyper-personalization platform shifts from broad marketing to precise, AI-driven engagements by generating tailored offers based on behavior, intent, and life stage.
“We don’t outsource this because our customer and Clubcard data is our biggest differentiator,” Mitra said.
GCCs are typically set up to build and manage core technology operations in-house.
Engineering-led growth
Tesco said that the attrition figures also reflect the company’s shift to an engineering-first approach. Tesco only records 3 percent attrition, compared to the industry average of 20–25 percent in Bengaluru’s tech sector.
“The main reason for that is: are we paying like an Amazon or a Facebook or other tech organisations? No. But it’s the quality of work that people do here, that’s what makes the huge difference,” Mitra said.
The India center has added around £750 million in business value to the Tesco Group over the last four to five years.
Along with managing all online training, learning, and talent management, Tesco Business Solutions also oversees the group’s end-to-end recruiting process in the UK, Europe, Ireland, and India, employing almost 1.10 lakh individuals a year, the majority of whom are gig workers.
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