Tesco's Analytics Engine: Driving Relevance, Speed and Loyalty

Tesco is using analytics to drive hyper-personalisation, instant fulfilment, and AI-led decisions—reshaping loyalty, speed, and customer relevance at scale.

- Shrikanth G

Over the last five years, Venkat has built his team into a pivotal unit within Tesco's group strategy.

This transformation includes establishing the Analytics Centre of Excellence (CoE), partnering with CXOs, and delivering significant commercial impact alongside cultural change by addressing a blend of daily decision-making challenges and large-scale transformations—such as customer personalisation, category management science, demand forecasting, cost base optimisation, and experimentation science—across various group businesses.

In a conversation with Dataquest, Venkat Raghavan, Director of Enterprise Analytics at Tesco Business Solutions, explores the analytics-driven shifts reshaping global retail. He highlights hyper-personalisation, extreme convenience, seamless omnichannel experiences, and the practical integration of emerging technologies—positioning analytics and AI as Tesco's core strategic differentiators. Excerpts.

Retail is undergoing a structural shift, with customer expectations shaped by hyper-personalization and instant fulfilment. From your vantage point, what are the most critical analytics-driven shifts reshaping global retail? How is Tesco navigating this transformation?

I believe there are 2 key shifts shaping retail industry. The first is Relevance - retail is shifting from the traditional concepts of buying and selling and into a place where customers seek highly relevant and meaningful engagement. When they connect with us through any of our touchpoint, they want us to show that we know them and can connect with them on an individual level. This will be a trend that will take a few years to build as retail industry shifts from the traditional thought process of addressing segments of customers with similar needs.