Tesco has appointed its first group agentic director, a new role responsible for exploring how the supermarket responds to consumers using AI to do their shopping for them.
The supermarket group has appointed Lucy Cooper as its group customer experience & agentic director, who joins from THG Ingenuity.
“The most interesting question in commerce right now isn’t how AI helps people shop. It’s what happens when AI starts shopping for them,” Cooper said.
“The weekly shop might be the perfect proving ground… high-frequency, habitual and highly personal. Full of decisions most of us would happily delegate,” she added.
At THG Ingenuity – the end-to-end e-commerce platform used by Coca-Cola, Nestlé, L’Oréal, Mondelez and Kraft Heinz which demerged from THG last year – Cooper had served as chief commercial officer since the beginning of last year.
Prior to THG – in which she remains a “loyal shareholder”, she said – Cooper served at Accenture and Microsoft in innovation-focused roles.
“Few businesses have a bigger place in British life, serve more people, or have quite so much opportunity to use technology and data to change how millions of customers shop. That combination was pretty difficult to resist,” Cooper said.
The role is also responsible for finding similar “opportunities” across the wider Tesco group, including Tesco Mobile, banking and health.
The appointment follows a series of AI-related deals and developments at Tesco. The company has already doubled the size of its technology team over the past five years and is already using AI, developed both in-house and with partners, across many of its operations.
This includes finding the most efficient routing for online orders to create more delivery slots for customers, helping with demand forecasting to ensure availability, and ramping up personalisation through Clubcard.
In April, the supermarket launched a trial of an AI assistant built into the Tesco app, with which customers can converse to find personalised recipe ideas and add the required ingredients to their basket. Later that month, the supermarket signed an AI deal with software giant Adobe to “accelerate personal engagement” with its shoppers. The “strategic AI partnership” is focused on personalising the content and offers Tesco serves up to its Clubcard members and “better anticipating” their needs along the shopping journey.
In December the supermarket announced a three-year deal with French tech company Mistral AI to develop “cutting-edge” AI solutions, including an overhaul of its personalised Clubcard offers.
The partnership gives Tesco full access to the AI company’s commercial models, including any future developments, as well as its AI engineers.
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