Enterprise Tech Tesco’s AI Agents Could Soon Do Your Shopping For You By Bernard Marr ,
Summary Tesco, the UK's largest supermarket, is evolving its AI strategy, moving beyond predictive analytics to "agentic AI" that can take action. Leveraging 30 years of Clubcard data, Tesco partnered with Adobe to develop solutions like an AI assistant for its app. This assistant, currently in pilot, offers personalized meal planning, food waste reduction advice, and automatically builds shopping baskets based on customer preferences. This initiative signals a significant shift towards a future where AI actively participates in the shopping process, rather than merely recommending. The ultimate challenge for this autonomous retail vision will be earning customer trust.
Tesco is using AI agents, decades of Clubcard data and new partnerships with Adobe and Mistral to rethink how it serves customers and runs its business. Adobe Stock Tesco, the UK’s largest supermarket chain, has spent 30 years learning what millions of people buy. Now it wants AI agents to start acting on that knowledge.
The retail giant accounts for almost 30 percent of the UK grocery market, and through its Clubcard loyalty program it has built an extraordinary picture of British shopping habits, with data said to cover eight out of 10 households. For years, Tesco has used that information to predict what customers might want and personalize the offers they see.
Through partnerships with Adobe and other AI companies, Tesco is exploring AI agents that can move beyond predicting customer behavior and actually take action. That includes an AI assistant capable of planning meals, helping customers reduce food waste and automatically building shopping baskets based on their preferences and purchase history.
It raises a much bigger question. Are we approaching a future where AI doesn’t simply recommend what we should buy, but increasingly does the shopping for us?
In April this year, Tesco announced a strategic partnership with Adobe to create the Tesco x Adobe Innovation lab. This will see the supermarket giant’s data and AI teams working directly alongside Adobe engineers to develop bespoke agentic solutions.
Its technology is built around Adobe’s Firefly Foundry, its genAI platform for personalized, branded creative materials at scale. This is a technological leap forward from Tesco’s previous AI-driven personalization initiatives, which were mainly focused on predictive analytics and recommendation engines.
While those technologies basically provided insights into what someone might buy next based in what they bought before, agents take things further.
Rather than just giving the retailer information, they are capable of taking action. This means reading transactional data and customer behavior signals, generating offers and promotions on the fly, and deciding what way of delivering them to the customer will be most helpful.
One feature currently being tested by staff before it’s rolled out to customers is an AI assistant that will live inside its Clubcard app. It will provide meal planning advice tailored to individual preferences and dietary needs, as well as advice on reducing food waste by using up leftovers at home.
It’s also reported that it will automatically build shopping baskets based on preference and purchase history. This certainly sounds like a step towards the buying capabilities we’ve been told to expect from agents.
The project is new, so no concrete…