Sakshee Kohli, Head of Engineering and Store Infrastructure at Coles, shares insights into the priorities guiding Coles’ tech strategy.

The company’s focus aligns with its 3D strategy: destination for food and drink, accelerated by digital, and delivered consistently for the future.

Sakshee highlights that the key goals are delivering faster, maintaining quality and doing so cost-effectively.

Agility, in terms of rapid feature deployment and seamless customer experiences, is a top priority, all while keeping an eye on scalability and future readiness.

To navigate the complexity of retail technology, Sakshee emphasises the importance of cross-functional collaboration and ruthless prioritisation.

She addresses challenges like managing store infrastructure, ensuring quality in tech deployment and delivering features at scale.

Sakshee also discusses how Coles uses technology to solve business problems, like reducing loss through AI-driven skip-scan solutions.

By focusing on the business outcomes, tech becomes an enabler for retail innovations, such as improving freshness, affordability and personalisation.

Looking to the future, Sakshee foresees AI playing a pivotal role in optimising consumer behaviour analysis and loss prevention.

However, she acknowledges that tech lifecycle management will remain a critical challenge, especially as organisations focus on sustainability.

Coles will continue leveraging data and AI to enhance operations, while managing the ongoing costs of maintaining cutting-edge technology in a fast-paced retail environment.

Key takeaways:

  • Agility and quality in tech deployment: Coles prioritises delivering faster while maintaining high quality and managing costs, with a strong emphasis on agility in deploying and releasing technology solutions quickly.
  • Technology as a business enabler: Coles leverages technology to solve specific business problems, such as reducing loss and enhancing freshness and affordability, using tools like AI and computer vision.
  • Future focus on AI and sustainability: AI will play a major role in optimising customer insights and operational efficiencies, while managing the lifecycle and sustainability of large-scale technology systems remains a key challenge.
Contributors
Sakshee Kohli Head of Engineering & Site Infrastructure at Coles Group
I am an experienced and accomplished transformation executive with a deep passion for delivering “Business Value” and providing thought leadership. My global... More

I am an experienced and accomplished transformation executive with a deep passion for delivering “Business Value” and providing thought leadership.

My global 20+ years of experience in managing IT and business transformation-focused portfolios enables me to drive sustainable improvements across the technology services delivery process. By leveraging my skills in delivering positive business outcomes across banking, insurance, healthcare, and logistics domains, I successfully facilitate value-driven solutions to customers through measurable operational uplift and a keen ability to recover challenging at-risk programs and projects. I focus on uplifting the quality of business outcomes, the reliability of delivery commitments, and the implementation of standard practices for delivery governance and controls.

I invest time and effort into mentoring, developing, and inspiring a high-performing team, in addition to ensuring the success of my teams through effective management of financials, vendors, and resources.

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Peter Hind Principal Research Analyst at ADAPT
One of the ICT industry’s foremost analysts and commentators, Peter Hind has spent over 25 years advising and talking on topics across... More

One of the ICT industry’s foremost analysts and commentators, Peter Hind has spent over 25 years advising and talking on topics across the technology industry. His primary areas of interest are the potential of technology to transform the way organisations operate, the change management obstacles executives encounter in realising this potential, as well as the tactics and techniques leaders have deployed to overcome these difficulties.​

With roles across IDC, Unisys, NCR, Sigma Data, and others, Peter now takes on multiple roles within ADAPT including the moderation of private events and roundtables, interviewing business executives about the strategies they are pursuing and assisting with the structuring of delegate surveys.​

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