Despite Challenges, AI Is Bringing Many Opportunities: Colruyt MD Subramanian

Colruyt Group is a Belgian family business which is nearing a milestone of being 100-years in business. Over three generations, the group grew into a retail company with more than 33,000 employees.

"We have a diverse portfolio of food and non-food formats, and leading retailers in Belgium. Over the past half century, it has significantly diversified its activities and operates in the retail sector with a dozen or so business formulas, with both physical points of sale and online shops in Belgium, Luxembourg and France. The inception of the Indian engineering centre happened in 2007 and thereafter our scope of services gradually expanded in these years as we collaborated with multiple business units within Colruyt Group," Hari Subramanian, Managing Director of Colruyt Group India said in an exclusive interview with Bizz Buzz.

Today, the group has employed about 825 people including 125 consultants in Hyderabad and Coimbatore. As a technology enabler for the group, the in-house team of IT architects, solution analysts, and software and system engineers work in global teams on emerging technologies like IoT, RPA, Computer Vision, Azure, Data Science, Mobile and in Java, MF, QA etc. He said the group has forayed into other verticals such as retail trade, both in sourcing food products and launching our private label boni selection categories, and deep-tech VC investments in India

Can you tell us about your hiring strategy for the coming years? What kind of skills would you hire?

We have had a consistent growth of 10 per cent CAGR in the past decade, going forward too we expect an organic growth every year. Our resource pool comprises IT architects, Business Analysts, Data Analysts, Data Scientists, Robotic Engineers, Software and System Engineering etc from lateral hiring and colleges.

How is AI impacting IT leadership? Do you see it influencing the leadership styles given that the IT industry has to navigate extensively in an AI-driven environment?

AI has rapidly transformed the way we approach business and IT operations. The ability to make data-driven decisions, automate processes, and accelerate programming has significantly boosted organization efficiency by as much as 10-20 per cent.

However, while AI brings many advantages, it also presents challenges. One of the critical responsibilities for leaders in this era is managing the human side of these transformations.

As AI reshapes roles across the industry, it is natural for job insecurity to rise, with employees concerned about the future relevance of their skills. To address this, organizations must prioritize reskilling and cross-training, ensuring that their workforce remains adaptable and employable in a changing landscape. Investing in upskilling opportunities not only supports employees but also ensures a resilient and innovative organization in the face of AI advancements.

Why are you doing deep-tech investments in India?

Colruyt Group is committed to embrace new technologies that are instrumental to shape the future. We continually study the trending technologies to evaluate how it can accentuate our efficiency as an organization and enable us to extend a seamless and superior customer experience. We do a lot of in-house R&D especially in IoT, Computer Vision, SDVs, RPA,

including AI. Our belief is that leveraging the IT ecosystem externally is a great way to bring the best of both the worlds. We also strategically invest in VC from our IT balance sheet from India. In the last two years, we have invested in two VC funds viz., Pi Ventures and Pavestone Capital, making a combined commitment of Rs.40 crore.

How important is the role of AI in the management of retail supply chains?

Supply chain management is a crucial contributor to the seamless operations of business but owing to its complexity and global nature, it becomes quite challenging for organizations to find a balance. The phrase out of stock and overstock can be nightmarish for any retailer. The former impacts the reputation and sales opportunities while the latter burns cash. Achieving seamless supply chain management requires careful planning and continuous optimization.

At Colruyt Group, a major part of the supply chain operations leverage artificial intelligence to support our inventory and sales forecasting. Techniques like regression modelling have been quite effective by accounting for seasonality, historical sales data etc. Another aspect of SCM is predicting customer behavior. Among the many emerging market trends in AI, hyper-personalization presents a great opportunity where AI tools could be used to obtain granular customer information and analyse demand fluctuations. It would be a leap forward for organizations to improve inventory management and increase customer satisfaction.

Given SCM's susceptibility to external factors, like political instability, natural disasters, or something as simple as road congestion, AI can help in the optimization of route planning or improve efficiency in transportation thereby helping companies mitigate these challenges.

What sustainability means to you and what kind of initiatives are taken from India in this direction?

We say this often, because we abide by it - Sustainability is in the DNA of everything we do at Colruyt Group. You may notice, sustainability finds prominence in our mission statement too. That is the seriousness demonstrated from the top and it eventually percolates into every business operation across geographies. As a retail conglomerate in Belgium, our initiatives are directed to encourage our customers to consume more consciously, through relevant product assortment, information available to customers.

We actively adopt a value-chain approach rather than a purely retail format to be able to have a better view of our full value chain activities and thereby take more responsible actions to promote sustainability. The idea of the Value Chain project at Colruyt Group started with an intention of giving back to the farmers who are producing goods for us. Currently, the group has various value chain projects for different products across the world. In India, we have the Rice value chain project that has been operating for more than 4 years from Uttarakhand.

The Collibri Foundation of Colruyt Group invests in practical training courses on organic farming that aim to increase the professional skills and entrepreneurship of local young people from farming families. Education and youth empowerment has been the core of Colruyt Group’s community development initiatives. We believe providing quality education is the primary enabler to ignite a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship in their minds. Our skill development program in Telangana under the National Digital Literacy Mission (NDLM), was one of the longest running programs that enabled more than 3500 digitally literate students. Majority of them have found a living in data entry roles, operators in Railways and Metro stations. Our school transformation project was initiated in 2020 with an endeavor of the holistic advancement of the Zilla Parishad school through physical infrastructure development, academic transformation, and access to digital technology. Over the last few years, we have undertaken various steps towards this and aim to do more in this area.

We have also joined hands with NGOs dedicated to secure a decent livelihood through skill development and capacity building of children and young people with limited or no access to financial and education support. The other most important aspect of Sustainability that we have replicated in India is the renewable energy resources. Our own office fully complies to the Green Building standards with a strong focus to continually adopt measures that reduce carbon footprint.