Watch: We want to combine the offline and online shopping experience: Vidya Laxman, Tesco

Vidya Laxman drives innovation to better the in-store experiences of customers at British food retailer Tesco’s 6,800-odd supermarkets globally. As director of technology at Tesco Bengaluru, Laxman, who joined Tesco five years ago when the company was in the midst of a digital transformation, is also responsible for implementing solutions that make business and life more efficient Tesco’s 450,000 employees around the world.

Tesco’s sprawling technology center in Bengaluru’s Whitefield suburb has played a critical role in managing the technology backbone for food retailer since 2004.

In a conversation with TechCircle, Laxman, earlier COO at ThoughtWorks Studios and a computer sciences engineer by training, spoke about moving Tesco from datacenters in silos to the cloud, pilot projects in blockchain and how the company has adopted major technological innovations over the years  to better its people and processes.