Tesco and Adobe Turn 24 Million Clubcard Households Into an AI Engine
"Working with Adobe, we can be even more responsive to the needs of shoppers."
Tesco and Adobe announced a strategic AI partnership on April 13, combining Adobe's agentic AI and creative technology capabilities with Tesco's Clubcard data infrastructure to deliver more personalized shopping experiences across its digital channels.
The partnership is built on the foundation of Tesco's Clubcard loyalty scheme, which covers more than 24 million UK households and already provides personalised offers, product recommendations, and recipe ideas to members, according to the press release.
Through Adobe's agentic AI capabilities and Adobe Firefly Foundry, Tesco's personalisation and AI teams will use that customer intelligence to better anticipate individual customer needs and deliver relevant content in the moment across its app, website, and in-store channels.
Central to the partnership is the launch of the Tesco x Adobe Innovation Lab, a co-innovation model that brings Adobe engineers to work directly alongside Tesco's personalisation and AI teams.
The Lab is designed to accelerate experimentation in AI-driven personalisation, combining Tesco's retail customer expertise with Adobe's customer experience technology under a single unified mission, according to the press release.
Adobe will also support Tesco's creative output through technology that rapidly produces on-brand content at scale, reducing the production cycle between customer insight and campaign activation.
"At Tesco, we want customers to feel that the more they use their Clubcard, the more use it is to them," said Becky Brock, Tesco Group Customer Digital Transformation Director. "Working with Adobe, we can be even more responsive to the needs of shoppers. We can act in the moment, getting the right messages, savings or ideas to the right customers, just when they need them."
Nathan Hancock, Vice President and Managing Director for UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa at Adobe, framed the partnership around the depth of customer trust Tesco has built.
"Few retailers anywhere in the world have built the depth of trust and knowledge that Tesco has, and together, we can connect that foundation with AI-powered solutions that deliver smarter journeys and more personal customer experiences at an unprecedented scale," he said.
Tesco holds a 28% share of Britain's grocery market and operates one of the largest loyalty programmes in the country, according to Reuters.
That scale of first-party data is the asset the partnership is built around. Personalisation at the level both companies describe, like acting in the moment and anticipating needs before customers articulate them, requires both the data infrastructure Tesco has accumulated through decades of Clubcard membership and the AI capability Adobe is bringing to bear.
Where earlier personalisation technology generated recommendations based on historical purchase patterns, agentic AI systems can coordinate tasks across systems and respond dynamically to real-time signals.
The announcement comes two days before Tesco is scheduled to publish its annual results on April 17, giving the partnership additional context as a signal of the grocer's digital and AI investment direction heading into the new financial year, as per Reuters.