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Major American retail corporation Target established its Indian GCC, known as Target in India (TII), in Bengaluru in 2004. One of India’s oldest GCCs, TII has been operational since 2005 and currently employs over 4,500 professionals. TII has also assisted the retailer’s recent plans to roll out Store Companion, a new generative AI tool for nearly 2,000 stores by August.
“We grew from around 300 people in the first year to over 4500 people today. What’s special and different about the team in India and TII is that the employees are across a breadth of capabilities. We have technologists, data scientists, people who design all our stores, architects, creative and marketing team, HR, finance, enterprise services, and others working out of here,” said SVP & President Target in India, Andrea Zimmerman.
She added that TII brings connected capabilities to deliver impact for Target in the US. “Every function at the headquarters in the US is represented here in India. The investment and connection as one true global team are quite strong. Unlike a traditional GCC, we operate as an extended and connected global headquarters. Our teams are working and impacting strategies together,” she said.
Brad Thompson, SVP, of Technology, Target, said, “Both in the United States and TII, we have software developers working on the underlying application of Store Companion and they have helped to build the actual interface team members will interact with. The Indian and U.S. teams have built an embedding vector database that allows the large language model (LLM) to interact with our process documentation.”
He added that the Indian team, along with the US team, have been involved in the deployment of the software to over 100,000 mobile devices across 2,000 stores used by over 400,000 team members.
Store Companion is Target’s GenAI-powered chatbot designed by the company to answer on-the-job process questions, coach new team members, and support store operations management among others. This chatbot is supposed to make the teams’ jobs easier and allow them to work more efficiently, offering faster service and deeper guest engagement to make the shopping experience better.
Zimmerman also noted that India is appealing to Target for its talent pool. She added that the company has invested in many capabilities to support growth within TII’s operations. “Over the last few years, we have grown by 1000 or more, and not just in one area. We’re always looking to build and acquire new skills across a breadth of capabilities.”
Of the 4,500 employees, 1700 are part of TII’s tech organisation. These include product engineers, data scientists, and analysts who are working with the company’s US counterparts.
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