Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will take over the India global capability center of Best Buy, the consumer electronics retailer based in Richfield, Minnesota. TCS, a technology services company headquartered in Mumbai, in western India, announced the multi-year agreement on October 1.
The Best Buy India entity will move to TCS, which says the handover is meant to keep the business running without a break. TCS then plans to turn the center into what it calls an AI-native Capability Center. Best Buy’s employees in India will join the TCS global organization, according to The Hindu BusinessLine. Business Standard reported that the price was not disclosed.
TCS says teams will redesign workflows, build AI-powered experiences and solutions, and scale the center’s work across Best Buy’s business. It will draw on its Global Value and Innovation Centres framework to do so.
In statements reported by Business Standard and The Hindu BusinessLine, Krishnan Ramanujam, president of the consumer business group at TCS, said combining Best Buy’s technology talent with TCS’s retail, AI, engineering and delivery skills will create an AI-native capability engine, and that the arrangement could become a repeatable model for the wider retail industry. Ahrey Smith, vice president of technology strategy and transformation at Best Buy, said the India team had advanced Best Buy’s priorities and that the company wanted a partner that understood both the business and the value of those workers, with room for them to keep learning and growing.
Business Standard added context on why such deals happen. It reported that some global capability centers in India have struggled to mature past a certain point, which has led some owners to sell them to service providers, while service providers have been pushing into the capability center business to add revenue.
Why this matters. The deal moves a US retailer’s India engineering team under a services firm instead of closing the center. For an American executive deciding how to run an India operation that proper advance planning and management of GCCs is important.
