Initial Situation

Having delivered a business-wide AI strategy, the retailer needed to operationalise the recommendations. Leadership recognised that capturing this potential at scale required three things: a shared understanding of AI across the executive team, a structured method for channelling ideas from across the business into a single, value-led programme, and clear ownership for converting AI investment into measurable returns.

Working alongside the retailer’s strategic leadership and the wider business, vector8 designed, initiated and ran an AI Value Factory – the retailer’s AI value delivery programme.

Our Contribution

• Defined the Value Factory's operating model, establishing core roles spanning people, process and technology that collaborate to ensure strategy translates into delivery.
• Built a structured decision-making framework for AI investment, giving leadership a single view of the retailer’s AI capability, active projects and organisational skills - with every opportunity required to carry an EBITDA-driven value proposition and accompanying change plan.
• Ran a use case capture initiative that surfaced approximately 200 use cases across the business, scoring and prioritising each by business impact, feasibility and alignment with strategic ambition.
• Supported prioritisation with a roadmap and forecasting exercise, sequencing the portfolio to balance early wins against longer-term strategic bets.
• Strengthened organisational AI competence through a comprehensive, department-by-department assessment of current and target AI maturity, benchmarked against industry leaders - an assessment now driving a change and training programme across all levels of the business.

Value Delivered

• The retailer now runs a coordinated AI programme with clear executive ownership spanning both business and technology functions.
• A sequenced roadmap across three horizons — one, three and five years — carries a pipeline of approximately 200 opportunities, estimated to unlock £50–75 million in EBITDA over three years, continuously assessed and delivered across six value domains.
• The Value Factory now sits behind every AI investment decision, ensuring value is defined before build or purchase and measured after deployment, and is tasked with embedding AI into the retailer's business strategy by aligning all AI initiatives to business OKRs through an AI Business Blueprint.
• The cross-functional Value Factory team operates autonomously with full accountability for improving the organisation's AI maturity and has already met the targets set for its first horizon.
• Within six months, the Value Factory's influence is expanding beyond its initial remit, empowering individual departments to build their own value-recognition and decision-making capabilities that report into the central strategy - what began as a centralisation programme is now how TVG makes its AI decisions.

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