Croma appoints Suman Guha as Chief Digital Officer to accelerate AI-driven omnichannel growth
Tata Group’s consumer electronics retail chain Croma has appointed Suman Guha as Chief Digital Officer, effective 1 April 2026. He will report to CEO and Managing Director Shibashish Roy, marking a significant leadership transition as the retailer sharpens its digital and omnichannel strategy.
Guha brings over two decades of experience spanning deep technology, product leadership, and large-scale digital transformation across global and Indian enterprises. He joins from within the Tata Group ecosystem, most recently serving as CTO at Tata UniStore and working closely with Tata Digital to drive technology synergies across platforms.
A Platform-First Push for the Next Phase of Growth
Croma’s appointment comes at a time when the company is expanding its digital commerce footprint, enhancing customer experience, and integrating technology-led retail operations. Guha’s experience in building composable commerce architectures and data-driven ecosystems is expected to power Croma’s next phase of platform-led growth.
Previously, at Tata Digital and Tata CLiQ Fashion, Guha led cross-functional teams across engineering, product, UX, data science, analytics, cloud, and information security, overseeing more than 250 professionals. He played a key role in group-level technology integration and product innovation.
Before that, as Chief Product & Technology Officer at Reliance Retail, he helped launch the omnichannel beauty platform Tira and led digital initiatives across fashion and lifestyle businesses. He also architected a “design-to-shelf” framework that reduced product launch cycles from 180 days to 21 days — underscoring his focus on speed, scale, and experimentation.
His global experience includes leadership roles at Cisco and Tesco UK, where he worked on large-scale platform engineering and SaaS-based commerce transformation. Earlier stints at Teradata and Red Hat strengthened his expertise in cloud platforms and enterprise systems.
“Make Omnichannel Invisible to the Customer”
Speaking about his priorities at Croma, Guha outlined a three-fold focus for the first 12–18 months.
“My first priority will be to make omnichannel truly invisible to the customer. Customers don’t think in terms of store or online — they think in terms of intent. Whether they research on mobile, touch the product in store, or buy later, the journey must feel like one continuous experience. Croma should behave like a single operating system for electronics retail.”
His second focus is transitioning Croma toward a modular, composable commerce architecture.
“Retail growth now depends on speed of experimentation. We will build a platform where pricing, merchandising, fulfilment, promotions, and seller integrations operate as APIs — enabling faster launches and rapid category expansion without rebuilding the core each time.”
The third pillar: deeply embedding AI across operations and customer experience.
“AI will not be a feature — it will become the interface. From conversational product discovery to intelligent supply chain and service diagnostics, our goal is to move from transactional commerce to assisted decision-making. Electronics retail is complex, and the retailer who reduces decision anxiety wins.”
From Transactional Retail to Predictive Retail
Guha believes the next phase of retail growth will come not from more traffic, but from better decisions.
“Customers don’t need more choices; they need clarity.”
He plans to redesign the journey from search → compare → buy to intent → guidance → confidence → ownership, using AI and data to contextualize recommendations based on budget, usage, lifecycle stage, and household needs.
Stores, he says, will evolve into advisory hubs:
“Associates will be augmented with AI-powered tools that combine customer history, product intelligence, and real-time inventory. Online and offline will share the same brain — the same customer memory and recommendation logic.”
On the backend, Croma aims to unify customer, product, and interaction data into a continuous learning loop, enabling predictive retail — identifying upgrade, accessory, or service needs even before customers begin searching.
“The long-term vision is to evolve Croma from a retailer of devices into a trusted technology advisor for households — helping customers choose, use, maintain, and upgrade technology throughout its lifecycle.”
Beyond Retail: A Passion for AI Education
Beyond his corporate role, Guha is deeply invested in democratizing AI knowledge. He actively writes about AI and its societal implications at Recode AI (https://www.recodeai.co/), reflecting his interest in helping communities understand and adopt AI at a deeper level.
Academic and Leadership Foundation
Guha holds a Master’s degree in Information Technology from the University of Glasgow and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from BIT Mesra. He has completed executive programs at Stanford GSB and The Wharton School, alongside advanced studies in data science.
