Asda chief information officer Rob Barnes said the supermarket wants to be “famous for being brilliant value” as it pushes ahead with its turnaround plan.

Speaking at the 2025 Retail Technology Show, Barnes said that Asda is “really trying to recapture” its position as offering the best value for families. He noted the return of former CEO Allan Leighton as executive chairman, who he described as “trying to really restore that price point prominence in the market”.

Leighton served as the retailer’s CEO from 1996 to 2001 and was chair of the Co-op for almost 10 years. At Asda, he is known for helping to turnaround the business in the late 1990s alongside current M&S chair Archie Norman.

Since returning, he has focused on his objective to “restore Asda’s DNA” and made clear that one of his first priorities is to improve prices and product availability.

Subscribe to Grocery Gazette for free

Sign up here to get the latest grocery and food news each morning

In January, the supermarket giant re-launched its famous Rollback price proposition, which offers an average price reduction of 25%. Just last month, Leighton said he is “beginning to see incremental improvements in our price gap”.

Barnes also discussed how omnichannel retail will evolve in the next two years. He said that as the front-end customer experience has already been on a “massive revolution”, the future focus will be on the colleague experience and how it can be enhanced by technology.

“Equipping our colleagues on the shop floor or in our distribution with that real time knowledge and insight, that next best action type technology. I haven’t seen a lot of AI out there, not by name anyway, certainly by technology. It’s just becoming embedded into everything we do.

“I think that’s the next thing that people in the search for margin, in the search for trying to improve cost, that’s where we’ll all turn our attention to: how do you actually empower our colleagues?”

Barnes explained: “We have 150,000 of them and if we can make every single one of them even more effective with data in their hands or actionable insight, it would make a huge difference to our business.”