Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Google Cloud have launched a Gemini Experience Centre (GEC) in Kolkata dedicated to the Consumer Business Group (CBG) vertical. The facility is TCS’s eighth GEC globally and its third in India, following centres for retail in Chennai and banking and financial services in Bengaluru. The centre is designed to help consumer businesses across retail, consumer packaged goods, and travel, tourism and hospitality sectors move from AI prototypes to production-grade deployments using Google’s Gemini models.
What Is the Gemini Experience Centre
A Gemini Experience Centre is a co-innovation facility where enterprises can explore, test, and scale AI-powered solutions built on Google’s Gemini family of models. These centres act as physical collaboration spaces where TCS brings its deep industry domain expertise together with Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure.
The Kolkata GEC will offer immersive demonstrations and co-innovation workshops that allow consumer businesses to experience agentic AI enabled solutions first-hand. Customers visiting the centre can see live use cases spanning digital customer experiences, operations optimisation, and commerce platforms. TCS will use its forward deployed engineering teams at the centre to help clients build and deploy custom AI applications tailored to their specific business needs.
Key focus areas at the centre include customer service with unified contact centre solutions, HR and talent acquisition automation, and agentic AI architectures that can transform how consumer businesses engage with their end customers.
What Is Agentic AI
Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems capable of autonomous action and decision-making. Unlike traditional AI models that simply generate outputs or follow pre-defined rules, agentic AI systems can perceive their environment, reason through complex problems, take independent actions, and learn from the outcomes to improve future performance.
These AI agents can pursue multi-step goals with minimal human supervision. For example, in a retail context, an agentic AI system could autonomously monitor inventory levels, predict demand using historical and real-time data, place reorders with suppliers, and adjust pricing dynamically all without a human triggering each step.
Google’s Gemini models are multimodal, meaning they can process and understand text, images, audio, video, and code simultaneously. This makes them particularly suited for building agentic AI applications that need to operate across different types of data and touchpoints in a consumer business environment.
The centre in Kolkata will be a dedicated space where TCS and Google Cloud help enterprises move from isolated AI experiments to enterprise-scale agentic AI deployments using the TCS Human+AI Autonomy model, which focuses on AI systems working alongside human teams rather than replacing them.
TCS’s Growing GEC Network
The Kolkata launch is part of a much larger global expansion of TCS’s Gemini Experience Centre network. By the end of 2026, TCS plans to operate 10 GECs worldwide, with four located in India. The current global footprint of TCS GECs spans across key innovation hubs:
| Location | Focus Area |
|---|---|
| Chennai, India | Retail |
| Bengaluru, India | Banking and Financial Services (BFSI) |
| Kolkata, India | Consumer Business (CBG) |
| Troy, Michigan, USA | Manufacturing (Physical AI) |
| New York, USA | Cross-industry innovation |
| Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | Regional digital transformation |
| Singapore | APAC innovation |
| Sao Paulo, Brazil | Latin America innovation |
These centres are part of TCS’s broader Pace innovation network, which connects startups, universities, and enterprise customers to emerging technologies. The GEC network is a central pillar of TCS’s strategy to partner with hyperscalers like Google Cloud and help enterprises navigate AI-enabled transformation across the entire stack, from infrastructure to production-ready applications.
TCS has also deepened its partnership with Google Cloud beyond the GEC network. It has built more than 3,000 industry-aware AI agents on Gemini Enterprise, embedded Gemini across its service portfolio, and launched offerings such as the TCS Agentic AI Data Accelerator, the TCS Physical AI Blueprint, and the TCS AI Security Operations Centre enabled by Google SecOps. At Google Cloud Next ‘26, TCS was recognised with five 2026 Google Cloud Partner of the Year Awards.
Why Kolkata
Kolkata has emerged as a significant technology hub in eastern India, with its IT sector growing at an annual rate of 70%. The Bengal Silicon Valley Tech Hub in New Town, launched in 2018, is a 250-acre technology park that houses major IT companies including TCS, which has a 20-acre campus within the hub.
The city offers a strong talent pool from premier engineering institutions in the region, lower operational costs compared to metros like Bengaluru and Mumbai, and proactive state government policies through bodies such as the West Bengal Electronics Industry Development Corporation (WEBEL), established in 1974. TCS’s existing presence in Kolkata through its large delivery centre made it a natural choice for the new GEC.
The centre also helps TCS diversify its innovation footprint beyond the traditional IT hubs of Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad. For Google Cloud, the Kolkata centre opens access to the fast-growing eastern India market and the consumer businesses headquartered or operating in the region.
Significance for Consumer Businesses
Consumer businesses are among the most dynamic adopters of AI, but many struggle to move beyond pilot projects to full-scale production deployment. The Kolkata GEC addresses this gap by providing a dedicated environment where companies can co-create, test, and scale AI-led offerings specific to their sector.
Retail
Retailers can explore AI applications for personalised customer engagement, dynamic pricing, inventory optimisation, and unified commerce platforms. Gemini’s multimodal capabilities allow retailers to analyse customer behaviour across online and offline channels.
Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)
CPG companies can use agentic AI to optimise supply chains, automate quality control, predict demand patterns, and accelerate product innovation cycles. The centre will demonstrate how AI agents can autonomously manage end-to-end distribution and logistics.
Travel, Tourism and Hospitality (TTH)
For the travel sector, the centre showcases AI applications in personalised trip planning, real-time pricing and booking optimisation, multilingual customer service automation, and predictive maintenance for hospitality infrastructure.
The centre’s focus on agentic AI is particularly significant. Unlike earlier phases of AI adoption that centred on generative AI for content creation, agentic AI represents a shift toward systems that can act autonomously. Gartner has predicted that by 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention. The Kolkata GEC positions Indian consumer businesses to be early movers in this transition.
Key Takeaways
- TCS and Google Cloud launched the Gemini Experience Centre (GEC) in Kolkata, dedicated to the Consumer Business Group vertical.
- This is TCS’s eighth GEC globally and third in India, following centres in Chennai (Retail) and Bengaluru (BFSI).
- TCS plans to expand the GEC network to 10 centres worldwide, including four in India, by the end of 2026.
- The centre focuses on agentic AI, a class of AI systems that can autonomously pursue complex goals and take independent actions.
- Consumer businesses across retail, CPG, and travel, tourism and hospitality sectors will benefit from the centre.
- TCS, founded in 1968 and headquartered in Mumbai, is part of the Tata Group and generated over $30 billion in revenue in FY2026.
- Google’s Gemini models are multimodal AI models launched in December 2023, capable of processing text, images, audio, video, and code.
