How Landmark Created a Team of ‘Silicon Sapiens’

Landmark Group is a retail giant. With more than 2,200 retail stores spread across multiple continents and over 55,000 people, the scale of operations is immense. The company is as complex as you would expect from a large business with a long history.

Managing such a vast enterprise takes more than operational know-how—it takes vision. The kind of vision that has leadership looking far ahead, futureproofing the business for years to come. That’s the kind of leadership Landmark has fostered throughout the organization.

Almost a decade ago, long before automation became a boardroom buzzword, Landmark saw the future. Or rather, it created it. “We imagined a way of working where shared services could be ‘lights out’,” says Rajesh Garg, Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and one of Landmark’s senior leaders. “That was the aspiration. And automation gave us a way to start turning it into reality.”

This ‘lights out’ vision—a business so seamlessly automated that manual intervention would become the exception, not the rule—wasn’t just about saving money. It was about creating a shared services function that could support the entire business with speed, intelligence, and precision. And automation was the linchpin.

Bringing the vision to life

It was back in 2017 when Garg and his team first brought robotic process automation (RPA) forward to the business. Automation could help Landmark tackle the kind of complex, repetitive, high-volume work that bogged down teams across its operations.

Eager to get leadership buy-in, the team turned to a bit of theater.

We had set up four laptops on four desks in a room. UiPath bots were quietly doing tasks at each one. They filled out forms, moved data, and sent emails. There were chairs, but no people.

Rajesh Garg • Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Landmark Group

But Garg didn’t stop there. In the background, the 1970s electronic band Kraftwerk’s iconic song “The Robots” played. It was a fitting soundtrack for a glimpse into the future. “It wasn’t just about the spectacle,” he reflects. “We wanted them to see what it meant in action. Unless you watch those robots working, you think it’s science fiction.”

The moment landed. Senior leaders walked away not only understanding the power of automation but believing in it. From then on, Landmark’s automation journey was in motion. With leadership support secured, Landmark quickly established a dedicated center of excellence (CoE). This would drive automation strategy, development, and governance, rethinking processes with automation at the heart.

Since then, Landmark has made over 700 bots. Five hundred forty six of them are living and working in the background, helping with everything from hiring new employees to pricing forecasts. “We’ve built a workforce of silicon sapiens—a digital workforce that works in harmony with our homo sapiens—keeping Landmark operating at the top,” Garg adds with a smile.

And the results have been impressive.

It’s not about robots. It’s about processes

The first silicon sapiens automated a process for creating purchase orders. This had been a problem for finance teams for a long time. Before, staff spent 90 minutes typing data into over 90 fields for each request. The automation reduced this to just four minutes, removing errors in the process. This one bot now saves the business between 40,000 and 50,000 hours of manual work per year.

Another notable example emerged when Saudi Arabia introduced new nationalization rules, requiring companies to employ a higher percentage of Saudi nationals. The sudden change caused a lot of new hires and new employees to join the company. This made HR teams very busy.

We worked quickly to build a bespoke end-to-end app, handling everything from onboarding paperwork to ID checks and compliance.

Praveen Joseph • Head of Process Excellence and Automation, Landmark Group

Underpinned by UiPath technology, the app replaced a mountain of paper-based processes and restored order to a challenging situation. Joseph adds, “No manual team could have scaled up fast enough.”

As with any major change, there was initial resistance. “Some worried that robots might threaten jobs. But as the benefits became clear, people’s attitudes shifted,” says Garg. Rather than removing people, automation freed teams from repetitive, time-consuming tasks. This allowed them to focus on higher-value, strategic work or be reassigned elsewhere within the business. In a large company like Landmark, there were many new positions for people who had changed jobs.

To date, Landmark’s silicon sapiens have collectively saved the business 1.9 million hours of manual effort—and counting. With demand growing across departments, Landmark has a strong governance structure. It took eight months to design and from which to select the most impactful opportunities.

Ahead of the AI curve

While AI is dominating headlines today, Landmark has quietly embedded intelligence into its automation strategy for years. “When we hear about agentic AI now, it feels like we’ve been living that journey already,” explains Garg. “We’ve always built our bots with intelligence; it’s something we’ve integrated where possible since day one.”

The business built AI-powered bots for invoice processing, document reading, and data validation, with AI models running seamlessly alongside rule-based automations. As a result, Landmark finds itself ahead of the curve in the emerging agentic AI space.

In fact, the business is already working on how to use agentic AI better in its work.

I hear a lot about AI, but very few are using it properly. We’ve already done the heavy lifting of adding intelligence to automation. Now, we’re perfectly placed for the next steps.

Rajesh Garg • Group Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Landmark Group

Looking to the future, Landmark is preparing to incorporate agentic AI into its sustainability reporting. The company has built one of the most robust sustainability and carbon accounting models in the industry. The addition of agentic AI will allow it to continuously improve and enhance its reporting, gathering real-time data across supply chains, HR, and product lines.

Learning from Landmark

Garg and the team offer some valuable lessons for organizations starting on their own automation journey. “The first is to focus on the process, not the technology. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of new tools, but unless you truly understand how your processes work and where they’re failing, you’ll never unlock the full potential of automation. “

Joseph later adds, “The starting point should always be what needs improving, not what software you want to buy.” From here, it’s crucial to build credibility through results. Landmark started with small, specific projects that made quick, clear progress. Those early successes created momentum, built confidence, and proved to the wider business that automation was a genuine operational advantage.

And finally, don’t be afraid to bring a little drama. Garg concludes, “Sometimes, the best way to demonstrate the power of automation is to let people see it for themselves. Creating those memorable moments can help shift perceptions and win over the right people.”

Landmark’s automation journey is still evolving. But what’s clear is that the company has already made a profound shift. From a bold vision to a team of over 500 bots working side-by-side with their colleagues, Landmark has created something remarkable: a workforce of the future, made up of both homo sapiens and silicon sapiens.

And if the lights do go out someday? It’ll be because everything is running just as it should.