A Deliberate, Experienced Choice
Marks and Spencer's decision to appoint John Hunt as Chief Digital and Technology Officer is notable less for its drama than for its caution. M&S did not reach for a fashionable outsider from big tech. It hired a career retailer: Hunt spent nearly ten years as Chief Information Officer and Managing Director of Group Enablement at Woolworths Group in Australia, following more than two decades with Woolworths in South Africa. That is over thirty years inside grocery and general-merchandise retail technology.
We see this as a signal about what M&S believes it needs. After a period of visible operational stress, the retailer appears to have concluded that the next phase of its transformation is about disciplined execution rather than reinvention. Hunt's profile fits a brief that prizes resilience, supply-chain systems, and store-and-online integration over moonshots. He will join in summer 2026 and take ownership of the digital, data, and technology function.
The Cyber Incident That Reframed the Job
It is impossible to read this appointment without the backdrop of the cyber incident that disrupted M&S operations and exposed how dependent the modern retailer has become on a small number of core systems. When digital infrastructure fails at a company that sells food, clothing, and homeware at scale, the damage is immediate and visible to customers. That experience tends to change how a board defines the technology leadership role.
The brief Hunt inherits is therefore not only about growth and innovation but about hardening the estate. Resilience, recovery, and the ability to keep trading through disruption have moved from back-office concerns to boardroom priorities. For CIOs across retail, the M&S episode has become a case study in why operational continuity is now a first-order technology objective, not a compliance checkbox handled somewhere below the executive committee.
A Careful Handover, Not a Clean Break
The transition is being managed unusually gently. Hunt assumes responsibilities currently held by operations director Sacha Berendji, who has been with M&S for more than 32 years and will remain on the executive committee until April 2027 to allow a smooth handover. Retaining institutional memory through a leadership change is a sound instinct, particularly in a complex retailer where undocumented operational knowledge lives in the heads of long-tenured executives.
Berendji's own words capture the cultural weight of the moment. "M&S runs through my blood and has done for more than 32 years. It's the best brand in the country and in my view the best retailer in the world," he said. CEO Stuart Machin was equally warm, calling Berendji "a loyal, hardworking, trusted colleague and one of the most company minded people I've had the pleasure to work with." The tone matters: smooth successions reduce the risk that critical knowledge walks out the door mid-transformation.
Following a Departure, Filling a Gap
The appointment also closes a leadership gap. Hunt's arrival follows the earlier departure of former chief digital and technology officer Rachel Higham, leaving the function without a permanent senior owner at exactly the moment M&S most needed continuity in its technology direction. Vacancies at the top of a transformation are dangerous, because programs drift, vendors sense uncertainty, and internal teams lose momentum waiting for direction.
Hunt brings his own framing to the task. "I'm really looking forward to joining M&S and bringing my passion for both retail and technology to what is an incredibly exciting transformation," he said. The phrase both retail and technology is the tell. M&S has chosen a leader who is fluent in stores and supply chains as well as systems, betting that the next chapter is won by someone who understands the operational reality the technology is meant to serve.
What Global Retail Should Take From It
For technology leaders elsewhere, the M&S hire reinforces a pattern we have watched build across enterprise retail. The most contested executive seat is no longer the CIO who keeps the lights on or the chief digital officer who chases new channels, but a combined figure expected to own data, technology, resilience, and customer experience together. The fragmentation of these roles tends to produce exactly the gaps that cyber incidents exploit.
Hunt's cross-market background adds a second lesson. He carries playbooks from South African and Australian retail into a UK institution, and that portability of retail technology leadership is increasingly common as the underlying problems converge. Omnichannel fulfillment, loyalty data, and operational resilience look broadly similar in Sydney, Johannesburg, and London. M&S is wagering that hard-won experience in one market transfers to another, and that experience, not novelty, is what its overhaul now demands.
