Target is strengthening its artificial intelligence and user experience capabilities as part of its next phase of growth, naming Chandhu Nair as the retailer’s first Chief AI Officer and moving Purvi Shah into a senior leadership role overseeing UX.
Nair will join Target on August 24 as Senior Vice President and Chief AI Officer, giving the company dedicated executive leadership to coordinate AI strategy across the enterprise.
At the same time, Shah will become Senior Vice President of UX, reflecting Target’s strategy of developing AI capabilities alongside human-centered design rather than treating them as separate initiatives.
The leadership moves support four strategic priorities Target has identified for its next chapter of growth: strengthening merchandising authority, elevating the guest experience, accelerating technology, and strengthening its team and communities.
Target sees AI as a tool that should build on the retailer’s existing strengths rather than operate as a standalone strategy.
Nair said the company’s approach will begin with specific business outcomes and determine where AI can create the greatest impact.
Potential opportunities include identifying changes in customer needs sooner, improving inventory management, simplifying work for employees, and enabling faster and better-informed business decisions.
The company is also looking at how AI could improve customer-facing shopping experiences and accelerate the process of bringing new ideas to market.
Nair emphasized that Target does not intend to measure AI success simply by how widely the technology is deployed. Instead, the company plans to evaluate whether AI contributes to growth, improves the guest experience, and helps employees perform their work more effectively.
Shah’s expanded UX role is intended to ensure those increasingly intelligent systems remain intuitive and useful for the people interacting with them.
Target believes the evolution of AI is changing the scope of UX design. Rather than focusing primarily on screens and interfaces, UX teams will increasingly help shape how intelligence, services, technology, and operations work together across an entire customer or employee journey.
That could involve experiences that move among social media, Target’s app, physical stores, employees, conversational interfaces, voice systems, images, and AI agents.
Target expects AI agents themselves to become another important component of this environment, including situations where intelligent agents interact directly with software systems or other agents.
The company believes developing AI and UX together can help prevent highly capable technology from becoming confusing or fragmented.
Target is consequently emphasizing collaboration among product, technology, data, business, and UX teams during the earliest stages of development.
Shah described this approach as “radical collaboration,” with designers and the people ultimately using Target’s technology working alongside the teams building it.
The company also intends to apply the same design standards across different groups interacting with Target.
That includes consumers shopping online or in stores, employees using internal tools to complete tasks, and business partners interacting with Target’s systems.
For shoppers, Target sees an increasingly connected journey where a customer might discover a product through social media, continue through a visual experience in the Target app, and ultimately complete the purchase in a store or with assistance from an employee.
UX will be responsible for helping those different interactions feel connected and consistent with Target’s broader brand experience.
The creation of a dedicated Chief AI Officer position also gives Target a central executive responsible for coordinating AI initiatives that could otherwise develop independently across different business units.
Nair said his initial priority will be listening and learning from Target teams while studying the business from the perspective of customers, employees, and partners before determining where AI should be expanded.
Ultimately, Target is positioning the combination of AI and human-centered design as an operating capability that could influence merchandising, inventory, employee productivity, customer engagement, and technology development across the company.
KEY QUOTES:
“What excites me most is the opportunity to make AI real for the people who experience Target every day. The most meaningful AI stories won’t be about what happens in a lab. They’ll be about what happens on the front line, how we make shopping easier for a guest, give a team member a better tool, make a business decision with more confidence or bring a new idea to market faster.”
“Target has distinctive strengths in its stores, merchandising and team. The opportunity is to use AI to build on those strengths and support Target’s priorities, not create a separate AI strategy. We should begin with the outcomes we want and focus the technology where it can make the biggest difference.”
Chandhu Nair, Incoming Senior Vice President and Chief AI Officer of Target
“UX helps us stay focused on three fundamental questions: What is the right problem to solve? Who are we solving it for? And are we solving it in the right way, given the context in which someone will use it?”
“Intelligence may make a system more capable, but human-centered design helps make that capability understandable, useful and trustworthy. It helps us point the technology toward the opportunities that matter most and shape how a system should behave, not just how it should look.”
Purvi Shah, Senior Vice President of UX at Target
“AI expands what technology can understand and do, while UX helps turn those capabilities into something useful.”
“Powerful intelligence without a thoughtful experience can create confusion or fragmentation. An experience that looks good without the right intelligence underneath it can fall short of what people need. Advancing the capabilities together helps us create experiences that are intelligent, intuitive and useful.”
Chandhu Nair, Incoming Senior Vice President and Chief AI Officer of Target
“A more coordinated approach will help us focus on the outcomes that matter most for Target, our guests and our team. My first responsibility will be to listen and learn: spending time with our teams and seeing the business through the eyes of the guests, team members and partners.”
“That could mean helping us understand changing guest needs sooner, improving how we manage inventory, simplifying work for our team or enabling faster, better-informed decisions. The measure of success won’t be how much AI we deploy. It will be the difference it makes for Target’s growth, the guest experience and our team’s ability to do their best work.”
Chandhu Nair, Incoming Senior Vice President and Chief AI Officer of Target
“The future of UX isn’t just about what people see. It’s also about shaping the systems behind the experience, how intelligence, services and operations work together in a seamless, end-to-end manner.”
“We want our guest experiences to reflect Target’s distinct thoughtfulness of great design, and we want that same level of thoughtfulness for our team members and partners. No matter who is interacting with Target, the experience should feel true to our brand.”
Purvi Shah, Senior Vice President of UX at Target
