Target Hires First Chief AI Officer in Retail's Latest Tech Push

By Katherine Hamilton

Target said it is putting more resources into its artificial intelligence and user experience capabilities, the latest move by a major retailer to integrate more AI.

The retailer said Tuesday it would bring on two executives to focus specifically on AI and user experience.

Chandhu Nair will join as Target's first chief AI officer. Nair joins from Lowe's, where he was overseeing data and AI innovation at the hardware-store chain.

Purvi Shah, who has been at Target for four years, will become senior vice president of user experience.

AI is a crucial element of Target's plan to recover from sluggish performance, which includes an investment of about $6 billion this year.

Target's chief executive, who started in February, is focused on using AI to help Target stay on top of trends, forecast sales better and invest in agentic models that can help customers find what they want.

Among those initiatives is Target Trend Brain, an AI tool trained to sort through data from social media and fashion shows to help the company's designers decide what is on trend. The company also has partnered with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini to allow shoppers to purchase products directly.

The efforts mirror some of rival Walmart's initiatives. Walmart, too, has worked with OpenAI to allow customers to plan and execute purchases through the platform.

In June, Walmart said it was using AI tools to streamline the work done by their employees, including translation and task management.

Target is scheduled to report second-quarter financial results on Aug. 19, and Walmart is slated to report the following day.

Write to Katherine Hamilton at katherine.hamilton@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 11, 2026 13:40 ET (17:40 GMT)