Overview
- On Tuesday, August 11, Target announced it has appointed Chandhu Nair as senior vice president and its first chief AI officer and promoted Purvi Shah to senior vice president of user experience.
- Target says Nair will begin by listening to teams and guests and then run focused pilots that target concrete business outcomes rather than broad technical experiments.
- The company plans initial AI work on frontline needs such as understanding guest trends sooner, improving inventory management, and simplifying tasks for store and supply teams.
- Purvi Shah will lead UX to make AI systems understandable, useful, and trustworthy for guests and employees, building on her work on Target’s conversational shopping experience launched with ChatGPT about eight months ago.
- Executives frame the move as pragmatic governance: the CAIO role aligns with a wider surge of such appointments across industries and could speed decisions, change day-to-day employee tools, and reshape customer-facing systems if pilots prove successful.