Target named Chandhu Nair as its first Chief AI Officer and promoted Purvi Shah to Senior Vice President of UX, pairing artificial intelligence with human-centered design as the retailer pursues its next growth phase. Nair joins the company August 24; Shah moves into her expanded role immediately. The appointments give Target dedicated executive leadership for AI strategy while elevating UX to shape how those systems behave.
The moves support four strategic priorities Target has set for growth: strengthening merchandising authority, elevating the guest experience, accelerating technology, and strengthening its team and communities. Target views AI as a tool that should build on its existing strengths in stores and merchandising rather than operate as a standalone strategy.
Coordinating AI across the enterprise
The Chief AI Officer role gives Target a central executive responsible for coordinating AI initiatives that could otherwise develop independently across business units. Nair said his first priority will be listening and learning from Target teams while studying the business from the perspective of customers, employees, and partners before deciding where AI should expand.
Potential applications include identifying changes in customer needs sooner, improving inventory management, simplifying work for employees, and enabling faster business decisions. Target is also examining how AI could improve customer-facing shopping experiences and accelerate the process of bringing new ideas to market.
Nair said Target does not intend to measure AI success by how widely the technology is deployed. Instead, the company will evaluate whether AI contributes to growth, improves customer satisfaction, and helps employees perform their work more effectively.
UX as a design partner to AI
Shah's expanded role reflects Target's view that 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, 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, and AI agents. Target expects AI agents themselves to become another component of this environment, including situations where intelligent agents interact directly with software systems or other agents.
"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?" Shah said.
The company believes developing AI and UX together can 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 end users working alongside the teams building the technology.
Target plans to apply the same design standards across different groups interacting with the company, including shoppers online or in stores, employees using internal tools, and partners interacting with Target's systems. For shoppers, Target sees a connected journey where a customer might discover a product through social media, continue through a visual experience in the Target app, and complete the purchase in a store or with help from an employee.
"AI expands what technology can understand and do, while UX helps turn those capabilities into something useful," Nair said. "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."
Why this matters for executives and strategy leaders
Target's structure offers a model for organizations deciding how to govern AI. The company created a dedicated executive role to coordinate AI across business units while pairing it with UX leadership, rather than letting AI initiatives develop in silos. For executives developing their own AI approach, the key takeaway is Target's emphasis on starting with business outcomes and measuring success by impact - not by deployment volume. That framing shifts the question from "how much AI are we using" to "what difference is it making." Executives weighing similar organizational decisions can examine how Target is structuring accountability for AI outcomes and connecting technical capability with user experience from the start. For those building these skills, AI for Executives & Strategy covers how to align AI initiatives with business priorities, while AI Strategy for CEOs addresses governance and leadership considerations for AI adoption.
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