MINNEAPOLIS — Target Corp. is restructuring its top technology ranks, naming Chandhu Nair as the company's first chief AI officer and promoting Purvi Shah to senior vice president of user experience, in a move executives say is meant to keep artificial intelligence tethered to the human touches that have long defined the retailer's brand.
Nair, who joins Target Aug. 24 as senior vice president, will be charged with bringing what the company calls "greater focus and coordination" to AI efforts spread across the enterprise. Shah, moving into her new UX role at the same time, will oversee the design discipline that Target is positioning as AI's essential counterweight — ensuring that faster, smarter systems still translate into experiences that feel, in the company's words, "distinctly Target."
The appointments are part of what Target has described as the next chapter of its growth strategy, built around four priorities: merchandising authority, an elevated guest experience, faster technology deployment, and investment in its team and communities. Company leaders frame the pairing of AI and UX as central to that agenda rather than a side initiative.
"What excites me most is the opportunity to make AI real for the people who experience Target every day," Nair said. "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."
Nair said he intends to spend his early days on the job listening rather than launching new initiatives, meeting with teams and studying the business "through the eyes of the guests, team members and partners" before setting priorities. He was explicit that Target does not intend to build a freestanding AI strategy, but instead wants to apply the technology to reinforce strengths the company already has in its stores, merchandising and workforce.
"The measure of success won't be how much AI we deploy," Nair said. "It will be the difference it makes for Target's growth, the guest experience and our team's ability to do their best work."
Shah described her expanded mandate in similar terms, arguing that design's role is expanding beyond visual interfaces into the systems and decisions that sit behind them. She said UX teams will increasingly be embedded alongside product, technology, data and business groups from the start of a project — a practice she called "radical collaboration."
"Our role is to shape not only what people see, but the systems and decisions behind it to ensure each experience is as easy, inspiring and valuable as it can be," Shah said. "Experience is everywhere at Target. It's how a guest discovers a product, how a field team member completes a task and how a business partner works with our team."
Both executives argued that treating AI and UX as separate disciplines risks undermining each. Powerful models without thoughtful design, Nair said, can produce "confusion or fragmentation," while polished interfaces without strong intelligence underneath can fall short of what people actually need. Shah said design's job is to keep three questions in front of every project: what problem is being solved, who it is being solved for, and whether the approach fits the context in which someone will actually use it — a test she said applies as much to AI agents as to human users.
Target said the journey a guest takes — discovering a product on social media, browsing a visual interface in the app, then finishing a purchase in-store or with a team member's help — illustrates why the company wants AI and design capabilities managed together rather than in separate silos. Shah said the goal is for that entire path to "feel trusted, connected, easy and delightful," and that Target intends to hold internal tools for employees and partners to the same design standard as guest-facing products.
Asked what's always in their own shopping carts, Nair pointed to Cat & Jack kids' clothing and birthday gifts for his two children's friends, while Shah said her family can't get enough of Target's Favorite Day flavored whipped cream and is already counting down to the return of peppermint and hot cocoa flavors for the holidays.
The leadership changes come as large retailers race to apply generative AI to merchandising, supply chain and customer-facing tools, while facing pressure to avoid rolling out technology that feels impersonal or gimmicky. Target's bet, according to Nair and Shah, is that naming a single AI executive and elevating design to sit alongside that role will keep the company's technology push grounded in its stores and its people rather than becoming an initiative pursued for its own sake.
