As Target Creates a Chief AI Officer Role, Will This Become a Retail Mainstay?

In an August 11 press release, Target announced two personnel changes: Purvi Shah would be taking on the position of SVP of UX, and Chandhu Nair would be stepping into the newly created role of chief AI officer.

“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,” Nair said.

“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,” he added.

Target is no stranger to integrating artificial intelligence into its operations, with its AI Gift Finder and AI Store Companion tools having been rolled out in recent years. And according to CNBC’s Laya Neelakandan, on the back end the red-and-white-branded retailer has leveraged its Target Trend Brain to predict upcoming trends and styles that shoppers will be desiring in the near future.

Target appoints its first chief AI officer as big retailers bet on AI https://t.co/Z1u2aCspCm

— CNBC (@CNBC) August 11, 2026

As Neelakandan highlighted, Target’s certainly far from alone in pushing for even greater AI integration — Walmart has famously adopted a slew of AI tools and agents, while Gap, Best Buy, and other brands and retailers follow suit. In Walmart’s case, outgoing CEO Doug McMillon specifically told CNBC that he was stepping down and passing the leadership torch to a “faster” individual (in this case, now-CEO John Furner) who was better able to harness AI to improve the speed of the mega-retailer’s business.

“About a year ago, I really started feeling like this next run, you could see what agentic commerce was going to look like, the vision for AI shopping, and I started thinking about everything that needs to happen over the next few years, and it really caused me to think that now was the right time [to step down],” McMillon said last December.

Retailers are paying large salaries to AI talents as well, with Walmart’s AI boss actually out-earning then-CEO McMillon in 2025. Whereas McMillon notched a total compensation package estimated at approximately $29.2 million for the year, the highest-paid executive disclosed by Walmart was actually EVP of AI acceleration, product and design Daniel Danker, who joined that year for a total compensation package of an estimated $44.1 million. Walmart created the AI leadership role last year, providing earlier evidence of a trend.