Business
Target names its first chief AI officer
Target appoints Chandhu Nair as its first chief AI officer and promotes UX leader Purvi Shah to expand AI across shopping and employee tools.
Target has appointed Chandhu Nair as its first chief AI officer, putting an executive with retail, data, and innovation experience in charge of expanding the technology across the company. Fast Company first reported the appointment.
As first reported by Fast Company, Nair joins Target after more than six years at Lowe’s, where he most recently served as senior vice president of stores, data, AI, and innovation. Before that, he spent nine years at Staples and cofounded both a data analytics software company and a business strategy consulting startup.
“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.”
— Chandhu Nair
Target is also promoting Purvi Shah, its vice president of user experience design, to a senior vice president role. Shah has spent the past four years working on Target’s user experience systems, including helping launch the retailer’s conversational shopping experience in ChatGPT eight months before this appointment.
The retailer says its AI work will cover both employee-facing and customer-facing systems. Shah said the team will focus not only on visible interfaces but also on the systems and decisions behind them, with the goal of making each experience easier, more valuable, and more inspiring.
Target joins a growing group of companies creating chief AI officer roles. The position has also been established at Meta, Google, IBM, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Accenture, and PwC.