Target has hired its first chief AI officer. Chandhu Nair joins on August 24, coming from home improvement retailer Lowe's, where he spent more than six years leading stores, data, and AI work. He will report to Prat Vemana, Target's chief information and product officer, keeping AI decisions inside the normal chain of command.
The timing tells the real story. Target has posted falling or flat comparable sales in 11 of its past 13 quarters. Shoppers have been buying less, both online and in stores, for years.
New CEO Michael Fiddelke, who took over in February after two decades at the company, is trying to reverse that. His plan rests on four priorities: better merchandise, a stronger shopping experience, faster technology, and investment in staff.
Money is backing that plan. Target committed an extra 2 billion dollars this year, split between store and supply chain upgrades and operating costs like staff training. By its second quarter, the company had already spent 2.4 billion dollars on capital projects, up 30 percent from the year before.
Some of that money went toward partnerships with Google and OpenAI to build conversational shopping tools. Some went toward an internal tool called Proxima, a digital copy of how goods move between warehouses and stores. In an early test on 63 fresh food items, Proxima helped keep shelves stocked 2.5 percent more often, a gain that adds up fast across thousands of stores.
None of this is happening at Target alone. A recent global survey found that 76 percent of large companies now have a chief AI officer, up from just 26 percent the year before, a jump that shows this job title went from rare to standard in a single year. Retail is moving as a group, not as scattered experiments.
Walmart has been rolling out AI agents across its supply chain. Home Depot recently folded its AI and data teams under one technology chief. Crocs signed a ten year deal with Infosys to clean up its data for AI use.
There is a less comfortable side to this story too. Target cut 1,800 corporate jobs last fall, about 8 percent of its office workforce, and announced another 500 cuts in February, mostly in supply chain and store district roles. The company frames this as reinvesting in front line staff.
But it also matches a pattern showing up across retail. Companies add a senior AI leader and new AI tools at the same time they trim the office jobs those tools are meant to replace. The hiring announcement and the layoff announcement usually do not appear in the same press release, but they belong to the same plan.
For any business that sells to Target, competes with it, or watches it as a bellwether for retail, the lesson is straightforward. AI is no longer a side experiment bolted onto a marketing team. It is becoming a normal part of how big retailers plan inventory, manage suppliers, and decide who keeps their job.
Companies that wait to build their own version of this will find themselves negotiating with AI powered buyers and competing against AI powered supply chains without one of their own.