Wednesday, November 26, 2025

AI is reshaping how Americans shop. Here’s how Target’s top tech leader says the retailer is adapting

Prat Vemana, the chief information and product officer for Target, this week experienced something brand new as a shopper. He bought sleepwear through the retailer’s app in OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The C-suite executive’s new shopping behavior reflects a seismic shift happening for retailers as they head into Black Friday and a holiday season that’s projected to surpass $1 trillion in spending for the first time in the U.S. Shoppers who have spent the past few decades migrating to web-based shops, then to mobile commerce, and shopping and discovery on TikTok and other social media platforms, are evolving again. They are now beginning to embrace artificial intelligence, including AI web browsers like ChatGPT Atlas from OpenAI and Comet from Perplexity, as yet another new way to shop.

“Whether it’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini, we want to be there to help answer a question that the guest has,” says Vemana, who joined Target in 2022 with digital retail experience from big-box retailers The Home Depot and Staples. “The minute Target comes to their mind, we want to be there.”

By integrating with ChatGPT, Target is angling to get in front of the chatbot’s 800 million weekly active users with personalized recommendations from the retailer. Another generative AI bet that Target placed this month was the debut of an AI-powered gift finder that’s now on the company’s website and app, allowing shoppers to ask questions like “what’s a good present for my mother-in-law” and get a natural-language response.

While Target, which is ranked 41 on the Fortune 500, has already signaled to investors that it expects its ongoing sales struggles will continue through the holiday season, digital sales have been a bright spot. When Vemana joined the company from healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente, where he served as chief digital officer for three years, he was given a clear mandate from Target CEO Brian Cornell. “He said ‘Just get us to positive comps,’” recalls Vemana with a laugh.

By the fiscal first quarter of 2024, digital comparable sales were on the upswing and have increased for seven consecutive quarters, including a 2.4% gain for the fiscal third-quarter results that were reported last week.

With wind behind his sails, Vemana’s responsibilities have also expanded to include CIO duties following the retirement of Brett Craig earlier this year. Vemana now oversees enterprise product technologies, engineering, infrastructure, and cybersecurity.

Internal applications of AI include ChatGPT Enterprise, which has been rolled out to about 18,000 employees who are using the tool to ask questions, upload spreadsheets, and for summarization. Last week, OpenAI’s team visited Target’s corporate office, where 4,300 employees participated in ChatGPT-focused training sessions. Vemana says that 92% were satisfied with the experience.

In its stores, Target has rolled out a generative AI chatbot called Store Companion, which can help answer questions to make store operations run smoother or address a shopper’s questions. Vemana says he’s continuing to field input from associates to make improvements to Store Companion.

“Ultimately, we want to make sure that their experience in store is fully assisted with tech so that they can focus on the guest,” he says.

Target has already deployed several agentic AI use cases, with early areas of focus on handling customer service requests and improving IT workflows. Vemana is also rolling out a data science-led inventory management system that triangulates the complexity of a network of 2,000 Target stores with hundreds of thousands of products to more precisely match inventory levels with anticipated demand.

“The models are evolving and learning,” says Vemana, noting that the early focus on this project are “frequency items” like cereal or a pack of underwear.

Target told investors this month that it would increase capital expenditures for the next fiscal year by an additional $1 billion, bringing the planned spending to about $5 billion on new store openings, remodels, and technology advancements. Tech’s core focus areas will be on supporting merchandising, supply chain, and store operations, though Vemana says he will share more details about his spending priorities in March 2026.

But he vows that technology will play a critical role in lifting Target’s overall sales.

“Not a single minute goes by without me thinking about growth,” says Vemana.

John Kell

Send thoughts or suggestions to CIO Intelligence here.

NEWS PACKETS

Anthropic rolls out a new AI model. Anthropic on Monday debuted a new version of the company’s LLM that the AI startup says is better at automating coding, deep research, reasoning, and mathematics skills than its predecessors. The new Claude Opus 4.5 is Anthropic’s third major model launch in just two months, highlighting the intense race among OpenAI, Google, and other AI model makers who are competing to offer the best AI technologies for enterprise clients. The Verge, meanwhile, points out that the latest Claude model “is harder to trick with prompt injection than any other frontier model in the industry.” This comes after Chinese hackers earlier this month were suspected of using Anthropic’s AI coding tool to breach dozens of organizations, including tech companies and government agencies.

Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini 3 is getting rave reviews. The new Gemini 3 AI model has been out for less than two weeks but already generating a lot of buzz, with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declaring on X that after using ChatGPT every day for three years, the executive spent two hours on Gemini 3 and vowed, “I’m not going back. The leap is insane.” Tech executives have been heaping praise, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who privately told colleagues in an internal memo that Google’s update would create “temporary economic headwinds” for the ChatGPT maker, according to The Information.

Tech leaders depart at Airbnb, General Motors. Last week, rental platform Airbnb disclosed that CTO Ari Balogh would step down from his role in December but remain with the company through at least February to assist with the leadership transition. The company told Bloomberg that it will share more on those transition plans soon. Prior to joining Airbnb in 2018, Balogh was VP of engineering at Google. Separately, auto giant General Motors confirmed that Barak Turovsky, who had served as chief AI officer for less than nine months, would depart. The role was created with Turovsky’s hire and GM hasn’t yet said if the company would replace him, but did tell CIO Dive that the AI team would report to the manufacturing and engineering organization.

AI bubble chatter continues to swirl. Is the hype around AI beginning to deflate? Every news outlet from Fortune to NPR to Bloomberg has been weighing in with no clear consensus, though Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AI companies are in a no-win situation. “If we delivered a bad quarter, it is evidence there’s an AI bubble. If we delivered a great quarter, we are fueling the AI bubble,” he told employees, according to audio of an internal all-hands meeting reviewed by Business Insider. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged in a recent interview with the BBC that there was some “irrationality” in the AI boom. And some have pointed to Oracle as, well, a potential oracle of the jitters. Oracle's stock has tumbled 40% since September, when it signed a $300 billion OpenAI deal, though one of the main issues is that the cloud-software company is borrowing a lot of cash to fund its AI ambitions.

ADOPTION CURVE

CIOs are adding new skills and feeling more confident as they adopt AI. 61% of CIOs report that they felt they were ahead of their competitors on AI as full implementation of the technology increased to 42% from 11% in 2024, according to Salesforce’s second annual study that surveyed responses from 200 global CIOs from 24 countries. These CIOs are also extremely bullish on agentic AI: with 96% saying their company either currently uses this more autonomous form of the technology or plans to within the next two years. CIOs also report that they are dedicating 30% of their budget to agentic AI. (Salesforce, it's worth noting, has made a big push as a vendor of agentic AI technology).

With the AI boom celebrating its third birthday (ChatGPT launched in November 2022), 75% of CIOs now report feeling more confident in their role than they did a year ago. They also report that they’ve personally improved their leadership, storytelling, and communications skills, and amid the move toward agentic, report working more closely with C-suite leaders like the CEO, CFO, and COO.

Shibani Ahuja, senior vice president of enterprise IT strategy at Salesforce, tells Fortune that the role of the CIO has evolved to facilitate more strategic conversations with other C-suite leaders about what business transformation will look like when enabled with AI. “CIOs are pushing the boundaries, because they are maybe two steps ahead of where others are,” says Ahuja. These technologists, she says, are more bold in challenging their C-suite peers in saying, “you’ve come up with a use case that automates from here-to-here. That’s simple. Do you really want to challenge that a bit more?”

Courtesy of Salesforce

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

- Hardesty & Hanover Construction Services is seeking a CIO, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $200K-$250K/year.

- Charles B Wang Community Health Center is seeking a CIO, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $180K-$210K/year.

- Atomic Machines is seeking a head of IT, based in Emeryville, California. Posted salary range: $175K-$235K/year.

- StemWave is seeking a head of IT and business systems, based in Boston. Posted salary range: $130K-$170K/year.

Hired:

- Intel has appointed Cindy Stoddard to serve as SVP and CIO, effective December 1, and reporting directly to CEO Lip-Bu Tan to lead the chipmaker’s global IT organization. Stoddard joins Intel from Adobe, where she spent nine years leading global IT and cloud operations. Prior to Adobe, she held senior technology leadership roles at companies including data infrastructure company NetApp and grocery retailer Safeway.

- Guidehouse named Ron White as CIO, joining the consulting firm to lead internal IT operations, cybersecurity and cloud-first initiatives. Previously, White served as CIO at IT consultancy Avanade, CIO at glass bottle manufacturer O-I Glass, and as a managing director at consulting giant Accenture.

- FormAssembly announced that Bryan O’Neill has been promoted to CTO. O’Neill first joined the web form builder company in June 2024 as VP of engineering and has played a key role in expanding FormAssembly’s AI strategy. Prior to that, he served as SVP of technical operations at tech company Babel Street and held senior engineering roles at GMAC Insurance, Lowe’s, and Anheuser-Busch.

- Gallion Health appointed Mathieu Baissac as CTO, joining the health-technology company after it was spun out from the University of Maryland Medical System in July to commercialize its hospital supply chain management software. Baissac previously held senior director roles at healthcare companies Phreesia and Kyruus and as a VP of product management at software firm Flexera Software.