A Target store in San Ramon, California

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Target is, in the words of its Chief Information and Product Officer Prat Vemana, "in the business of joy." The $100 billion-plus multichannel retailer operates more than 1,900 stores across the United States, offering a portfolio that spans apparel, home goods, beauty, essentials and food and beverage. Guests can shop in-store, pick up curbside, receive same-day delivery or schedule at their convenience.

Vemana has led Target's technology and product organization since 2023, holding the combined title of Chief Information and Product Officer. His remit spans enterprise product, user experience and design, data sciences, product engineering, cybersecurity, infrastructure, enterprise analytics and oversight of the company's Global Capability Center in Bangalore. In a recent conversation, Vemana discussed the evolution of digital retail, Target's AI agenda and how a career spanning healthcare and retail has shaped his thinking.

A Unified Role Spanning Product and Technology

The combination of CIO and CPO responsibilities is unusual, but Vemana sees it as a natural fit. The integration of product and engineering under one leader allows Target to move from insight to execution without friction. Under its new CEO Michael Fiddelke, Target has sharpened its focus around three pillars: merchandising authority, elevated guest experience and technology as an enabler of both. "Technology is powering these," Vemana emphasized, "along with our team members and the communities that we serve."

Designing Experiences From the Inside Out

User experience and design play a central role in how Vemana's organization operates. The team conducts end-to-end journey mapping for guests, vendor partners and store team members, documenting the emotions, interactions and friction points at every stage. A recent example illustrates the ambition of that approach: Target's design team worked side by side with OpenAI's designers to build a discovery experience within ChatGPT. The collaboration revealed a distinctive advantage for Target, as its breadth of categories, from fuzzy blankets to snacks, enables integrated occasion-based shopping that narrower retailers cannot replicate.

Internally, the team applied similar thinking to myday, Target’s store operations app that allows directors to run an entire location from a single mobile application. "We created a completely customizable view for a leader where they can say, 'Here are the three things I want to see when I come in every morning,’" Vemana underscored.

Building an AI-Ready Organization

Vemana described Target's AI journey as operating across multiple layers: generative AI, data science, analytics and the underlying data infrastructure. The company has built a semantic layer on top of its centralized data lake and is adding the contextual metadata that allows AI systems to draw relevant conclusions from queries. "One of the things we needed to recognize early on is to create the data to be AI-ready," he said.

On the people side, OpenAI delivered hands-on training for more than 4,000 headquarters staff over several days, and more than 60% of those employees now use ChatGPT weekly. A long-running Demo Day program where teams showcase production deployments and experimental work keeps the culture of learning active.

A Model-Agnostic Ecosystem

Target's AI infrastructure is deliberately designed to avoid vendor lock-in. An internal platform called ThinkTank enables teams to build and deploy agents using GPT, Claude, Gemini or open-source models interchangeably.

Alongside that flexibility, Target has pursued partnerships with major frontier AI providers, integrating with Google's UCP-based protocols, launching experiences and advertising on ChatGPT and extending its presence to Microsoft Copilot.

Agentic AI in Practice

Target now has more than 300 AI agents in production. Vemana highlighted one example: vendor onboarding. Target is selective about the suppliers it brings on, and the review process can be lengthy. An agentic system now scans a supplier’s social presence, marketplace reputation and product quality, delivering a synthesis to reviewers within hours rather than weeks. "The reviewers can make the right decisions," Vemana noted. "They have the synthesis and summary, so they focus on what decisions need to be made."

Lessons From a Broader Career

Before joining Target, Vemana served as Chief Digital Officer of Kaiser Permanente through the COVID-19 pandemic, scaling digital health consults from 55,000 to 5.5 million in a single year. The experience reinforced a principle he carries across industries. "Whether you are thinking about a chronic condition management journey or planning a Friday evening at Target, you center the experience around the person you're serving," he said. "You get the best outcomes from that."

Board service has added yet another dimension to his perspective. During his tenure on the board of Frontier Communications, Vemana witnessed a full corporate arc: emergence from bankruptcy, a NASDAQ listing, an equity raise and a strategic exit. "It expanded my thinking," he explained, "but also allows me to become a better executive."

Looking ahead, Vemana is energized by the convergence of a new CEO with a clear mandate and a technology landscape in rapid transformation. "I can't wait to see what's ahead in the next two to three years," he said. "It's time to be an agile, nimble student and be part of the transformation."

Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written three bestselling books, including his latest Getting to Nimble. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on X @PeterAHigh.