Target partners with OpenAI to use ChatGPT for AI-led shopping

Target hasn’t had much good news to work with lately — soft traffic, uneven sales, and a consumer who keeps drifting toward either bargains or impulse buys. So the company is trying something bigger than a merchandising refresh: It’s planting a Target storefront inside ChatGPT.

The beta, which launches next week, turns OpenAI’s assistant into a personal shopper that can assemble multi-item carts, handle fresh groceries, and funnel orders to the nearest store. For a retailer searching for momentum, this is both a tech play and a narrative one.

Target’s latest earnings, reported hours before the ChatGPT announcement, didn’t change the underlying picture much. The company topped profit expectations but still logged lower sales and another dip in store traffic, the kind of soft landing that isn’t exactly a win. Same-store sales were down again, and the company is still in the middle of a roughly $1 billion capital push to rework stores and merchandise offerings.

So this AI push is just another sign that Target is still looking for new ways to pull shoppers back into its orbit.

The ChatGPT app is the latest expression of that strategy. Most AI-shopping pilots so far have been single items, shipped to your door, and nothing that really tests a retailer’s operational wiring. Target is doing the opposite.

This partnership will let users tag Target inside a conversation — plan a holiday movie night, restock a pantry, pull together a kid’s birthday list — and watch the assistant build a curated basket across categories. The twist is operational rather than flashy, and it’s designed to support real-world logistics such as Drive Up pickups, in-store fulfillment, and even fresh groceries, which means Target is exposing the guts of its inventory and routing systems to an AI agent and betting — or hoping — that the experience feels seamless.

“Technology is helping define Target as a company that doesn’t just use AI, but runs on AI,” said Prat Vemana, Target’s executive vice president and chief information and product officer.

Behind the scenes, Target has been loading up on OpenAI tech for months. Around 18,000 employees at headquarters now use ChatGPT Enterprise, and the company has rolled out a full constellation of internal tools. Contact-center staff use Agent Assist to sort out returns and price matching. Store teams lean on a digital companion trained on thousands of FAQs. Gift Finder and Shopping Assistant steer guests toward recommendations that don’t feel like the usual algorithmic grab bag.

“A big part of the AI transformation is happening inside enterprises,” said Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications at OpenAI, “and Target is a great example of what that shift looks like when it’s done with ambition and speed.”

That speed matters, because Target’s ChatGPT integration lands smack dab in the middle of what has become a broader retail race. Walmart moved early with OpenAI and used the partnership to show off “AI-first” meal planning and restocking. Amazon is still trying to keep things in-house with Rufus. Etsy and Shopify are plugged into OpenAI’s Instant Checkout. With Target joining the fold, OpenAI’s retail stack now spans a mass-market grocer, a big-box generalist, a long-tail marketplace, and the payment and infrastructure rails to support them.

For a growing share of consumers — especially Gen Z, nearly half of whom say they trust AI to help pick what they buy, according to a recent Harris Poll — that intent isn’t forming inside a search bar. Shoppers are increasingly asking AI assistants to plan, choose, and execute purchases, which means the fight for loyalty now includes the layer that sits between the consumer and the cart.

Target is trying to secure a place in that layer before assistants become the default entry point for holiday lists, “What should I buy for my girlfriend?” searches, and impulse runs that used to start in an app. If the conversational flow works — and if it turns browsing queries into coherent, higher-margin baskets — it gives Target a new lane in a retail environment that hasn’t been giving out many. If the next phase of shopping really begins inside an assistant, being early (and on Target) doesn’t hurt.