Target is making a bet that your next shopping trip starts with a conversation, not a search bar. The retailer is deepening its partnership with OpenAI, launching a Target app directly within ChatGPT that lets users ask for movie night ideas and walk away with a full basket of curated goods ready for curbside pickup. It’s a pragmatic play to meet customers in a tool they’re already using, with the beta rolling out next week.
This isn’t just a flashy consumer gimmick. Target has already deployed ChatGPT Enterprise across its headquarters to 18,000 employees, using it to cut through busywork and speed up everything from supply chain forecasting to store operations. The company’s internal tools, like Agent Assist and Store Companion, now handle price matching and returns in a chat interface, while JOY, an AI trained on over 3,000 FAQs, answers vendor questions instantly. Prat Vemana, Target’s chief information and product officer, framed the move simply: “We’re proud to be one of the first retailers bringing shopping into this new channel.”
The consumer-facing piece is where things get interesting. Tag the Target app in ChatGPT and ask it to “plan a family holiday movie night,” and it will spit out a multi-item basket—blankets, candles, snacks—that you can check out via Drive Up, Order Pickup, or shipping. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, noted that “a big part of the AI transformation is happening inside enterprises,” and Target’s all-in approach makes it a prime case study. They’re not just dabbling.
Target joins a roster of over a million OpenAI business customers, but the scale of this rollout feels different. 18,000 employees already use the tools. Millions of shoppers will soon have access. The company is promising Circle loyalty linking and same-day delivery down the line. Whether shoppers actually want to build their Target cart inside an AI chatbot remains an open question, but the infrastructure is now in place. If this takes off, the line between “browsing the aisles” and “prompting a model” gets very blurry, very fast.
