Will AI Do The Shopping?

Host Jason Michael Perry sits down with Brad Thompson, Senior Vice President of Technology at Target, to talk about what happens to shopping when AI starts doing the finding — and what it would take before you'd let it do the buying.

In this episode, they get into Target's bet on agentic commerce: the Target app inside ChatGPT, the open Universal Commerce Protocol Target helped shape with Google, and what it means to meet shoppers inside Gemini or AI Mode instead of on Target.com. Brad explains why Target is a "build shop" that increasingly "rents" software rather than buying it, how a tool called Store Companion answers team members' questions on the store floor, and how AI quietly fixes the "unknown out-of-stock" problem before you ever notice the shelf is empty. They close on the near future Brad imagines — telling your app, "I'm hosting Taco Tuesday: send the ingredients, skip the guacamole" — and what it takes to earn that kind of trust.

Podcast Notes & Links

• Target — Conversational, curated shopping comes to ChatGPT
• Target — Frictionless checkout in Google's AI Mode and Gemini
• Universal Commerce Protocol — The open standard for AI shopping
• Target — Store Companion, generative AI for store team members
• Target Tech — Solving for product availability with AI

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Credits

Thanks to the team at WYPR, our producers Sam Bermas-Dawes and Shania Mapson, and Myrna Martinez, Head of Operations and Marketing at PerryLabs.