The Target stock price is up almost 2%, or $2.75, following a couple of significant news announcements from the company today and on last Friday.
The TGT share price closed at $143.38 on Friday June 21, and was up to $146.69 in pre-market trading today on June 24 at the time of this article going to press.
New Shopify partnership
Today, the retail super-chain announced that it would be partnering with multinational online commerce platform Shopify.
Certain select Shopify products will now be available on Target Plus, the retailer’s third-party online marketplace, including some of Shopify’s best-known brands.
The move is ostensibly to expand the retail chain’s ecommerce reach, as Target commented on the announcement that the “new partnership with Shopify will expand Target Plus through a hand-selected assortment of new and on-trend products and brands like True Classic, Caden Lane and more”.
Shopify stock price also up
Shopify (NYSE: SHOP) is one of the world’s most successful online ecommerce platforms, with a market cap of $83.80 billion.
It too, has seen its stock price climb by almost 2% ($1.15) today.
This makes sense, as the news also marks Shopify’s first foray into the brick-and-mortar retail world, and TGT also announced that “Target will be the first mass retailer to work with Shopify to bring select merchants’ products into its physical stores in the months to come”.
Target jumps on the AI bandwagon
But that’s not the only news to have come out of Target lately.
The company also announced late last week that it would be rolling out a new generative artificial intelligence tool for its internal team members at all of its nearly 2,000 stores in the United States, by August.
The tool, called Store Companion, will be a Target-designed GenAI-powered chatbot that can answer on-the-job process questions for store staff, coach new team members, support store operations management and more.
In this, Target is “becoming the first major retailer to share that it is bringing this technology to its store team members across the US”, in the brand’s own words.
The initiative is part of Target’s broader strategic approach to using GenAI across its business to empower its team, enhance the guest experience and support the company’s long-term growth.
A new AI-complimenting strategy
Target employees can take heart from the fact that the corporation is aiming to use the power of AI to complement, rather than replace, the company’s human being capital.
“Generative AI is game-changing technology and Store Companion will make daily tasks easier and enable our team to respond to guests’ requests with confidence and efficiency,” said Mark Schindele, Target’s executive vice president and chief stores officer, of the news.
“The transformative nature of GenAI is helping us accelerate the rate of innovation across our operations, and we’re excited about the role these new tools and applications will play in driving growth,” added Brett Craig, executive vice president and chief information officer at Target.
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