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AI is reshaping how Americans shop. Here’s how Target’s top tech leader says the retailer is adapting

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Prat Vemana, the chief information and product officer for Target, this week experienced something brand new as a shopper. He bought sleepwear through the retailer’s app in OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The C-suite executive’s new shopping behavior reflects a seismic shift happening for retailers as they head into Black Friday and a holiday season that’s projected to surpass $1 trillion in spending for the first time in the U.S. Shoppers who have spent the past few decades migrating to web-based shops, then to mobile commerce, and shopping and discovery on TikTok and other social media platforms, are evolving again. They are now beginning to embrace artificial intelligence, including AI web browsers like ChatGPT Atlas from OpenAI and Comet from Perplexity, as yet another new way to shop.

“Whether it’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini, we want to be there to help answer a question that the guest has,” says Vemana, who joined Target in 2022 with digital retail experience from big-box retailers The Home Depot and Staples. “The minute Target comes to their mind, we want to be there.”

By integrating with ChatGPT, Target is angling to get in front of the chatbot’s 800 million weekly active users with personalized recommendations from the retailer. Another generative AI bet that Target placed this month was the debut of an AI-powered gift finder that’s now on the company’s website and app, allowing shoppers to ask questions like “what’s a good present for my mother-in-law” and get a natural-language response.

While Target, which is ranked 41 on the Fortune 500, has already signaled to investors that it expects its ongoing sales struggles will continue through the holiday season, digital sales have been a bright spot. When Vemana joined the company from healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente, where he served as chief digital officer for three years, he was given a clear mandate from Target CEO Brian Cornell. “He said ‘Just get us to positive comps,’” recalls Vemana with a laugh.

By the fiscal first quarter of 2024, digital comparable sales were on the upswing and have increased for seven consecutive quarters, including a 2.4% gain for the fiscal third-quarter results that were reported last week. 

With wind behind his sails, Vemana’s responsibilities have also expanded to include CIO duties following the retirement of Brett Craig earlier this year. Vemana now oversees enterprise product technologies, engineering, infrastructure, and cybersecurity. 

Internal applications of AI include ChatGPT Enterprise, which has been rolled out to about 18,000 employees who are using the tool to ask questions, upload spreadsheets, and for summarization. Last week, OpenAI’s team visited Target’s corporate office, where 4,300 employees participated in ChatGPT-focused training sessions. Vemana says that 92% were satisfied with the experience.

In its stores, Target has rolled out a generative AI chatbot called Store Companion, which can help answer questions to make store operations run smoother or address a shopper’s questions. Vemana says he’s continuing to field input from associates to make improvements to Store Companion.

“Ultimately, we want to make sure that their experience in store is fully assisted with tech so that they can focus on the guest,” he says.

Target has already deployed several agentic AI use cases, with early areas of focus on handling customer service requests and improving IT workflows. Vemana is also rolling out a data science-led inventory management system that triangulates the complexity of a network of 2,000 Target stores with hundreds of thousands of products to more precisely match inventory levels with anticipated demand. 

“The models are evolving and learning,” says Vemana, noting that the early focus on this project are “frequency items” like cereal or a pack of underwear.

Target told investors this month that it would increase capital expenditures for the next fiscal year by an additional $1 billion, bringing the planned spending to about $5 billion on new store openings, remodels, and technology advancements. Tech’s core focus areas will be on supporting merchandising, supply chain, and store operations, though Vemana says he will share more details about his spending priorities in March 2026.

But he vows that technology will play a critical role in lifting Target’s overall sales.

“Not a single minute goes by without me thinking about growth,” says Vemana.

John Kell

Send thoughts or suggestions to CIO Intelligence here.

NEWS PACKETS

Anthropic rolls out a new AI model. Anthropic on Monday debuted a new version of the company’s LLM that the AI startup says is better at automating coding, deep research, reasoning, and mathematics skills than its predecessors. The new Claude Opus 4.5 is Anthropic’s third major model launch in just two months, highlighting the intense race among OpenAI, Google, and other AI model makers who are competing to offer the best AI technologies for enterprise clients. The Verge, meanwhile, points out that the latest Claude model “is harder to trick with prompt injection than any other frontier model in the industry.” This comes after Chinese hackers earlier this month were suspected of using Anthropic’s AI coding tool to breach dozens of organizations, including tech companies and government agencies.

Meanwhile, Google’s Gemini 3 is getting rave reviews. The new Gemini 3 AI model has been out for less than two weeks but already generating a lot of buzz, with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff declaring on X that after using ChatGPT every day for three years, the executive spent two hours on Gemini 3 and vowed, “I’m not going back. The leap is insane.” Tech executives have been heaping praise, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who privately told colleagues in an internal memo that Google’s update would create “temporary economic headwinds” for the ChatGPT maker, according to The Information.

Tech leaders depart at Airbnb, General Motors. Last week, rental platform Airbnb disclosed that CTO Ari Balogh would step down from his role in December but remain with the company through at least February to assist with the leadership transition. The company told Bloomberg that it will share more on those transition plans soon. Prior to joining Airbnb in 2018, Balogh was VP of engineering at Google. Separately, auto giant General Motors confirmed that Barak Turovsky, who had served as chief AI officer for less than nine months, would depart. The role was created with Turovsky’s hire and GM hasn’t yet said if the company would replace him, but did tell CIO Dive that the AI team would report to the manufacturing and engineering organization.

AI bubble chatter continues to swirl. Is the hype around AI beginning to deflate? Every news outlet from Fortune to NPR to Bloomberg has been weighing in with no clear consensus, though Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AI companies are in a no-win situation. “If we delivered a bad quarter, it is evidence there’s an AI bubble. If we delivered a great quarter, we are fueling the AI bubble,” he told employees, according to audio of an internal all-hands meeting reviewed by Business Insider. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged in a recent interview with the BBC that there was some “irrationality” in the AI boom. And some have pointed to Oracle as, well, a potential oracle of the jitters. Oracle’s stock has tumbled 40% since September, when it signed a $300 billion OpenAI deal, though one of the main issues is that the cloud-software company is borrowing a lot of cash to fund its AI ambitions.

ADOPTION CURVE

CIOs are adding new skills and feeling more confident as they adopt AI. 61% of CIOs report that they felt they were ahead of their competitors on AI as full implementation of the technology increased to 42% from 11% in 2024, according to Salesforce’s second annual study that surveyed responses from 200 global CIOs from 24 countries. These CIOs are also extremely bullish on agentic AI: with 96% saying their company either currently uses this more autonomous form of the technology or plans to within the next two years. CIOs also report that they are dedicating 30% of their budget to agentic AI. (Salesforce, it’s worth noting, has made a big push as a vendor of agentic AI technology).

With the AI boom celebrating its third birthday (ChatGPT launched in November 2022), 75% of CIOs now report feeling more confident in their role than they did a year ago. They also report that they’ve personally improved their leadership, storytelling, and communications skills, and amid the move toward agentic, report working more closely with C-suite leaders like the CEO, CFO, and COO.

Shibani Ahuja, senior vice president of enterprise IT strategy at Salesforce, tells Fortune that the role of the CIO has evolved to facilitate more strategic conversations with other C-suite leaders about what business transformation will look like when enabled with AI. “CIOs are pushing the boundaries, because they are maybe two steps ahead of where others are,” says Ahuja. These technologists, she says, are more bold in challenging their C-suite peers in saying, “you’ve come up with a use case that automates from here-to-here. That’s simple. Do you really want to challenge that a bit more?”

Courtesy of Salesforce

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

– Hardesty & Hanover Construction Services is seeking a CIO, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $200K-$250K/year.

– Charles B Wang Community Health Center is seeking a CIO, based in New York City. Posted salary range: $180K-$210K/year.

– Atomic Machines is seeking a head of IT, based in Emeryville, California. Posted salary range: $175K-$235K/year.

– StemWave is seeking a head of IT and business systems, based in Boston. Posted salary range: $130K-$170K/year.

Hired:

– Intel has appointed Cindy Stoddard to serve as SVP and CIO, effective December 1, and reporting directly to CEO Lip-Bu Tan to lead the chipmaker’s global IT organization. Stoddard joins Intel from Adobe, where she spent nine years leading global IT and cloud operations. Prior to Adobe, she held senior technology leadership roles at companies including data infrastructure company NetApp and grocery retailer Safeway.

– Guidehousenamed Ron White as CIO, joining the consulting firm to lead internal IT operations, cybersecurity and cloud-first initiatives. Previously, White served as CIO at IT consultancy Avanade, CIO at glass bottle manufacturer O-I Glass, and as a managing director at consulting giant Accenture.

– FormAssemblyannounced that Bryan O’Neill has been promoted to CTO. O’Neill first joined the web form builder company in June 2024 as VP of engineering and has played a key role in expanding FormAssembly’s AI strategy. Prior to that, he served as SVP of technical operations at tech company Babel Street and held senior engineering roles at GMAC Insurance, Lowe’s, and Anheuser-Busch.

– Gallion Health appointed Mathieu Baissac as CTO, joining the health-technology company after it was spun out from the University of Maryland Medical System in July to commercialize its hospital supply chain management software. Baissac previously held senior director roles at healthcare companies Phreesia and Kyruus and as a VP of product management at software firm Flexera Software.



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BlackRock’s billionaire CEO warns AI could be capitalism’s next big failure after 30 years of unsustainable inequality after the Cold War

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January 20, 2026

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BlackRock CEO Larry Fink opened the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a stark message to the global elite: AI’s unfettered growth risks pummelling the world’s working and professional classes. Beyond that, he warned that it could be capitalism’s next big failure after a 30-year reign after the Cold War that has failed to deliver for the average human being in society.

In his opening remarks on Tuesday at the gathering of thousands of executives and global leaders, the billionaire boss of the world’s largest asset manager—often called one of Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe”—said that as those in power discuss the future of AI, they risk leaving behind the vast majority of the world, just as they have for much of the last generation.

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more wealth has been created than in any time prior in human history, but in advanced economies, that wealth has accrued to a far narrower share of people than any healthy society can ultimately sustain,” Fink said.

Fink, who has used his annual BlackRock letters and annual appearances at Davos to set the agenda for a more progressive kind of capitalism, even one that is arguably “woke,” making him at times the face of ESG and of stakeholder capitalism, warned that the gains of the tremendous wealth creation since the 1990s have not been equitably shared. And the capitalist ideology driving AI development and implementation forward could come at the expense of the wage-earning majority, he added. 

“Early gains are flowing to the owners of models, owners of data and owners of infrastructure,” Fink said. “The open question: What happens to everyone else if AI does to white-collar workers what globalization did to blue-collar workers? We need to confront that today directly. It is not about the future. The future is now.” 

Fink’s past critiques of capitalism

Fink, who was appointed interim co-chair of the World Economic Forum in August 2025, replacing founder Klaus Schwab, has long espoused the reshaping of capitalism, seeing it as a responsibility of large asset managers like himself. Fink was formerly vociferous about the importance of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) investing, and has argued that climate change is reshaping finance, creating an imperative for executives to reallocate their capital to address the crisis accordingly. In a 2022 letter to investors, published the day before the Davos summit, Fink emphasized a model of “stakeholder capitalism” of a business’s mandate to serve not just shareholders, but employees, consumers, and the public.  

Fink’s new primacy in Davos is the first without Schwab, following allegations that he had expensed more than $1 million, billed to the World Economic Forum, on questionable travel spending, as well as claims of workplace misconduct and research report manipulation. The BlackRock chief emphasized the need for the gathering to demonstrate its legitimacy in part by showing that it’s concerned with more than just swelling growth of companies and countries, but also the economic welfare of its employees and citizens.

“Many of the people most affected by what we talk about here will never come to this conference,” Fink said. “That’s a central tension of this forum. Davos is an elite gathering trying to shape a world that belongs to everyone.”

Though BlackRock announced in early 2025 it would roll back many of the diversity, equity, and inclusion goals it created a few years before, Fink has once again used his spotlight to call on leaders to transform their capitalist sensibilities, this time in how they imagine the AI future.

The cost of the AI boom

Last year capped an explosion of growth in the AI sector, with Morningstar analysts finding a group of 34 AI stocks, including Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft, shot up 50.8% in 2025. AI firms and investors have seen their wealth skyrocket in the past year, with Per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the median increase in net worth last year was nearly $10 billion among the 50 wealthiest Americans. Google co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin, for example, got $101 billion and $92 billion richer, respectively, in 2025.

The BlackRock CEO noted these gains, however, have been reserved for the richest few, alluding to a K-shaped economy of the rich getting richer, while the poor continue to struggle: The bottom half of Americans, in short, are not cashing in on the AI race. Although Fink didn’t get into the politics of utilities setting electricity prices, it seems the poor are actually paying higher bills to support the data centers powering the AI boom. According to Federal Reserve data, the poorer demographic owns about 1% of stock market wealth, translating to about 165 million people owning $628 billion in stock. Conversely, the top 1% of wealthiest households own nearly 50% of corporate equity.

Fink’s framing of the post-Cold War era as one of exploding inequality represents a mainstreaming of a once niche view that has become increasingly mainstream in the 21st century. While the triumph of the west over communism was seen as the ultimate victory for capitalism, as epitomized by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, history has in fact continued. The unprecedented rise of China as an economic superpower, through its fusion of socialism and capitalism “with Chinese characteristics,” has complicated the narrative, as has the inequality alluded to by Fink. 

An internal critic of the post-Cold War world order is Andrew Bacevich, a military veteran and historian who likened the collapse  of the Soviet Union in 1989 as “akin to removing the speed limiter from an internal combustion engine.” Bacevich’s 2020 book The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, was an early articulation of the once niche viewpoint that Fink lent support to on Tuesday.

What AI’s growth means for workers

Similarly, the risks of the AI boom on workers extends beyond who has a stake in the technology industry’s growth. Nobel laureate and “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton has previously warned this explosion of wealth for the few will come at the expense of white-collar workers, who will be displaced by the technology.

“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Hinton said in September. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”

Some companies have already leaned into culling headcount to grow profits, including enterprise-software firm IgniteTech. CEO Eric Vaughan laid off nearly 80% of his staff in early 2023, according to figures reviewed by Fortune. Vaughan said the reductions happened during an inflection point in the tech industry, where failure to efficiently adopt AI could be fatal for a company. He’s since rehired for all of those roles, and he would make the same choice again today, he told Fortune.

According to Fink, sustaining a white-collar workforce will depend on the world’s most powerful people creating an actionable plan that will defy the critiques of capitalism that has, so far, stood to predominantly benefit them.

“Now with abstractions about the jobs of tomorrow, but with a credible plan for broad participation in these gains, this is going to be the test,” Fink said. “Capitalism can evolve to turn more people into owners of growth, instead of spectators watching it happen.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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At Davos, AI hype gives way to focus on ROI

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January 20, 2026

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Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition….a dispatch from Davos…OpenAI ‘on track’ for device launch in 2026…Anthropic CEO on China chip sales…and is Claude Code Anthropic’s ChatGPT moment?

Hi. I’m in Davos, Switzerland, this week for the World Economic Forum. Tomorrow’s visit of U.S. President Donald Trump is dominating conversations here. But when people aren’t talking about Trump and his imposition of tariffs on European allies that oppose his attempt to wrest control of  Greenland from Denmark, they are talking a lot about AI.

The promenade in this ski town turns into a tech trade show floor at WEF time, with the logos of prominent software companies and consulting firms plastered to shopfronts and signage touting various AI products. But while last year’s Davos was dominated by hype around AI agents and overwrought hand-wringing that the debut of DeepSeek’s R1 model, which happened during 2025’s WEF, could mean the capital-intensive plans of the U.S. AI companies were for naught, this year’s AI discussions seem more sober and grounded.

The business leaders I’ve spoken to here at Davos are more focused than ever on how to drive business returns from their AI spending. The age of pilots and experimentation seems to be ending. So too is the era of imagining what AI can do. Many CEOs now realize that implementing AI at scale is not easy or cheap. Now there is much more attention on practical advice for using AI to drive enterprise-wide impact. (But there’s still a tinge of idealism here too as you’ll see.) Here’s a taste of some of the things I’ve heard in conversations so far:

CEOs take control of AI deployment

There’s a consensus that the bottom-up approaches—giving every employee access to ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, say—popular in many companies two years ago, in the initial days of the generative AI boom, are a thing of the past. Back then, CEOs assumed front line workers, closest to the business processes, would know how best to deploy AI to make them more efficient. This turned out to be wrong—or, perhaps more accurately, the gains from doing this tended to be hard to quantify and rarely added up to big changes in either the top or bottom line.

Instead, top-down, CEO-led initiatives aimed at transforming core business processes are now seen as essential for deriving ROI from AI. Jim Hagemann Snabe, the chairman of Siemens and former co-CEO at SAP, told a group of fellow executives at a breakfast discussion I moderated here in Davos today that CEOs need to be “dictators” in identifying where their businesses would deploy AI and pushing those initiatives forward. Similarly, both Christina Kosmowski, the CEO of IT and business data analytics company LogicMonitor, and Bastian Nominacher, the cofounder and co-CEO of process mining software company Celonis, told me that board and CEO sponsorship was an essential component to enterprise AI success.

Nominacher had a few other interesting lessons, including how, in research Celonis commissioned, establishing a center of excellence for figuring out how to optimize work processes with AI resulted in an 8x better return than for companies that failed to set up such a center. He also said that having data in the right place was essential to running process optimization successfully.

The race to become the orchestration layer for enterprise AI agents

There is clearly a race on among SaaS companies to become the new interface layer for AI agents that work in companies. Carl Eschenbach, Workday’s CEO, told me that he thinks his company is well-positioned to become “the front door to work” not only because it sits on key human resources and financial data, but because the company already handled onboarding, data access and permissioning, and performance management for human workers. Now it can do the same for AI agents.

But others are eyeing this prize too. Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce’s chief engineering and customer success officer, told me how his company is using “forward deployed engineers” at 120 of Salesforce’s largest customers to close the gap between customer pain points and product development, learning the best way to create agents for specific industry verticals and functions that it can then offer to Salesforce’s wider customer base. Judson Althof, Microsoft’s commercial CEO, said that his company’s Data Fabric and Agent 365 products were gaining traction among big companies that need an orchestration layer for AI agents and a unified way to access data stored in different systems and silos without having to migrate that data to a single platform. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy meanwhile thinks the deep expertise his company has is maintaining cloud-based data pools and controlling access to that data combined with newfound expertise in creating its own AI coding agents, make his company ideally suited to win the race to be the AI agent orchestrator. Ramaswamy told me his biggest fear is whether Snowflake can keep moving fast enough to realize this vision before OpenAI or Anthropic move down the stack—from AI agents into the data storage—potentially displacing Snowflake.

A couple more insights from Davos so far: while there is still a lot of fear about AI leading to widespread job displacement, it hasn’t shown up yet in economic data. In fact, Svenja Gudell, the chief economist at recruiting site Indeed, told me that while the tech sector has seen a huge decline in jobs since 2022, that trend predates the generative AI boom and is likely due to companies “right sizing” after the massive pandemic-era hiring boom rather than AI. And while many industries are not hiring much at the moment, Gudell says global macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty are to blame, not AI.

Finally, in a comment relevant to one of this week’s bigger AI news stories—that OpenAI is introducing ads to ChatGPT—Snabe, the Siemens chairman had an interesting answer to a question about how AI should be regulated. He said that rather than trying to regulate AI use cases—as the EU AI Act has done—governments should mandate more broadly that AI adhere to human values. And the one piece of regulation that would do more than anything to ensure this, he said, would be to ban AI business models based on advertising. Ad-based AI models will lead companies to optimize for user engagement with all of the negative consequences for mental health and democratic consensus that we’ve seen from social media, only far worse. 

With that, here’s more AI news.

Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn

Beatice Nolan wrote the news and sub-sections of Eye on AI.

FORTUNE ON AI

Wave of defections from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s $12 billion startup Thinking Machines shows cutthroat struggle for AI talent–by Jeremy Kahn and Sharon Goldman

ChatGPT tests ads as a new era of AI begins—by Sharon Goldman

A filmmaker deepfaked Sam Altman for his movie about AI. Then things got personal—by Beatrice Nolan

PwC’s global chairman says most leaders have forgotten ‘the basics’ as 56% are still getting ‘nothing’ out of AI adoption–by Diane Brady and Nick Lichtenberg

AI IN THE NEWS

EYE ON AI RESEARCH

Researchers say ChatGPT has a “silicon gaze” that amplifies global inequalities. A new study from the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Kentucky analyzed over 20 million ChatGPT queries and found the AI systematically favors wealthier, Western regions, rating them as “smarter” and “more innovative” than poorer countries in the Global South. The researchers coined the term “silicon gaze” to describe how AI systems view the world through the lens of biased training data, mirroring historical power imbalances rather than providing objective answers. They argue these biases aren’t errors to be corrected, but structural features of AI systems that learn from data shaped by centuries of uneven information production, privileging places with extensive English-language coverage and strong digital visibility. The team has created a website–inequalities.ai–where people can explore how ChatGPT ranks their own neighborhood, city, or country across different lifestyle factors.

AI CALENDAR

Jan. 19-23: World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland.

Jan. 20-27: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Singapore.

Feb. 10-11: AI Action Summit, New Delhi, India.

March 2-5: Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, Spain.

March 16-19: Nvidia GTC, San Jose, Calif.

BRAIN FOOD

Is Claude Code Anthropic’s ChatGPT moment? Anthropic has started the year with a viral moment most labs dream of. Despite Claude Code’s technical interface, the product has captured attention beyond the developer pool, with users building personal websites, analyzing health data, managing emails, and even monitoring tomato plants—all without writing a line of actual code. After several users pointed out that the product was much more of a general-use agent than the marketing and name suggested, the company launched Cowork—a more user-friendly version with a graphical interface built for non-developers.

Both Claude Code and Cowork’s ability to autonomously access, manipulate, and analyze files on a user’s computer has given many people a first taste of an AI agent that can actually take actions on their behalf, rather than just provide advice. Anthropic also saw a traffic lift as a result. Claude’s total web audience has more than doubled from December 2024, and its daily unique visitors on desktop are up 12% globally year-to-date compared with last month, according to data from market intelligence companies Similarweb and Sensor Tower published by The Wall Street Journal. But while some have hailed the products as the first step to getting a true AI personal assistant, the launch has also sparked concerns about job displacement and appears to put pressure on a few dozen startups that have built similar file management and automation tools.

FORTUNE AIQ: THE YEAR IN AI—AND WHAT’S AHEAD

Businesses took big steps forward on the AI journey in 2025, from hiring Chief AI Officers to experimenting with AI agents. The lessons learned—both good and bad–combined with the technology’s latest innovations will make 2026 another decisive year. Explore all of Fortune AIQ, and read the latest playbook below: 

–The 3 trends that dominated companies’ AI rollouts in 2025.

–2025 was the year of agentic AI. How did we do?

–AI coding tools exploded in 2025. The first security exploits show what could go wrong.

–The big AI New Year’s resolution for businesses in 2026: ROI.

–Businesses face a confusing patchwork of AI policy and rules. Is clarity on the horizon?



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European leaders’ text messages to Trump reveal a very different tone than their Greenland saber-rattling

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January 20, 2026

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While Europe is pushing back publicly against U.S. President Donald Trump over Greenland, the language appears softer behind the scenes.

Trump published a text message on Tuesday that he received from French President Emmanuel Macron, confirmed as genuine by Macron’s office.

Starting with “My friend,” Macron’s tone was more deferential than the criticism that France and some of its European partner nations are openly voicing against Trump’s push to wrest Greenland from NATO ally Denmark.

Before broaching the Greenland dispute, Macron opted in his message to first talk about other issues where he and Trump seem roughly on the same page.

“We are totally in line on Syria. We can do great things on Iran,” the French leader wrote in English.

Then, he added: “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland,” immediately followed by: “Let us try to build great things.”

That was the only mention that Macron made of the semi-autonomous Danish territory in the two sections of message that Trump published. It wasn’t immediately clear from Trump’s post when he received the message.

Trump breaks with tradition

World leaders’ private messages to each other rarely make it verbatim into the public domain — enabling them to project one face publicly and another to each other.

But Trump — as is his wont across multiple domains — is casting traditions and diplomatic niceties to the wind and, in the process, lifting back the curtain on goings-on that usually aren’t seen.

This week, a text message that Trump sent to Norway’s prime minister also became public, released by the Norwegian government and confirmed by the White House.

In it, Trump linked his aggressive stance on Greenland to last year’s decision not to award him the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” the message read.

It concluded, “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

On Tuesday, Trump also published a flattering message from Mark Rutte, secretary general of NATO, which the alliance also confirmed as authentic.

“I am committed to finding a way forward on Greenland,” Rutte wrote. “Can’t wait to see you. Yours, Mark.”

Rutte has declined to speak publicly about Greenland despite growing concern about Trump’s threats to “acquire” the island and what that would mean for the territorial integrity of NATO ally Denmark. Pressed last week about Trump’s designs on Greenland and warnings from Denmark that any U.S. military action might mean the end of NATO, Rutte said: “I can never comment on that. That’s impossible in public.”

Macron’s relationship with Trump

Macron likes to say that he can get Trump on the phone any time he wants. He proved it last September by making a show of calling up the president from a street in New York, to tell Trump that police officers were blocking him to let a VIP motorcade pass.

“Guess what? I’m waiting in the street because everything is frozen for you!” Macron said as cameras filmed the scene.

It’s a safe bet that Macron must know by now — a year into Trump’s second spell in office — that there’s always a risk that a private message to Trump could be made public.

Macron said Tuesday that he had “no particular reaction” to the message’s publication when a journalist asked him about it.

“I take responsibility for everything that I do. It’s my habit to be coherent between what I say on the outside and what I do in a private manner. That’s all.”

Still, the difference between Macron’s public and private personas was striking.

Hosting Russia and Ukraine together

Most remarkably, the French leader told Trump in his message that he would be willing to invite representatives from both Ukraine and Russia to a meeting later this week in Paris — an idea that Macron has not voiced publicly.

The Russians could be hosted “in the margins,” Macron suggested, hinting at the potential awkwardness of inviting Moscow representatives while France is also backing Ukraine with military and other support against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

Macron wrote that the meeting could also include “the danish, the syrians” and the G7 nations — which include the United States.

The French president added: “let us have a dinner together in Paris together on thursday before you go back to the us.”

He then signed off simply with “Emmanuel.”

Making nice only goes so far

Despite Macron’s persistent efforts, in both of Trump’s terms, not to ruffle his feathers, any payback has been mixed, at best.

Trump bristled on Monday, threatening punitive tariffs, when told that Macron has no plans to join Trump’s new Board of Peace that will supervise the next phase of the Gaza peace plan, despite receiving an invitation.

“Well, nobody wants him because he’s going to be out of office very soon,” Trump told reporters, even through the French leader has more than a year left in office before the end of his second and last term in 2027.

“I’ll put a 200% tariff on his wines and champagnes and he’ll join,” Trump said.

___

Lorne Cook in Brussels, Sylvie Corbet in Paris and Kostya Manenkov in Davos contributed.



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