Companies that foster an environment that supports professional growth are more likely to thrive and successfully adopt digital innovation. Here are the 100 best places to work in Europe—and how they stay that way.

<p>PPI ranks 71 on this year's Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For Europe list.</p>

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Oil prices remain volatile, artificial intelligence is demanding more power than the electrical grid can easily handle, and energy CFOs are deciding where billions of capital will flow next.
Chevron CFO Eimear Bonner joins Fortune Daily to discuss how one of America’s largest energy giants (No. 21 on the Fortune 500) is navigating these shifts—from continuing investments in Venezuela to signing a 20-year natural-gas supply agreement for Microsoft’s massive data center project in Texas. Bonner breaks down energy security, AI’s unprecedented power appetite, and what consumers should expect on their energy bills as winter approaches.
Also on today's episode: • Term Sheet Preview: How did prebiotic soda brand Poppi scale from a local farmers' market booth into a $1.95 billion beverage powerhouse? Senior Writer and Editor Allie Garfinkle talks with the founder to uncover the blueprint behind their rapid growth.
- watch the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqcD2QIeEH8
Subscribe to Fortune: https://fortune.com/subscribe/ 

Additional images courtesy of Getty Images

00:00 - Chevron CFO Eimear Bonner on AI & Energy Demand 
14:04 - Term Sheet: How Poppi Became a $1.95B Soda Brand


Inside Chevron’s Massive Bet on AI & Energy | Fortune Daily

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I live in an apartment building in Brooklyn and one of the main topics of conversation is the price of our energy bills right now. We hear the concerns and the most important thing that we can do and what we are doing as a company is ensuring that we bring as much supply to market as we can. Hello, I'm Ellie Austin and you're watching Fortune Daily. Energy is rarely out of the headlines these days and oil prices continue to be volatile. At the same time, AI needs more power than the grid can easily deliver. At the center of all of this are CFOs, Chief Financial Officers, because they're the ones deciding where energy companies invest their money. Ema Bonner is the CFO of Chevron, which is number 21 on our Fortune 500 list. And she's helping steer one of America's largest oil companies through all of it, from deciding to double down on rigs in Venezuela. To a 20 year deal with Microsoft to supply natural gas power to a massive data center that it's building in Texas and that project alone could deliver power roughly equivalent to 2 million homes. Bonna joins me to talk about energy security, about AI's voracious appetite for electricity, and also about what she'd say to consumers, panicked that as we head into winter, that already very pricey energy bills are about to skyrocket. Eva, thank you so much for joining us. So it's the UN General Assembly this week in New York, and there's real hopes that U.S.Iran talks there could help stabilize global oil prices. What's it like to manage this volatility, this ongoing volatility from the CFO chair of a major oil company like Chevron? Well, thanks, Ellie, for having me. It's buzzing here in New York at Ongo Week. Look, things Very volatile and very uncertain and that's something that we don't try and predict as a company we plan for it and so from a CFO chair I'm involved in planning for all of that uncertainty. Our business is cyclical, so we're used to every few years having some shocks and cycles, and we have to make sure, and I have to make sure from the CFO's chair that we can weather all of that disruption. So what I pay attention to are things that are within our control. How does the portfolio perform at high and low prices? What investment choices make sense? Investment choices that make sense over the long term that will be profitable and deliver high returns even if prices. are lower. How to manage risks around the world, we have operations. Around the world and so each country is different and so we think about that as a company and the CFO plays a key role in looking at all the enterprise risks and ensuring that we can manage those risks. And then third is really to ensure that every day we're safely and reliably operating all of the assets we have because it's that platform of performance that is so important, important, especially given the disruption that we're managing today when Delivering supply to the market to delivering products to customers, and it's even more important when you've got constraints in the system. Chevron has announced that it's planning to more than double its red count in Venezuela following a deal struck with the Trump administration. You've negotiated or the company has negotiated stability clauses and arbitration rights as part of that deal. But this is still a deal that's tied to a certain political administration. What protects that money that Chevron has invested if the politics change over the next couple of years? The new terms that we were able to negotiate it unlocked this growth opportunity for us. It had long duration growth possibilities. It was a low cost. Operations 3 low cost operations and higher returns. So those 3 things came together to give us confidence that we could grow our investment in Venezuela. So when we think about Venezuela, we have 3 operating. Joint ventures today we've been in the country for 100 years, so we understand the country very well. We understand the stakeholders very well. We have exceptional employees in Venezuela, so our human capital is there. Our partnership has been developed over many years. So that's where we're starting from when we got these new terms and additional acreage, it made the outlook for. Venezuela compete with everything else that we have in the portfolio. The extra protections that we put in place, the stability clauses, protects the terms of all of those new agreements regardless of who's in power, regardless, regardless. So the stability clause, and these stability clauses are like what we would have in other parts of the world, so they're no different than what we have in Kazakhstan, for example, and that really protects the investment and that's really important to know when you're in a country that the investment that you're making for the long term is protected. So in addition to the additional acreage, we also got those additional protections. And then we got the right to resolve disputes through international arbitration, which is something that we would typically have in other assets of scale around the world. So it was the terms and it was these protections, the protections on the economics and the protections, legal protections that gave us that overall confidence to grow, and we'll grow production. We'll double production over the next five years. That will require gross $7 billion of commitment. And what we'll unlock at a gross level is roughly 9 billion barrels of commercial. Commercial reserves before becoming CFO you were CTO, um, so you're particularly uniquely placed to talk about what we're seeing now with the AI boom and its potential impact on, um, the energy market. So every week is bringing another story about AI agents and what they can, they can't do, how they might. Behave. AI is now selling utilities protection against that, um, to try and guarantee safety. You're about to sell power to these companies. Um, what goes through your mind? How are you thinking about this moment in time and specifically the conversation we're having right now about AI and long term safety? So we see the opportunity in two areas. One, how to leverage the technology to improve performance, and it's one focus area. And the other area is how to power the energy, the AI growth, and the energy that's needed, that's needed for the AI growth. So we're playing kind of both sides of the equation. I'd start with, you know, leveraging AI. I mean from a CTO perspective, when I was the CTO, we stood up the enterprise AI team, so the team in Chevron that has grown over the last couple of years that has deployed AI across the organization. We're using AI in our assets to improve performance. We're using it in our reservoirs to help us make the right decision on how to increase recovery. We're using it across the organization for personal productivity and team products. Oh, I use it every day. In fact, I can't remember a day where I did not use AI. I'm using it every day to help me synthesize information. There's a huge amount of information that comes obviously across my desk every day. And one of the challenges to discern what really matters and what doesn't. And so it's really helping me with discern discern. Things I should pay attention to. It's helping me with my personal efficiency, and that gives me more time to think about some of these longer term decisions that are important to me. One of the topics that has been mentioned in these doomsday debates that have been swirling over the past week or so is the possibility of AI hacking the energy grid. Is that in your perspective, is that something that's likely within the next decade and sort of all the repercussions that could happen as a result of that? Well, I can talk about the framework that we have in our company around AI. So what regulations and what safety guardrails are you putting in place to make sure that that doesn't happen at Chevron? Yeah, we have a framework in place, a responsible AI framework, and so since the very beginning when we started up our AI team a couple of years ago, everything that we developed and everything we pushed out was consistent with that framework, and that was the third party. Um, um, this third party, um, thought leaders on AI that had developed this framework in the early days and we were able to participate in some of that work and also implement it, you know, for us we have to think every day about cybersecurity risk, risks in general, safety risk. Health risks and so this framework helped us think about the new risks associated with AI. So everything that we've developed is within that in that framework and so for us it's really important that as we leverage the technology we think about it like every other new technology that we deployed. We have good risk management. We test it. And we deploy it responsibly and safely and so that's the approach that we're taking with AI. I live in an apartment building in Brooklyn and I have a WhatsApp chat with all the other kind of apartment holders in my building and one of the main topics of conversation. Is the price of our energy bills right now and specifically going into winter, people are very nervous about, hey, if my kind of energy bill costs this in June in New York City, what's it going to cost in December? What's your response to the consumer and those concerns they have given everything that's going on in the Strait of Hormuz and The soaring prices of energy that we've seen, we hear the concerns, you know, prices impact consumers, businesses, economies. They're very hard to predict prices. And so, you know, given the disruption that we've seen this year, not only to the crude supply that's on the market, but also now to refinery capacity, those things are showing up in the price. Over the last couple of months, all of the buffers that existed at the beginning of the conflict have been drawn down. You know, there were commercial inventories. There were strategic petroleum reserve releases. There were sanctioned barrels that were on the water, and so all of those, all of that supply buffered the price for a while and so now a lot of that is drawn down and so we're seeing that increased pressure in price. In addition to that, refinery. Capacity globally has been decreased as well with some of the some of the conflict and so those two things together are creating creating the challenge and so there's a lot of pressure on prices right now and the most important thing that we can do and what we are doing as a company is ensuring that we bring as much supply to market and that we run our refineries. Reliably and as efficiently as we can and that's what we're doing so we're growing production this year we're putting more supply in the market and that's what you were saying with Venezuela Venezuela is even in addition to the 7 to 10% that we are growing this year. Venezuela will bring more growth. We've grown Venezuela 15% this year already. So what we're focused on is bringing supply to the market and executing our plans with excellence. And then on the refinery side is really running our refineries at maximum throughput and in fact in the 3rd quarter we shared the production records that we are achieving and the refinery throughput records. So that's how we're part of the solution. Bringing supply and refinery throughput, and I think that is the message that operationally, operationally, operationally as best as you can, but you don't know the price is to an extent out of your, we don't control prices. What we control is putting supply in the market and running refineries well operationally, and that's what we're doing. You have had a really interesting career trajectory, Ema. So you started as an offshore. Petroleum engineer in the UK, um, my homeland, um, and then you went on to become Chevron's first female chief technology officer in 2021, um, and then first female CFO, not the first female CFO. OK, that's good news that that someone else had had held that role before you. But becoming the first female CTO, did that have any significance to you? Did you have any relationship with that milestone? It was, you know, exciting milestone. There were a few things that happened at the same time. I moved to Houston. I, um, was part of the executive leadership team and I was the CTO. So all of those things together was, was just, it was such a privilege to get that, get that opportunity. So it was significant on many, many levels. It gives me the opportunity to leverage all of the operational experience. I've had, you know, from multiple parts of the world, the UK, Asia, and Eurasia and really think about what was important in terms of the priorities for, for technology. And so what I learned through the role was that um technology can make what you think's impossible possible and technology can allow you to break through what's limiting performance. And again, the technology needs to be focused. It's got to be focused on the business, and you've got to at the end of the day see a result because that's the return that you get for all the technology programs is that you ultimately achieve a different step change in performance and so that's what I learned in the role and had a lot of fun in that role and then I. I took that lens when I became CFO because it helped me look at the asset performance just with that lens all the time. So I asked myself a lot, what's possible? What's possible? And I think that question came from that time. It's been a pleasure to speak to you. Thanks, Ellie. Cheers. How did Poppy go from a farmer's market stand to a nearly $2 billion soda brand? Here's a preview of Fortune's term sheet where senior writer and editor Ali Garfinkel got the story direct from the founder. What do you think most large companies are getting wrong about Gen Z? 100% of everything that they do. What is this? This is Poppy, the digital first soda brand Pepsi bought for $1.95 billion. Stop spiraling. Get a poppy. In the multi-billion dollar soda market, 3 companies dominate the shelves, and breaking in is notoriously difficult. Poppy, defied the odds. 53 days is the cycle. If you can't hit within that 3 days, you'll be the first to move at the speed of culture, what are you doing? And big corporations. Cannot move that quick, but executing that fast nearly bankrupt them. We had $75,000 in the bank and almost ran out of money. Today I asked Poppy co-founder Alison Ellsworth, how do you outmaneuver legacy giants, survive near bankruptcy and execute one of the largest consumer brand exits in beverage history. A lot of founders tend to cling to a CEO title. You really didn't. Why not? So it's so funny, and I'm here to tell you entrepreneurs, being CEO is just a glorified HR person. Like the last thing I want to do is deal with a ton of people problems and run a P&O. And, and, and in a day, no, CEOs are incredible and they, they have amazing vision and I adored ours at PPI. That's not what I'm saying, but it's like this title that people are so obsessed. with. And it's like, find your superpower. My superpower was running the creative and brand because I was the brand. I I I loved every aspect of it. There wasn't a can that I didn't design with my team, like all of those things. And so why would I want to do the CEO role? And it was the same with my husband. He was incredibly talented in the innovation and supply chain. And his team, I think other than our sales team was like the largest team. He was like managing like 80 people, right? You can find your superpower and not be CEO and I'm here to tell you, like you holding onto it for too long can be, it can hurt the business. To be a CEO, I think that it comes with experience and so Poppy with the crazy growth that we had, me and my husband looked at each other. It was like a year we're going from I think we were looking at going from 50 million to 200 million. We were looking at buying super wads and we looked at each other like we've never done this before. Why don't we bring in people that know more than us and be part of the conversation. And partner with them instead, instead of it getting forced upon you. Because if you have a board and you have investment and you have growth and you hold on for so long and let your ego get in the way of growth, it's going to get forced upon you and it's going to go sour real quick versus acknowledging it and learning from it. And I love that we're able to learn from these people who had been so seasoned in it before. So you can watch the full interview with Alison Ellsworth on our Fortune YouTube channel and we'll also drop the link um to that interview into the show notes for this episode. That's it for Fortune Daily. I'm Ellie Austin, remember to like, subscribe and let us know in the comments what you think about oil prices or maybe what your favorite coffee flavor is. I'll see you next week.

Soda is one of the hardest categories to break into, where a few legacy giants dominate shelf space. Yet Poppi, the prebiotic soda company, turned a Texas farmers' market side hustle into a $1.95 billion sale to PepsiCo. On Term Sheet, Fortune's Allie Garfinkle sits down with co-founder Allison Ellsworth to unpack how she cracked the Gen Z code, how she turned three-day TikTok trends into lasting demand, and why incumbents are still struggling to win over the next generation of soda drinkers.

This Billion-Dollar Soda Brand Founder Explains Why Fortune 500s Can’t Win Gen Z

Finance

Live shopping in China is a massive, multi-billion-dollar market, but for years, American platforms have struggled to crack the format. But in 2019, Grant LaFontaine and Logan Head started a live shopping marketplace for Funko Pops that not many investors believed in. Fast forward to today, Whatnot has transformed into a $11.5B valuation company, hitting 1 billion orders this year, overseeing transactions for everything from Pokémon cards to live seafood. It is now among the nation’s biggest shippers. Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle sits down with CEO Grant LaFontaine to talk about this unforeseen growth and the next steps for the company. 

The $11.5B Startup 100 Investors Turned Down | Term Sheet

Agentic AI has officially graduated from basic decision trees to unscripted autonomous agents, turning customer service into a massive $15 billion market. Startups like Decagon AI are pulling in a $4.5B valuation because of high enterprise demand. Hertz is already routing 50% of its phone interactions through AI voice, dropping its per-call costs by more than half. And the car rental giant is hardly alone. Companies are fast adopting AI customer service agents. However, about 80% of consumers still crave a human on the other line, and 40% of us would literally pay a premium just to bypass the bot. Fortune’s AI Editor Jeremy Kahn takes us behind the scenes to break down the delicate balance between instant resolutions and human connection.

Almost 80% of Americans Prefer Human Agents, but Why Is AI Growing in Customer Service?

Tech

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AI is making customer service even more unbearable. Three second delay and it goes ha ha ha, and I couldn't talk to a representative. How often does someone come in and they're just like, 000 agent agent agent. In 2026, AI and autonomous agents have taken over customer service. A recent report says 88% of contact centers are now leveraging AI, with a quarter of them running on fully integrated automation. Most of the inquiries that happened today in five years, there's no question that AI. will be able to handle all of them, but there's a catch. Another study reveals that nearly 80% of Americans still prefer talking to a living, breathing human being. And the hidden costs of this automation, it's staggering. Research shows that simply disclosing a chatbot's identity before a chat even begins can plummet purchase conversion rates by 80%. There's always that little human touch that that we always need. Yet we're a generation obsessed with instant gratification. How do we square that? As the AI editor at Fortune, I focus on how AI is shaping business and the wider economy. With AI poised to transform customer experience, I wanted to talk with business leaders on the front lines of this shift to find out how they're adapting and what the future of business really looks like. Despite our collective craving for human connection, the AI customer service market has ballooned to over $15 billion in 2026. So agentic AI or AI systems that actually take actions in the world, whereas previously you had automated agents that had to follow a set decision tree. With the current systems, they actually are able to have much less structured flows of how they operate. One of the front runners leading the charge is Decagon AI. Founded in 2024, they've already hauled in $481 million in funding, commanding a $4.5 billion post-money valuation. That is a major indicator of just how eager enterprises are to adopt this tech. Decagon's mission building faster, smarter AI without damaging the customer experience, and it's working. They're maintaining a 93% customer satisfaction score while driving revenue from fully automated interactions with. Some individual contracts now clearing $1 million. What do you think that looks like going forward in, in 5 years? Most of the inquiries that happened today, I would say in 5 years there's no question that an AI agent will be able to handle all of them. In a lot of these mass, like huge volume use cases, the human touch doesn't really matter, right? It's, it's not like you need the human touch to book a new flight or to, you know, reorder a lost credit card. All you want in that situation is just like get it done. It's, it's a little bit more mundane. These are not canned responses. This is something way more personalized. It's very different from what you've tried before. You're kind of changing the customer's behavior. But get this, over 40% of consumers say they'd actually pay a premium just to guarantee they can speak to a real human representative. Around the time of the industrial revolution, people wanted to buy a Ford Model T because the presumption was the quality was higher because it was built in a factory. Now today, curated, handmade experiences. Seem to have more of a premium association with them. Look across the industry and you'll see giants leveraging AI in different ways. Take Chipotle, a behemoth with over 100,000 employees, while some, like Decagon, are adapting to customers' changing behavior, others are doubling down on the interpersonal interaction. What kind of customer experience do you really want people to have going forward? One of the things that I think sets us apart and makes us special is the human interaction. Hi, how are you? Those curated moments of human connection and service. Are always going to be a fundamental part of what the Chipotle experience is. Back in 2024, they automated their hiring process with an administrative AI system called Avocado. And what was the idea behind that AI system? The average restaurant manager was spending more than 10 hours a week on recruiting activity, 20% of their week just on that one task. It's a fraction of that now. And how has AI changed sort of what your daily routine looks like? It allows me to, you know, be in front with the guest, serve them, going over recipe cards, you know, tasting food, a lot of training, people development for Chipotle, you know, we always need that human touch, you know, we always need, uh, people tasting the food because that's what we sell at the end of the day. We definitely always gonna need that human aspect. I don't know what kind of day they might be having before they come here, you know, we give them a burrito, a bowl, you know, we serve them with gratitude, with a smile, you know. Thank you. That could make anybody's day. But to see the customer facing side of this revolution, I synced up with Hertz. As an international car rental giant, they handle massive call volumes. By deploying Decagon's tech since early 2025, they're now resolving 75% of customer inquiries autonomously. We want to take every single one of those calls that comes our way, and we want that to be as seamless for our customers as possible. To see this AI agent interaction, I tried giving Hertz's AI, Haley, a call. Hi, this is Haley. I see you have a rental scheduled for pickup. How can I help you today? Oh hey Hayley, I'd like to change the drop off location. Let me see, where would you like to drop off the car instead? Yeah, if I could drop it off at LaGuardia Airport, is that possible? Great, you're all set with the new drop off at LaGuardia. Yeah, that was pretty good. I mean, I think that's, you know, that's was smooth, and it definitely didn't have to wait, which is nice not to have to queue at all. That's the new expectation. They're going to expect faster. Response times, better experiences. When we look at the future of contact centers, we're gonna see more and more AI agents taking on this workload. Every business will have an AI agent that's kind of like the front door to me that actually isn't to say that the human agents will go away because there's gonna be a lot more things that can be handled. Like why are people doing more of the mundane conversations because they have to, um, like those are the bread and butter. But if the AI can take that away, it frees them up to do more conversations that are not being had today. In fact, Hertz told us that AI voice is now live across 50% of their total phone interactions. In 2026, the cost of a customer interaction dropped by more than half to under $1.50. That shift means companies like Hertz are now seeing roughly $3.5 back for every $1 they put into AI customer service. Yet, depending on the issue, Hertz still reroutes calls to human agents. Hi, this is Hayley. How can I help you today? Hi, Haley, I've got a Hertz rental car right now and I have a flat tire. I'll connect you to a live agent now. Thanks for your patience. Thank you. They've got a flat tire or maybe they're on the side of the road and they're at risk. They absolutely want to hear a human voice and have that level of connection where someone understands that they may be at risk and is doing everything they can to support them in that scenario. Earlier you mentioned that billing is an area that still reverts to the human agent. Why is that? Why, why is the billing so important to be handled by a human? Yes, we think that the billing conversation is one about trust and the customers looking to understand why maybe a charge is not what they believe. It should be. So that's one where we very much default to someone being able to explain those pieces to them, and we found customers much prefer that. But even with those undeniable margins, the trust gap persists. Studies show that only 13% of consumers completely trust AI. Generally speaking, people will say I would be a little bit nervous about that, or in some cases a lot nervous or being very careful to consider PII or other information that might be in those systems and make sure that the models are both protected and secure from that perspective. that were responsibly handling people's information. How do you make sure there aren't hallucinations, because there have been these cases, I mean this famous Air Canada case where the judge said Air Canada was sort of liable for that incorrect information that its AI system had provided as part of a customer support experience. The only way to prevent that in a nondeterministic system is to have all these checks around. We call them supervisor models, and you kind of think of it as like the main agent is executing and you have these like, you know, small models around it that are running in parallel. There's all these models around it to make sure it stays on track and stays within the guard rails. Data proves we want more human interaction and will actively penalize businesses that deprive us of it. But as agentic AI gets increasingly good, will that sentiment hold? Are we staring at a future where consumers are forced to choose between instant resolutions or the human touch? Is there anything you think AI agents? We never really be able to automate when it comes to the customer contact, honestly, no, I think at a certain point it's almost indistinguishable. You'll get into a situation where if you didn't tell, inform the user that you might not know, consumers will now learn the other side, which they're, they're now used to interacting with great AI agents that they'll be disappointed if they're waiting on hold. We have very high conviction that that's where, where the world is moving towards.

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