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PPR, SA | Fortune

PPR, SA Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings | Fortune

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

Features

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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.

Bill Perkins, hedge fund manager, high-stakes poker player, and author of the bestselling Die With Zero, sits down with Fortune Daily to challenge everything we’ve been taught about saving and spending money. Bill discusses:
How AI pushes executives into a “productivity trap”
The ideal age to give your kids their inheritance
Advice for the coming wave of young AI millionaires and billionaires
Whether dying with zero is still realistic in an era of longevity breakthroughs
What a 20-something should do with their last $100 each month
His take on Warren Buffett’s approach to wealth and giving, and why he thinks earlier philanthropy would have had a bigger impact

Plus, on today’s episode:
The Business of Sports: Fortune’s Most Powerful Woman Editor, Emma Hinchliffe, breaks down the controversy surrounding Sydney Sweeney’s ad for Novig, and what it says about celebrity, sports, and brand risk.
Anatomy of a Deal: Fortune News Editor Cat Gioino unpacks the joint press conference between New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump, and what the unlikely pairing could mean for the city.

Read the articles mentioned:
Sydney Sweeney and Novig: https://fortune.com/2026/09/16/sydney-sweeney-novig-ad-sports-prediction-market-female-athletes-why-it-went-wrong/ 
President Trump and Mayor Mamdani Joint Press Conference: https://fortune.com/2026/09/21/trump-mamdani-press-conference-new-york-city-sunnyside-queens-housing-federal-funds/ 

Subscribe to Fortune: https://fortune.com/subscribe/

Additional images courtesy of Getty Images

00:00 Bill Perkins
16:07 Sydney Sweeney
20:53 Trump and Mamdani

When to Spend Everything ft. Bill Perkins | Fortune Daily

AS Watson is approaching AI as an enterprise transformation—not a series of IT pilots. Its CEO-led, cross-functional approach embeds AI in workflows, decision-making, and performance management across the business, rather than leaving adoption to a single technology team. To support this effort, the company has appointed 31 global strategic technology partners to accelerate its AI-powered online and offline retail transformation.

In this one-on-one conversation, Group CEO Malina Ngai discusses what this shift means in practice—from smarter warehouse operations and more connected customer experiences to the leadership choices required to make AI integral to the way the business operates. How can companies turn AI investment into compounding value? And what must leaders be willing to change to achieve it? 

Malina Ngai, Group Chief Executive Officer, AS Watson Group 

From Efficiencies to Reinvention: Navigating the AI Transformation

Conferences

Thank you, Andrew. Doctor Molina and I, thank you for joining us at Leaders Forum. In this session, we're going to discuss AS Watson's approach to AI transformation. And how this 185 year old company is reconfiguring for the intelligent age. But before we go into the details, um, I want to start at the beginning. Was there an aha moment for you? Was there a moment of realization when it became apparent that AI wasn't just another technology, but had the power to reshape your business, your entire industry, and therefore, it would require an entirely different approach? What did that moment look like? Well, as you said, we are 185 years old. So imagine that uh back in 1841, there's no electricity, no telephones, no internet, and certainly no AI. Uh, and, uh, over the past 185 years, well, basically it wasn't is as old as organized retail, I think. So we went through all the changes, you know, from an independent store to a chain store, and then the chain store becomes a category special. List, and then you from a local retailer becomes an international retailer. And then when the digital age came, and then we have to transform ourselves so that we have we have an Opus model which is offline, uh uh integrated with online and giving that customer experience. The interesting thing is, for all those changes over the two centuries, the change is mainly about like where you sell and how you sell. But then AI is very different. AI is very different because When you think about retail, it's a lot of processes. Oh gosh. You have to manage all the supply chain, move thousands and thousands of products, you have to manage promotions, you have to, uh, execute a lot of, uh, procedures in the company to get it running. In the past it's 10 hours a day, now it's 24/7. Now with AI. It's the first time we are able to look into how we reinvent the model so that we don't just focus on processes, OK. AI can do that, but we focus more on customers experience and problem solving. Now this morning, for example, when you wake up, You told me you run, right? When you wake up, you wouldn't be thinking about that. I need a bottle of vitamins. You think about, ah, today I need to be very energetic, right? On a good day. And when I wake up, when a customer wake up, they wouldn't be thinking about, I need a skincare product. They will be thinking about, oh, I need a healthy Younger looking skin. So that's what customers want. They don't want thousands of products. They just want retailer who understand them and being able to provide the right solutions. So with AI this is the first time that I told my team, this is the first time that we can look beyond just efficiency. It's about reinvention, how we relocate the way we serve customers. So that's when we think AI is transformational. So there wasn't necessarily one moment of friction. It was a kind of overall realization of this how expansive the influence of artificial intelligence would be. Um, so let's talk about how you're doing that. You've made the case that, that leadership, culture, organizational design is going to be what determines the success of implementing AI at scale. Um, and therefore, you've said in past remarks, it must be CEO led. So tell us about AS Watson's enterprise mandate around AI and what CEO ownership really looks like. When, um, decades ago when I led the digital transformation at the time, meaning that we have besides our physical retail experience, we have to build online. And at the time when we integrate technology, uh, either CRM, uh, e-commerce, and a lot of different types of technology. I will call it is vertical, it's top down. So we, we were in the boardroom, we decided we need to have go for this strategy. This is the investment, and then we pass that on to IT and pass that on to HR for example, for training. So then you go function by function and market by market. So that's what I call is vertical. But for AI what I What I see is my vision is that the whole organization needs to move together. So I would call the AI is horizontal. I can't afford the time to let a silo department or one department or a couple of departments to lead it and then try to roll out market by market and function by function. So then I started to um Uh, chair all the meetings. I talked to every market. I have 30 markets, and then I, I talked to every function to start everyone to understand and give them the transparency. There's still some companies where, um, the, the people who work in the company, they are They hesitate whether they should use AI or not use AI. But in AS Watson, we have announced our strategy, uh, last year is a human AI, uh, partnership strategy. And everyone, you should bring the AI assistant with you to work, help you to think faster and smarter. So that's step one. That's why I call it. COLED meaning that I, I would have to lead it because this is not the time to delegate. If you look at AI, I, I know we talk about AI like opportunities, but at the same time you look at AI, it's like crisis. Crisis meaning that technology develops so quickly, both from uh customer and consumer adoption and also all the companies. So if you, you don't do it in the right way quickly, it could be a crisis. But every crisis has opportunities. And at the same time, it allows me to bring in um a different meaning to agility, agility, because when we talk a lot about uh AI and everyone talks agility, we need to be very agile, the world is very uncertain. But agility is not speed. And this is what I told the team. I have a, I brought a video. OK, can I show a video? Yes, please. I think we have a video to demonstrate, uh, what Melina is talking about with regards to agility. Let's cue that. But Holland comes in for a pit stop. Time to refuel and change tires. Lou Moore himself changes the tires. Only 4 crew members, including the driver, are allowed to work on the car. It's a tense time. Holland stays in his seat, anxious to get away. Let's watch. Remember this 67 seconds. Mhm. Oh, just in case you didn't see it the first time. Yeah, this is the world record now is 2 1.8. So here we're looking at AI speed. This is not AI, this is real. Right? But I mean, this represents that, that agility. So, Normally when we see, even if you haven't been to F1, you have seen it on news, for example, you think, wow, Formula One is all about speed. Yeah. But in Formula One, when you have a car running 300 kilometers per hour, if you ask an engineer, Actually, the F1 engineer, the first thing they think about is not how to build a faster car, it's how to reduce the drag. So the weight of the car or the dirty air from the front and other car in the front, or they have uh some radio, uh they can't. clearly, so every millisecond decisions, it's like a drag if you don't do it right. So in an organization, if I can use this example, is that back in the 1950s, it's not, it's not slow, it's 67 seconds, but today it's 2 seconds. So when for an organization to look at AI it is not about how AI bring you speed. For us in AS Watson agility is acceleration minus friction. So, you've mentioned just now that you uh want to move from AI being a source of crisis to AI being a source of opportunity. You've given yourself as CEO the mandate to bring that together across your 30 markets, across your 17,000 stores um worldwide. So, let's talk about a specific Example of how you're doing that, the impact AI is making and and how you're measuring that impact as well. Can you give us a specific example of how you've reconfigured a workflow, a team, or maybe a whole business unit around AI and also the benefits you've seen as a result? Let's get into the weeds a little bit. Sure. Going back into that formula first, when I talked to the team, when I, I, I now see that every function like every, every two months. So the, the, the first question I ask them is not how you use AI. It's like, what friction have you identified? Because that is very important for us to take AI to the next level. And when you talk about ROI, a lot of people will think about AI investment is quite expensive, it's, it's, it's not cheap. So then what is ROI? Now if we focus just on AI efficiency, then we're trying to measure how many hours you save and so that will only just change the percentage. But what we are trying to do and think about is how to reinvent with the human and AI partnership so that we can change the equation. I brought you some equations, so share with you. I hold that up. So traditionally in, in, uh, in any organization. Then you have a, you have a perfect strategy in the boardroom which I pull up the image for Melina please which I would say is like you have a 100% perfect strategy but then as you move down the different levels of the Organization, every hands off, there's some discount to it because it's either uh communication scare people, how do they understand your strategy in the boardroom versus uh some inefficiencies or maybe capabilities. So if you look at the first number. is 50.4. Right. So meaning that if you, if you have a 100% perfect strategy in the boardroom, it could become 50. My customer can only experience like 50% of what we want to do. Now with AI you see the middle, this illustration is when you apply AI to organization, then it improves efficiency, right? And it could be even better than efficiency can cut off one of the process. So you see the formula actually have one less number in it and then that's nearly perfect. So then you get 99, quite close. So meaning that AI efficiency will help you to improve the percentages. But what we are trying to do in AS Watson is The human plus AI partnership because when you use AI to give us the speed, the scale, the intelligence, and the human brings, you know, that that context, we know how, what our customers need at what time. We, uh, we, the human also have that meaning and connection, how we provide a human touch to the surface. Then the formula is the equation completely changed. We can generate more value than just improving the percentage of every step. So this is how I explain this within the company. Agility is acceleration minus friction. You can't accelerate the pedal and then you have friction. So when we transform, we also need to look at the whole new way of doing every process and then focus much more on our customers. And what metrics are you looking at to measure the success of that? What we try to do, one, first of all, the first one, maybe a lot, maybe not a lot of companies do that. We measure the colleagues' engagement rate. So we, since we started um to promote human AI strategy in the company, we always do colleagues engagement rate, meaning that we, we ask the colleagues, you know, how they, whether they like work, what is the part they like, etc. But then the score has jumped up a lot in further to be in the uh several departments because the team leaders told us that when we started to use more AI. The colleagues love their job. They, they are able to have more interactions than facing the screen and that changes the engagement of our people working in the company to start with. And then we started to then put through into more customer front uh initiatives, then we measured customer love score. So for example, if we are able to free up more time for our store, our colleagues in the store to service the customer, then if you If you have shopped with Watsons, for example, then we will be asking you right after your shopping to give us your experience. How was that service? And we continue to see that customers love score improving. And this is uh not the usual way that people would measure AI because score, yeah, customer love score and our people love score in the company. So, let's talk about that engagement among your staff. So, as we mentioned at the top, AS Watson this year is celebrating its 185th anniversary. Um, it's an incredible achievement, almost two centuries. So, how do you tool and retool for new technologies while still keeping that heritage, that culture, that DNA that has driven your success for almost two centuries? How do you get that balance right between um embracing what's new without throwing out what has gone before? We actually start with the purpose of the company. Um, back to a decade ago, and we, we are Asian-based international company. So in the early days, we don't, it's not like some of the, uh, maybe the European or US company where you have a vision statement and a mission statement. We're very focused on like generating profit. So then, but then a decade ago, I started to see that we, we needed to transform the, the company. And it's not just a company that is just in Hong Kong. We're in 30 markets in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. So how do you link everyone together in terms of their focus without losing focus, whatever technology you put in a company. So then we, uh, I put in a team of young managers, not for a consult consultancy, but then we would brainstorm what what should be our purpose in AS Watson and in one hour they came out of the room and they told me with a flip chart at the time, sorry, still like 1010 years ago, a while ago they have flip chart and then a smiley, they said, Melina, I think the purpose of AS Watson. should be to put a smile on customers' faces. It's easy to understand what in whatever languages, it's easier to understand whether you are working in the office, you're working in the warehouse, or you work in the stores, and this is what we believe in. And within 30 minutes, we said this is going to be our purpose. Hence the customer love score. Exactly. So we don't have mystery shopper, it's customer love score, we just ask our customer. So we, we basically, we put our purpose in the center of everything we do. So here is AI when we even when we put in, we have to do supply chain optimization a couple of years ago when we start to have, have our Opus or model, etc. Then even you go to the warehouse, I, I talk about customer love, because if we are able to manage all the inventory on Time and being able to do the right delivery, we put a smile on customers' faces. And then the and then the the warehouse team start to understand what they do. They are not hiding somewhere in a very hot uh um premises to move products. They're actually putting a smile on customers' faces. Likewise, every function we go through that everyone knows this is the thing they do has a contribution to customer love. I, I believe when the company has a purpose. Whatever technology is not going to take away that focus. Absolutely. So customer satisfaction, customer love being a single-minded obsession that drives every decision you make, whether that's staffing, whether that's technology, and that being at its core. Um, I want to move on to talking about um employee love and, and engagement there. So you've talked before about AI as a tool for inclusion, which is interesting and, and counter. some oft-cited narratives around AI and how it could potentially um exacerbate existing human biases and so on. But at AS Watson, you've reported that AI powered automation at a warehouse in China has actually helped to increase the female workforce. You're, of course, on our most powerful women Asia list, uh, Melina, tell us about this and, and tell us the impact the tech has had. I was in Foshan two months ago. Uh, I went to our stores and then I usually try to make time to go to the warehouse. It's a bit remote, but then it's important. When I, I, I have read a lot of documents and videos and everything about the, the, the automation and the AI we put in the infantry forecasting, etc. I've seen that, but until the time that I was, I walked into the warehouse. I look around, it's not like you have many people moving boxes anymore. Everything is so orderly because we put in the different automation. And the thing is, the team told me that in the past, the warehouse, like a typical warehouse, we, we have 8 in in China and 80 around the world, but usually it's about 80% of our team would be males because we do require a lot of heavy lifting. We have big boxes. But now because of automation, uh, all, all, both males and females, they don't need to lift anything very heavy. We ensure that the robot can do that because it's for for our colleagues' wellness. So then in that warehouse, we have 62% of our colleagues, they are Now females and that was something that really positively surprised me of how technology can also bring more diversity in the company and actually in our technology team in AS Wilson we are our senior leaders 50% male and 50%. And females we have evolved that over the years uh for even for the technology team. We're here, Melina at the Fortune Leaders Forum. So I want to close by asking you a question on the leadership choices you've had to make enabled to do everything you've just been talking about. What has been the hardest leadership choices required to land that AI transformation? What must leaders be willing to change to get an ROI on AI? The hard decision for a lot of leaders, or maybe I'll start with the biggest risk of all the leaders with this type of AI, um, technology is We put AI to improve uh today's process. So basically you get a better version of yesterday. Uh, but we lose sight on how we can use AI, which is really transformative technology, to help us to reinvent how we serve our customers. Um, and the choices sometimes we will have to make is we focus a lot on the numbers, like how much we need to invest. But my starting point was actually focus a lot on human. What's the role of human going forward? Uh, is it really that we with AI we're going to cut out 30% of our workforce, or actually it's going, we are going to increase the quality of our people intelligence. Uh, in the past, it's just not possible to handle that amount of data within a quick speed and to analyze things and make decisions. But now with AI help people can actually play a much higher quality role. So initially there was something that is not easy to explain to the board. And what we are trying to, to think about also is not just an ROI for, for this year, how many hours we save. It's about how many, how many new ideas we have generated. Since last year October, we, we, we launched our strategy, our human AI strategy last October. And since last October, Not even a year. We have generated a lot more new ideas that we can put out in the market for the customers and for the way we, we serve. This is the kind of value we are trying, we are trying to, um, to reinvent. So this is, I, I, we have a lot of leaders in the room. And I do hope that you can focus more on the human side. And for me, my, my vision for AS Watson is that I would love to be able To create a sustainable company that's powered by technology. But with a human soul and going forward, I think retail is going to be more human. It's not going to be less. That's a perfect note to finish on. Thank you so much, Melina, for talking to us about AS Watson CEO-led enterprise level AI transformation, about customer love as a metric for success, and finally the difficult leadership decisions required to get there. Please join me in thanking Doctor Melina Nay. Thank you. Thank you so much.

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