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

0:02I live in an apartment building in Brooklyn and one of the main topics of conversation is the price of our energy bills right now.

0:08Eimear Bonner: 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.

0:25Hello, 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. Ima 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.

1:19And that project alone could deliver power roughly equivalent to 2 million homes. Bonner 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, they're already very pricey energy bills are about to skyrocket. Ima, 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 US around talks there could help stabilise 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?

2:05Eimear Bonner: Well, thanks, Ellie, for having me. It's buzzing here in New York at UNGA Week. Look, things are very volatile and very uncertain. And that's something that we don't try and predict as a company. And 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?

2:46Eimear Bonner: 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 risk 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.

3:28When delivering supply to

3:30Eimear Bonner: the market, to delivering products to customers, 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 rig 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.

4:06Eimear Bonner: It had long duration growth possibilities. It was a low cost operation, three low cost operations and higher returns. So those three things came together to give us confidence that we could grow our investment in Venezuela. So when we think about Venezuela, we have three 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 had in the portfolio.

4:48Eimear Bonner: 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. So within three years, President Trump is no longer president. 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.

5:19Eimear Bonner: 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 a gross$7 billion of commitment. And what we'll unlock at a gross level is roughly 9 billion barrels of commercial reserves. Before becoming CFO, you were CTO. So you're particularly uniquely placed to talk about what we're seeing now with the AI boom and its potential impact on the energy market.

6:08So every week is bringing another story about AI agents and what they can, they can't do, how they might misbehave. AI is now selling utilities protection against that to try and guarantee safety. You're about to sell power to these companies. 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?

6:31Eimear Bonner: So we see the opportunity in two areas. One, how to leverage the technology to improve performance, and there's one focus area. The other area is how to power the energy, the AI growth, and the energy that's needed for the AI growth. We're playing on both sides of the equation. I'd start with leveraging AI. 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 decisions on how to increase recovery.

7:15Eimear Bonner: We're using it across the organization for personal productivity and team productivity. How are you using it? 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, you know, one of the challenges is to discern what really matters and what doesn't. And so it's really helping me to discern what 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 make.

7:49One 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?

8:04Eimear Bonner: Well, I can only 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 a third party 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.

8:42Eimear Bonner: You know, for us, we have to think every day about cybersecurity risk, risks in general, safety risk, health risk. And so, you know, this framework helped us think about the new risks associated with AI. So everything that we've developed is within 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.

9:19And 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?

9:39Eimear Bonner: We hear the concerns. 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 was strategic petroleum reserve releases, there was sanctioned barrels that were on the water. And so all of that supply buffered the price for a while.

10:26Eimear Bonner: And so now a lot of that has 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 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 as 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.

11:07And that's what you were same with Venezuela.

11:09Eimear Bonner: 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 third quarter, we shared the production records that we are achieving and the refinery throughput record. So that's how we're part of the solution is bringing supply and refinery throughput. And I think that is the message that operationally as best as you can, but you don't, you know, the prices is to an extent out of your means.

11:55Yes.

11:55Eimear Bonner: We don't control price. 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, Ima. So you started as an offshore petroleum engineer in the UK, my homeland. And then you went on to become Chevron's first female chief technology officer in 2021. And then first female CFO. Not the first female CFO. Okay, that's good news that someone else 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?

12:32Eimear Bonner: It was, you know, exciting milestone. There were a few things that happened at the same time. I moved to Houston. I was part of the executive leadership team and I was the CTO. So all of those things together was just, it was such a privilege to get that opportunity. So it was significant on many, many levels. It gave me the opportunity to leverage all of the operational experience I've had from multiple parts of the world, the UK, Asia, and Eurasia, and really think about what was important in terms of the priorities for technology. And so what I learned through the role was that technology can make what you think is impossible, possible.

13:18Eimear Bonner: 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 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 what I learned in the role and had a lot of fun in that role. And then 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?

13:58Eimear Bonner: And I think that question came from that time. It's been a pleasure to speak to you. Thanks, Eli. 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.

14:33for$1.95 billion. Soda! Stop spiraling. Get a poppy. In the multi-billion dollar soda market, three companies dominate the shelves, and breaking in is notoriously difficult. Poppy defied the odds. Five. Three days is the cycle. If you can't hit within that three days to 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 Allison Ellsworth, how do you outmaneuver legacy giants, survive near bankruptcy, and execute one of the largest consumer brand exits in beverage history?

15:13A 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 &L. And in a day, no. CEOs are incredible and they have amazing vision and I adored ours at Poppy. 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 loved every aspect of it. There wasn't a can that I didn't design with my team, like all of those things.

15:56And 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. Why? 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.

16:30We were looking at buying superwell ads. 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, like 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 that had been so seasoned in it before.

17:00So you can watch the full interview with Alison Ellsworth on our Fortune YouTube channel and we'll also drop the link 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 poppy flavor is. I'll see you next week.

17:25Thank you.