CFOs to AI: earn budget or else, Chevron's Eimear Bonner says

The panel discussion, held at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara on Tuesday, brought together finance chiefs from three very different companies: an oil major, an enterprise software firm and a stock exchange operator. Their common thread was a insistence that AI spending survive the same capital-allocation discipline as any other corporate investment.

Chevron's Eimear Bonner, who becomes president of the company's oil, products and gas business on Jan. 1, framed the test in terms of measurable business performance, whether that means unlocking oil reserves, reducing costs or shortening cycle times. She also noted Chevron sits on the supply side of the AI boom, through a planned 2.67-gigawatt natural gas project to power a Microsoft data center in West Texas.

ServiceNow's Gina Mastantuono said CFOs are moving beyond simple revenue and profitability gains to weigh the cost of inaction, and that the company expects $500 million in savings this year largely from using its own products. Nasdaq's Sarah Youngwood described a tiered framework and pointed to the exchange's decade-old cloud and algorithmic AI investments as positioning it to serve clients today, citing data from 3,500 institutions representing $12 trillion in assets.