Corporate Leaders Reshape AI Strategy: Walmart Focuses on Retail AI Ads, Chevron Emphasizes Finance-Led Value Creation

Walmart's chief growth officer Seth Dallaire described how AI is changing the company's advertising strategy, emphasizing that ads within its Sparky shopping assistant must be contextually relevant rather than interruptive. Walmart's ads business grew 46% last year to $6.4 billion, and the company is learning as much from how customers phrase queries to Sparky — often in more detailed, conversational ways — as it is from the ads themselves. Meanwhile, Chevron CFO Eimear Bonner, the company's first female CTO before moving to finance, argues that CFOs are uniquely positioned to determine where AI genuinely creates value rather than simply funding experiments. Chevron uses Microsoft Copilot and Anthropic's Claude across its roughly 3,500-person finance organization for tasks including investor relations data synthesis, SOX audit controls, and forecasting. The company has cataloged about 15 enterprise AI workflows and runs a 'moonshot' program targeting high-impact projects like its proprietary ApEX tool for oil and gas exploration. A broader workforce readiness survey by Skillsoft found that while 86% of employees already use AI tools, only one in four feel prepared to do so, with a 53-point gap between leader confidence and employee readiness — a challenge both Walmart and Chevron are actively working to address through training and governance.