Franziska “Fran” Bell became Home Depot’s chief technology officer in April, after most recently serving as chief data, AI, and analytics officer at automaker Ford Motor. Eleven months before her appointment, 27-year Home Depot veteran Angie Brown ascended to the role of chief information officer. And yet another key technology executive is Jordan Broggi, who became executive vice president of customer experience and the online channel in June 2024.

Some of the top AI applications these executives oversee include an AI assistant called Magic Apron and a customer service AI system built with Google Cloud, the latter recently tested in 50 stores and proving during the pilot program that the voice agents could understand what a customer was calling about in 10 seconds. Internally, Microsoft Copilot has been made available to office workers, Anthropic’s Claude coding system is helping speed up software development, and machine learning algorithms are guiding more efficient workflows for store associates.

Brown says that all the AI investments need to link to one of three core priorities: support merchandising within the physical stores, cultivate an interconnected retail ecosystem that involves digital channels, and grow business with contractors, builders, and other professionals who tend to spend a lot more at Home Depot than do-it-yourself (DIY) shoppers.

And while some technologists have recently aimed to focus their AI efforts on fewer, bigger use cases, Brown says she doesn’t approach her investments with such a restrictive mindset.

“Am I going to limit the number  of use cases that can leverage AI to solve a problem?” Brown rhetorically asks. “I don’t want to. If AI can help solve those problems that we have already identified from a business perspective, I’m not going to hold them back.”

Home Depot, ranked No. 25 on the Fortune 500, is among the retailers that have shown resilient sales even amid a muted economy and inflation fears from the war in Iran that have dampened consumer sentiment. Last month, the company reported that net sales grew 4.8% in the fiscal first-quarter from year-ago levels, though it acknowledged that homeowners were delaying larger projects due to worries about higher gas prices, layoffs, and other economic uncertainties. 

Home Depot and rival Lowe’s must also confront a weak housing market, which has been stung by stubbornly high interest rates and rising building material expenses. These headwinds are particularly inopportune for the spring market, traditionally the busiest for the housing sector.

The company’s top technologists divide up their work by giving Brown oversight of the company’s technology strategy, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and software development. Broggi oversees Home Depot’s $25 billion e-commerce business, merchandising, and the customer experience for digital channels, while Bell steers product management, data, and AI.

One of Broggi’s biggest projects has been Magic Apron, which can answer shopper questions and summarize product reviews and debuted in March 2025. Magic Apron’s generative AI capabilities are trained on Home Depot’s product data and contextualized, but Broggi said that when it launched, “the consumers loved it and the pros hated it.”

Home Depot learned that the web-based Magic Apron system was asking pros questions that were too simplistic. Home Depot pulled the pro version offline and is in the process of fine tuning the large language models for a better user experience for that group of shoppers.

Magic Apron can also field questions from the retailer’s employees. Brown is in the early stages of rolling out the functionality to their smartphones and another upgrade down the road will make the tool multilingual. 

“Generative AI is becoming more and more a part of everybody’s life,” says Brown, explaining why these AI assistant tools are being adopted by employees.

Another AI use case is internally known as “order intelligence,” which looks backward at millions of data points from Home Depot’s past deliveries and assesses a risk score that takes into account problems such as whether the property may require a gate code, or perhaps sits on a winding, narrow path where a 22-foot delivery truck is better than a 36-foot truck. The system can proactively reach out to customers with any potential problems and provide more accurate delivery times.

Broggi says customers don’t know or even care much that generative AI is working in the background. “They just want their stuff delivered on time, complete, undamaged, and with clear communication,” he added.

Another area of focus is developing a generative engine optimization strategy, known as GEO, as consumers spend more time shopping on AI chatbots like Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Claude. Home Depot allows shoppers to buy its goods on ChatGPT, while also supporting Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, which advocates for a common language to support agentic commerce.

Broggi says that thus far, the retail strategy for the AI shopping platforms hasn’t been clearly defined. The AI companies developing the platforms have changed priorities a couple of times, he said. “They’ve got to try to figure out how they want to go to market.”

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

Workers who don’t embrace AI are more likely to be laid off. Despite all the hoopla about the “AI jobs apocalypse”—heightened by many firms across tech and elsewhere linking workforce reductions to AI—a new study published by Gallup found that only 1% of laid-off workers say AI was a factor in their job loss. This factor was vastly dwarfed by organizational restructuring, budget cuts, and economic conditions, which are all far more standard explanations historically used by corporations to justify trimming jobs. But a look under the hood of these stats found that currently employed workers were more likely to be frequent AI users than their laid-off counterparts (28% versus 22%, which Gallup said is a “statistically significant difference.” The gap is even higher for employees in the technology industry, Bloomberg reports, a sector that’s been badly hit by layoffs in 2026, including at Meta Platforms, Salesforce, and Cisco Systems.

After Anthropic’s model shutdown, should AI companies be wary of further interventions? A crackdown at Anthropic has led to a flurry of news out of Washington, including a report from Politico that the Claude maker is working with the White House to develop a framework that would assess the security flaws of its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. The Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models were taken offline on June 13 after the U.S. government barred Anthropic from distributing the models to any foreign nationals, though President Donald Trump said relations between the government and Anthropic have gotten better. Some experts say model makers should be cognizant that the government could weigh in on AI again. “Now that the Commerce Department has done it, no company can rule out that they’re going to do it again,” Kate Koren, a deputy director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Bloomberg.

Getty’s low share price gets a lift from OpenAI. Following a disclosure over the weekend that the stock photography agency would license its images in the search and discovery features of ChatGPT, investors more than doubled the value of Getty’s shares, though not such a mighty feat given the stock closed at 61 cents on Thursday. Still, Getty’s business model was viewed as particularly threatened by AI due to the rapid rise of image generators, but by monetizing a licensing pact with OpenAI, Getty may be showing Wall Street there’s a path forward to generate revenue from AI. Separately, OpenAI has announced some product news updates in recent days, including an updated version of its cybersecurity model and continues to move forward with plans to turn ChatGPT into an all-purpose “super app” that can handle both simple tasks and more complex requests.

Top AI talent shuffles among hyperscalers. There’s been a flurry of AI executive and researcher changes among the leading AI companies, including news from Business Insider that Noam Shazeer, the founder of Character.AI and VP of engineering and co-lead of Google’s Gemini, would depart to join OpenAI. Axios, meanwhile, reported that an AI policy advisor for the Trump administration, Dean Ball, was also heading to OpenAI. And John Jumper, vice president of Google DeepMind and winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on AI, is departing after nearly nine years for rival Anthropic, according to Bloomberg. Fortune, reporting on the departures at Google, says the loss of top talent is raising questions about the tech giant's position within the AI race.

ADOPTION CURVE

More than most C-suite leaders, CMOs control their own destiny on AI. As advertisers and marketers are mingling in Cannes for the industry’s most prestigious ad festival, a new survey finds that roughly half of chief marketing officers say they control their AI investment decisions. This group also feels greater pressure to deliver results, with 94% saying CEO expectations have “increased significantly over the past two years,” according to a survey of 300 global CMOs conducted by consulting giant BCG.

“With that great power comes great responsibility,” Mark Abraham, a managing director and senior partner at BCG, tells Fortune. “It's not just around productivity gains anymore, it's also about driving growth.” He adds that only a third of CMOs are actually doing the difficult work that’s needed to propel an AI transformation: investing in the tech stack, upskilling workers, and deploying AI agents.

Roughly four in ten CMOs say they are using generative AI only to assist human workers with discrete tasks, with just under a third reporting they’ve moved to agent-led workflows. Only 8% report that they run campaigns in which multiple agents operate autonomously.

CMOs are focusing a lot more on responsible AI usage and ethics training and Abraham says this is an acknowledgement that marketers cannot just hire externally to fill talent gaps. So-called “AI champions”—employees that are enthusiastic about experimentation with the technology—are becoming stars within the department. “They’re often not the most senior people; they’re in the weeds, they’re trying new tools,” says Abraham. “They’re also identifying what the weaknesses and issues with them are, so that the marketing function can work with the tech team to say, ‘Okay, these are the three new tools that are going to help us leapfrog in content creation.’”

Courtesy of BCG

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

- C3 AI is seeking a CIO and VP, based in Redwood City, California. Posted salary range: $285K-$325K/year.

- Oregon Tool is seeking a VP of global technology, based in Portland, Oregon. Posted salary range: $240K-$260K/year.

- REI is seeking a VP of technology, digital commerce, and customer, based in Seattle. Posted salary range: $275K-$360K/year.

- Spectrum is seeking a head of technology for the intelligence ventures unit, based in New York. Posted salary range: $263.2K-$393.8K/year.

Hired:

- Dollar General announced nine new executive appointments, including the promotion of Tom Hutchins to the role of CTO and Travis Nixon to serve as chief data and AI officer. Prior to joining the discount retailer in September 2024 as SVP of technology, Hutchins worked in retail technology for 25 years, including at Tractor Supply and Office Depot. Nixon, who joined Dollar General in 2025, previously worked at tech firms such as Dropbox, Meta, and Microsoft.

- NASA promoted Sean Gallagher to serve as CIO, responsible for the space agency’s entire portfolio of IT products and services. Gallagher had most recently served as deputy CIO for operations at NASA’s headquarters in Washington. He also previously served as the CIO of the agency’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. Prior to joining NASA in 2022, Gallagher worked at Booz Allen Hamilton as a senior associate.

- Crowell & Moring named Andrea Markstrom as CIO. He joined the international law firm after most recently serving as CIO at another firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. He has held executive technology and information roles at several firms, including Taft Stettinius & Hollister and Blank Rome.

- FirstEnergy appointed Daniel Puscas to the role of CIO, joining the electric utility after most recently serving as a partner at Fortium Partners, which fills technology C-suite gaps with interim or project-based executive talent. Puscas also previously served as a director at consulting firm AlixPartners, where he served in multiple CIO and chief operating officer roles.

- Cincinnati Financial promoted Ryan M. Osborn to the role of CIO, as John S. Kellington will retire from the position on August 7. Osborn initially joined the insurer in 2000 and most recently served as the director of shared services and the company’s architecture program.

- El Car Wash announced several executive appointments, including naming Ganesh Matha to the role of CTO. Matha joined the express car wash chain from hospitality chain MGM Resorts, where he most recently served as a vice president. Previously, Matha served as a senior manager for Walt Disney.

- Elauwit announced the appointment of Nick Jones as CIO and chief operating officer. He joins WiFi service provider after most recently serving as VP and COO at television systems provider World Cinema. He also previously served as CEO at outsourced managed services provider NJT.

- InnerActiv appointed Johnny Collins to the role of CTO, joining the cybersecurity firm from its peer Halcyon, where he most recently served as director of intelligence operations for its ransomware research center. Previously, Collins served as a managing director at KPMG and a director at Mandiant.