Most enterprise AI strategy looks the same on a slide: pillars, a center of excellence, a list of pilots. Chandhu Nair has to turn that picture into shipped product across more than 1,700 stores.

As SVP of Store Technology, AI, Data and Innovation at Lowe's, Chandhu runs everything through one filter: shop, sell, work. If a project doesn't land in one of those three buckets, it doesn't get funded. That discipline produced six lighthouse areas and 20 crown jewel use cases, scored on ROI, technology readiness, organizational change readiness, and brand risk.

We get into what that looks like in practice. How the Milo Companion app started as a store scorecard tool and got redirected by the head of store operations, who said it would only matter if it could answer questions about every product in the building. How Chandhu pitched a two-store pilot at 60% accuracy and grew it into five million associate questions. How watching associates talk to their Zebra devices instead of typing forced a roadmap pivot to two-way voice. And how Pro Companion cut call prep from two hours to minutes, while Materials AI turns a contractor's handwritten list into a quote in minutes instead of days.

The Watson Weekly interview is sponsored by Avalara - the agentic AI platform automating global tax and compliance for leading eCommerce brands. For more details: https://avalara.watsonweekly.com.

Also in this one: why Chandhu measures leading indicators before lagging ones, when he kills a project, and what the Foundation Building Materials and Artisan Design Group acquisitions mean for agents sourcing across three catalogs at once.

His closing advice is worth the listen on its own. Don't take any of this as a playbook.