The first wave of IT-led sustainability was about measurement — getting visibility into emissions, consumption, and waste. The next wave is about transformation: using technology to fundamentally redesign how enterprises use energy, manage water, renew materials, and address risk. AI is simultaneously opening new possibilities and compounding risk. This panel brings together four technology sustainability leaders with decades of combined experience driving transformation across sectors and geographies. We’ll examine what the next wave of progress requires: where the leverage points lie; and how IT leaders can navigate political headwinds and sovereignty tensions.

In 2022, the UK took an ambitious step: founding the Government Digital Sustainability Alliance (GDSA), a cross-departmental body built to drive coordinated sustainability action across the entire UK government and its one million civil servants. In this session, two of the architects of this national effort will share what they've learned — the structural hurdles of cross-departmental coordination, the strategies that have moved stakeholders from indifference to action, and how AI sustainability has emerged as a key point of entry. We'll review the newly finalized UK Government Digital Sustainability Strategy and discuss its goals, implementation, and anticipated outcomes for constituents, including tech vendors.  We'll conclude with the latest emerging sustainability guidance for the AI systems lifecycle and the influence of national AI sovereignty goals.

As cloud and AI spending continues to accelerate, leading organizations are discovering that the same actions that reduce technology costs can also reduce environmental impact. This session brings together enterprise practitioners and industry experts to share real-world examples of how GreenOps and FinOps are delivering measurable business results. You will hear success stories from Greenpixie client organizations including Mastercard, ABB, and ABN AMRO, highlighting practical approaches to optimizing cloud infrastructure, improving resource utilization, and embedding sustainability into everyday technology operations. The panel will also explore Sustainable AI—one of the fastest-growing drivers of both IT costs and emissions. Learn all about these leading organizations' actionable strategies for achieving the "double win" of lower costs and improved sustainability performance across cloud and AI environments.

How do organizations demonstrate real ROI from sustainability investments in technology? This session will explore how IT sustainability is becoming a business and technology imperative, delivering measurable returns through operational efficiency, AI optimization, cloud strategy, talent attraction, risk management, and long-term business resilience.

AI is on its way to becoming your company’s operating model. But most organizations are scaling AI on top of governance structures that were never built for it. The result: shadow AI, accountability fog, data naivety, and vendor dependency dressed up as strategy. Meanwhile, the communities least equipped to absorb AI’s failures are the ones most exposed to its harms.

The question facing every technology and sustainability leader today is not whether to adopt AI — it’s whether your institution has earned the right to scale it. SustainableIT Research Principal Rick Pastore sits down with Ron Guerrier — Chief Technology Officer at Save the Children,four-time Fortune 500 CIO, former Illinois Secretary of Innovation, CIO Hall of Fame inductee, and as of May 2026, a USC doctoral researcher whose dissertation on Digital Equity in the Age of AI proposes a Hippocratic Oath for AI governance. Guerrier brings a practitioner’s rigor and a researcher’s discipline to the most consequential governance challenge of our time. His message is pro-innovation and unapologetically practical: govern the data, challenge the model, bind the automation, keep humans accountable, and enable real recourse. That is how organizations earn the right to scale.