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.

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.