Sustainability leads turn climate ambition into climate action. They wrangle data from across their organizations, cut through regulatory complexity, and make the internal case for impactful climate decisions.
AI is helping teams accelerate this work, but there’s still an adoption gap: in our annual survey of 200+ global sustainability leaders, 37% highlighted a skills gap as a barrier to using AI for sustainability. Most sustainability teams are small—between 1-5 people—which can limit peer-to-peer learning and growth.
That's why we created the Watershed AI Fellowship, an intensive, hands-on program that combines AI upskilling and community to help corporate sustainability professionals take full advantage of AI’s potential for positive impact.
More than 400 people applied—100 on the first day alone. Today, we're introducing the first cohort of Watershed AI Fellows: sustainability leaders who are already putting AI to work and want to push what's possible.
Meet the Fellows
The cohort spans 20 companies across industries from consumer goods to financial services, logistics to tech. Each Fellow brings ambitious AI use cases—like scaling supplier engagement, forecasting emissions, and identifying decarbonization opportunities—that other sustainability practitioners can learn from.
Sabina Anderberg (Prudential) · Emma Bayliss-Chan (Royal Mail) · Christian Boothby (Smiths Group) · Kimberly Buncle (GitLab) · Michelle Calderon (Costco) · Nadia Carroll (Specialized) · Lauren Esposito (Booking Holdings) · Nicole Folstad (FedEx) · Sophia Gluck (Okta) · Felyn Goh (Cargill) · Katie Hogan (Shamrock Foods) · Madison Mckenna (Spotify) · Joshua Papachristidis (Pearson) · Kyle Robertson (Hain Celestial Group) · Jason Schneemann (General Motors) · Lindsey Schwartz (Yahoo) · Caitlyn Smith (Macmillan Publishers) · Christine Trella (Cimpress) · Dana Wilke (Visa) · Katharina Wirth (IVC Evidensia)
What’s next
Watershed customers have already seen significant efficiency gains from sustainability AI—including cutting data ingestion time by 87%—and these gains are starting to translate into concrete decarbonization decisions. Smiths Group finished its California SB 261 disclosure in two days. Burton used Watershed Product Footprints to model a hypothetical material switch that would cut 84,000 kg of CO2e from its scope 3 emissions and save $130,000.
The Fellowship will scale these results across the field by giving sustainability leads tools to build with and a community to build in. As the first cohort progresses, we'll share what they discover, from new use cases to standards for responsible AI.
We plan to expand to future cohorts in the coming months. For an early look at key sustainability AI use cases in action, check out Watershed’s virtual AI Academy.
