Speaker Bios:

Amit

Amit is the Founder and CEO of Climate-AI Ventures, a venture studio dedicated to catalyzing and accelerating new companies to make planetary scale impact in combating climate change utilizing the latest advances in AI. Previously, Amit was the Founder and CEO of AutoGrid where he led the company from its inception in 2012 to successful acquisition by Schneider Electric in 2022. AutoGrid Flex has been ranked #1 for Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) and Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) by independent industry analysts for several years and has been adopted in over 20 countries managing more than 8-GW of VPPs. Prior to AutoGrid, Amit was the Director of Smart Grid Research in Modeling & Simulation at Stanford University, and a serial entrepreneur who successfully built and sold several tech enterprises.

Amit and his work have been recognized with several awards, including Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, Bloomberg New Energy Pioneer, and the EDN’s Innovation for the Year. Amit earned a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur.

George Serafeim

George Serafeim is the Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he co-leads the Impact-Weighted Accounts Project and the Climate and Sustainability Impact AI Lab. He is currently teaching the course “Risks, Opportunities and Investments in an Era of Climate Change” that he designed for the elective curriculum of the MBA program and the course “Financial Reporting and Control” in the required MBA curriculum. Professor Serafeim’s research increasingly focuses on the intersection between the sustainability and the digital transformation. Over the years his research has span four main areas: business strategies in the context of climate change transition risk and opportunities, measuring and analyzing purpose inside organizations, ESG data analytics and strategies, and the role of leadership and governance in corporate scandals and misconduct.

Professor Serafeim earned his doctorate in business administration at Harvard Business School, where his doctoral dissertation was recognized with the Wyss Award for excellence in research. He received a master’s degree in accounting and finance from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was awarded the Emeritus Professors’ Prize for best academic performance. He grew up in Athens, Greece.