The systems that sustain human life — clean water, healthy soil, stable supply chains — are the same systems that drive economic growth. For a long time, sustainability lived in its own lane, apart from core business strategy. The cost of keeping them separate is now too high to ignore.
AI is giving us the ability to understand these systems faster and more clearly than ever before — from optimizing clean energy portfolios and eliminating packaging waste, to putting intelligence directly in the hands of farmers, fishers, and producers who've never had access to it. And the organizations making real progress aren't doing it alone. They're building coalitions, sharing what works and what doesn't, because no one controls the water, the grid, or a fair supply chain by themselves.
In this episode, AWS's Randi Larson sits down with Kara Hurst, Chief Sustainability Officer at Amazon, and Felipe Arango, CEO of Fair Trade USA, to explore what happens when sustainability stops being a parallel initiative and becomes the infrastructure that commerce actually runs on.
They explore:
• Why the systems that sustain human life and the systems that drive economic growth are the same infrastructure — and what that means for business leaders
• How AI is being applied to some of the world's biggest problems — from reforestation and disaster relief to packaging optimization and water efficiency
• What an "agency revolution" looks like for 1.5 million farmers and workers gaining access to intelligence for the first time
• Why "fair data" is the next frontier of equitable commerce
• What it looks like when fairness isn't a feature of a supply chain but how the system is designed to run
• The business logic behind not gatekeeping sustainability — and why collective action moves faster than competitive advantage
• Why you don't need a perfect AI strategy to start applying it to the problems that matter most
Whether you're a business leader connecting your sustainability roadmap to your AI roadmap, an executive trying to understand how supply chain resilience and social impact drive long-term growth, or someone building systems that need to work for people and planet — this conversation reframes what's possible when you stop waiting and start building.
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