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Leveraging AI For Sustainability – with Mandi McReynolds, Chief Sustainability Officer at Workiva

Electric Ladies Podcast - Women Leaders Discuss Careers, Trends, Technologies and Innovation in Energy, Climate, and Corporate Responsibility

Release Date: 10/07/2025

People Leveraging Carbon Markets To Keep Their Land – Stacey Solie, Coproducer of the Documentary People Leveraging Carbon Markets To Keep Their Land – Stacey Solie, Coproducer of the Documentary "From The Ground Up: Voices From The Carbon Market"

Electric Ladies Podcast - Women Leaders Discuss Careers, Trends, Technologies and Innovation in Energy, Climate, and Corporate Responsibility

“If you don't tell your stories, then no one will ever know, …Basically I just said, I think we should tell the positive stories and we should do it through the people…Let's actually just go and meet the people at all levels from the people that are involved in the projects and organizing them. Also the people that are participating in them and benefiting from them and find out what they say. How does this change your life? Is this actually happening? Did trees actually get planted? Did this well actually get plugged?." Stacey Solie on Electric Ladies Podcast   Who are the regular...

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Electric Ladies Podcast - Women Leaders Discuss Careers, Trends, Technologies and Innovation in Energy, Climate, and Corporate Responsibility

“We realized early on with our digital transformation that really what we're trying to do is digitize processes and …we really want to transform. But the people that own these business processes are stakeholders, they're in sales, they're in operations, they're in HR, finance, supply chain, so we needed them before we could get started on digitally architecting a solution. So… we take a senior leader from a function and ops or a business unit and ask them to be the business process leader…. and we match you to an IT leader who's also quite senior. So these are VP SVP roles and they're...

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Electric Ladies Podcast - Women Leaders Discuss Careers, Trends, Technologies and Innovation in Energy, Climate, and Corporate Responsibility

“Try as best as you can not to be fear-driven. I think we are so driven by fear that we're never going to be enough, that we aren't going to contribute enough….(Y)ou actually are enough just as you are, right? Take this day, do what you can. Impact the people around you.…Become partners in your career with unlikely people, people who don't think like you, people who aren't doing the same career as you. You'll get a lot more joy out of, I think, your career because of the cross-pollination.” Dr. Katherine Gergen-Barnett on Electric Ladies Podcast This Earth Day, we want to share...

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Electric Ladies Podcast - Women Leaders Discuss Careers, Trends, Technologies and Innovation in Energy, Climate, and Corporate Responsibility

“You see corporate procurement of clean energy, predominantly renewable energy, but there's fleet investments, there are efficiency improvements in buildings and on campuses underway….but it was a little different than what we'd seen in recent years. It wasn't just solar and wind. There was an interest in 24/7 reliable clean energy in particular by the tech industries, which won't surprise you, but things like nuclear, geothermal, other integrated technologies like solar and storage…So that's kind of an interesting set of dynamics because it's really diversifying the players in the...

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Electric Ladies Podcast - Women Leaders Discuss Careers, Trends, Technologies and Innovation in Energy, Climate, and Corporate Responsibility

“If there are people who are willing to talk to you about it, the first thing you got to do is listen….I grew up in a very rural area and it's very conservative also. And when I go home, I don't talk about climate change. I do talk about what's going on with hunting season. 'Oh, there's no deer this year. Why do you think that is? Tell me about the rain'….It is again about that pivoting and you have to understand what's important to the people you're talking to… I might say, 'I just upgraded my mom's generator. It's great because with all the outages we're having out here, now she can...

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Electric Ladies Podcast - Women Leaders Discuss Careers, Trends, Technologies and Innovation in Energy, Climate, and Corporate Responsibility

"What I knew about Carbon Credits having watched them for many years is that they're not always what they seem...So, Calyx Global was founded in 2021 to help companies navigate the space, to really understand….(i)t's a promise that somebody has reduced methane in that landfill or planted some trees thousands of miles away. So that's what Calyx Global is, we're a Carbon Credit Ratings Agency. But really what we're doing is, for every one of these assets, helping buyers understand what's underneath that, what the quality of that asset is.  Donna Lee on Electric Ladies Podcast  You've...

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Electric Ladies Podcast - Women Leaders Discuss Careers, Trends, Technologies and Innovation in Energy, Climate, and Corporate Responsibility

“Number one reason that people get denied and they didn't read the eligibility criteria. So yeah, very, very important …If you don't have the qualifications or something for something, you partner with somebody who does and you guys go after it together.… If you don't know something, that gives you a reason to call the vendor and start that conversation and get that personal relationship with them.…Relationships, relationships, relationships. It really is the key to grants. It's really not about what you write, it's about who you're speaking to ahead of time." Megan Pater on Electric...

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Electric Ladies Podcast - Women Leaders Discuss Careers, Trends, Technologies and Innovation in Energy, Climate, and Corporate Responsibility

“Healthcare Without Harm is more of an advocacy organization that works with clinicians and other healthcare workers to reduce the environmental impact of healthcare and pollution as well as climate impacts. And then Practice Greenhealth advises hospitals on how to get there and they do this awards process…(which is) about having people aware of all these different metrics that impact your operational sustainability…(and) raise awareness among the people who are running the hospital and leadership about how they're using water, food waste, where they're buying their food from, their...

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Electric Ladies Podcast - Women Leaders Discuss Careers, Trends, Technologies and Innovation in Energy, Climate, and Corporate Responsibility

“I've been in this industry for 40 years and we have never been at a moment like we are today. …About 10 years ago, a little bit more than that, the narrative at that time was we were closing down plants…. Now the narrative today is, Hey, you know what? Some of those plants you shut down, we've changed our mind. How hard would it be to restart that?... All of these hyperscalers (Google, Amazon, e.g.) are figuring out partnerships and marriages, if you will, with nuclear and trying to help nuclear be brought to the marketplace….I mean, the demand is off the charts, and that's really the...

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Electric Ladies Podcast - Women Leaders Discuss Careers, Trends, Technologies and Innovation in Energy, Climate, and Corporate Responsibility

“We, the people we can definitely keep the pressure on, not only on our lawmakers, our governors, our mayors, our senators, our Congress people. We have to keep reminding them that we care about these issues…There's a real key also to the future reimagining, asking companies to reimagine themselves as energy companies, not oil companies or gas companies, but energy companies. So all of these pressure points are incredibly important. We all have favorite stores, favorite brands that we shop on. If you love Walmart writing to the customer services and to the president of Walmart saying,...

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More Episodes

What we're seeing is, as the new carbon economy moves forward – and this is critical to businesses to operate in the future, in the next five, 10 years – it’s colliding with the digital transformation and financial transformation. And so, I think one of the essential things our customers are asking is. ‘how do we bring together the Chief Sustainability Officer, the CIO and the CFO and the new market, digital and carbon economy as we go forward?’ Because you need all three lenses to make a holistic decision for both the growth and resiliency of your company.” Mandi McReynolds on Electric Ladies Podcast

Artificial Intelligence, A.I., is transforming sustainability work, from data collection to analysis to reporting. It’s a tool to help assess risks and see opportunities, but humans bring the superpower. How?

Listen to Mandi McReynolds, Chief Sustainability Officer at Workiva in this fascinating conversation with Electric Ladies Podcast host Joan Michelson.

 

You’ll hear about:

        How Workiva is leveraging A.I. to serve its clients across the board – from assessing materiality, to financial reporting and sustainability reporting,

        How to use A.I. to minimize boring work and free up people to be more strategic and creative – in a few unique ways.

        How to ensure the integrity of the data you’re accessing with A.I. – and how to reduce the risk of your data being contaminated by A.I. hallucinations, etc.

        Plus, career advice, such as:

 Your job isn't to know the answer. Your job is to ask all the right questions of where the business is going and think about your lens is adding value because you're going to ask a different question….Don't be afraid….(Align) with people who could see the possibility of (your) experience. And… take that stretch job and just remember you're in the room to ask different questions, and that's perfectly fine. So, take the stretch and then lean into your experience that allows you to have a different lens and a different perspective.” Mandi McReynolds on Electric Ladies Podcast

 

Read Joan’s Forbes articles here.

You’ll also like:

·       Business Leaders Bridging The Gap – Women business leaders from The Earth Day Women’s Summit on the unique role of business in addressing the climate crisis.

·       The Power Of Buildings – with Katie McGinty, VP and Chief Sustainability and External Affairs Officer at Johnson Controls.

·       How GM Is Going All Electric – with General Motors Chief Sustainability Officer Kristen Siemen.

·       Reducing IT’s Carbon Footprint – with HPE Chief Sustainability Officer Monica Batchelder.

·       How Businesses Unlock Value With Sustainability – with Kristen Sullivan, Audit Partner and head of Deloitte’s Sustainability practice

 

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