About us

AppliedESG.ai began with a simple question: how much of your team’s time goes to ESG disclosures and reporting, compared with the work those reports describe? We asked a dozen of our peers, and their answers ranged from 40% to 90%.

What if we could flip that ratio? Agentic AI can take on much of the repetitive work of reporting, such as gathering data, mapping it across frameworks, and drafting responses, with checks that hold up to an auditor. That leaves more time for the work that moves sustainability forward: persuading executives, developing sustainable policies, embedding sustainability into business practices, investing in decarbonization, and making sustainability strategic.

We built this workshop to teach agentic AI for ESG. AI already has a footprint, so let’s spend its carbon to make us more efficient and effective as corporate ESG and sustainability professionals.

Founders

Asheen Phansey

Co-founder

Asheen Phansey has worked in corporate sustainability for more than 20 years. Most recently, as Director of ESG and Sustainability at PagerDuty, he led the company’s first double materiality assessment and developed climate targets validated by SBTi. He ran PagerDuty’s first agentic AI hackathon for non-developers, where colleagues learned to build their own workflow automations without engineering support.

Earlier, he founded the Sustainable Innovation Lab at Dassault Systèmes, co-authored the aerospace industry’s greenhouse gas reporting guidance, and served as a technical contributor to the Sustainable Apparel Coalition's Higg Product Index.

Asheen has taught for more than ten years in MBA and Masters in Sustainable Design programs, and served on the board of Net Impact.

Asheen on LinkedIn

Sean McPhillips

Co-founder

Sean McPhillips leads corporate responsibility disclosure at Palo Alto Networks, where he oversees sustainability reporting, works with internal audit to bring assurance-ready controls into that reporting, and uses AI tools to benchmark peers and automate customer inquiries.

Before that, as Head of ESG at Asana, he built the company's first ESG report and strategy and drove an upgrade of its MSCI ESG rating from BBB to AA. He also created Asana's AI ESG chatbot, a finalist in IR Magazine's Corporate Governance Awards for Best Use of Technology.

Sean began his career at ISS ESG, researching companies' sustainability performance, and later advised Fortune 100 companies on ESG strategy and reporting at Edelman. He advises CNaught and Beehive Climate and is vice chair of the board of EcoRise.

Sean on LinkedIn

Questions about the course

Email hello@appliedesg.ai and we'll get back to you.