Sustainable Transformation24 Nov 2025

AI, Climate Risk and the Future of Energy | IBM’s Ravi Kumar Mandalika

What if the smartest technologies could also be the most human?

In this episode of the Sustainable Transformation Podcast, Kiarne Treacy sits down with Ravi Kumar Mandalika, Utilities Industry Leader for IBM, to explore how digital innovation is reshaping energy, resilience and the way businesses plan for the future.

With three decades of experience helping global energy and utilities organisations navigate sustainability, Ravi’s work sits at the intersection of AI, infrastructure and climate adaptation, from grid stability and cyber resilience to AI models that can predict floods and bushfires.

Ravi shares how IBM and NASA are building open AI models to forecast climate patterns, how utilities are turning to digital systems to stabilise supply and demand and how small businesses are using the same technology to solve simple problems in smarter, more sustainable ways.

He also reveals how empathy and automation can coexist, recounting the story of an AI system trained for customer service that unexpectedly learned to show compassion.

You’ll hear and learn:

Why there’s no decarbonisation without digitisation
How AI is helping utilities manage renewable variability and climate risk
What happens when IBM and NASA join forces to predict natural disasters
How even small businesses can use open AI tools to improve efficiency and impact
Why the “utilities sector is the new sexy” — and what that means for innovation
How AI can teach us as much about empathy as it does about efficiency

This episode is a must-listen for business leaders, technologists and sustainability professionals who want to understand how digital transformation and decarbonisation are converging to reshape industries from the inside out.

MENTIONS:

LINKS:

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CREDITS:

Host: Kiarne Treacy

Guest: Ravi Kumar Mandalika

Guest Company: IBM

Find more great podcasts like this at novapodcasts.com.au

Nova Entertainment acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land on which we produced this podcast, the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation.

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