AI and Sustainability: Lessons from Both Transformations - Dr. Kiri Trier (EP 39)

🎙️ Dr. Kiri Trier, Chief Marketing & Growth Officer at Risk Management Partners, part of Munich Re

👋🏻 Opening paragraph

Every C-level claimed sustainability expertise overnight. Dr. Kiri Trier watched it happen, and she sees AI trust heading the same way. She spent more than a decade leading sustainability transformation before the current wave, and now runs growth inside Munich Re's climate risk business while the second hype cycle unfolds around her. This one is for leaders who suspect the pace of AI adoption has outrun the understanding beneath it.

🧭 Episode overview

In this episode, Dr. Kiri Trier maps the sustainability cycle onto the AI one: the expectation management problem when nobody knows the consequences, the human resource comparison that sustainability never triggered, and why she laughed the first time she heard "human in the loop". From inside reinsurance she raises the question with no settled answer yet - when a model judges wrong, what about the liability? And she closes with a definition that reorders most AI governance thinking: trust arrives only as an outcome of credibility and reliability.

💡 Key themes

• When a model judges a policy wrong, who carries the liability - and why the autonomy still lies on the human side
• Whether the EU AI Act repeats the German supply chain law: does checklist regulation produce compliance or trust?
• What greenwashing predicts about AI washing, from someone who watched the first one form
• Can trust be installed at all, or only earned as an outcome of credibility and reliability?
• The gut feeling as a leadership instrument the LLM does not have

👤 About the guest

Dr. Kiri Trier is Chief Marketing & Growth Officer at Risk Management Partners, a Munich Re company localising climate risk exposure. The detail that matters for this episode: seven years before the current wave, she published on how AI would change sustainability management - which means she entered the AI transformation already knowing how a hype cycle ends.

⏱️ Chapters

• [01:31] Trust is a behaviour - so what is trust in a technology?
• [04:09] The overnight experts return
• [09:32] Human in the loop, turned around
• [16:10] The foresight existed - Sustain what?
• [26:00] When regulation becomes Excel lists

🔗 Links

• Dr. Kiri Trier on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-kiri-trier-97bb1611/
• Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/
• Risk Management Partners website - https://www.munichre.com/rmp/en.html

• Related episode: 'Designing regenerative futures' with Karel Golta - https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-in-between-tech-and-trust-podcast/id1828521905?l=en-GB&i=1000721908996