Join us on call with Spencer Low, Google’s first-ever Head of Regional Sustainability for Asia Pacific and an alumnus and faculty member of the Business & Sustainability Programme by the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, on what it really takes to drive sustainability impact at one of the largest tech companies in the world with a scope over one of the world’s most complex regions.

Key takeaways:

• Why a decade in strategy consulting at Bain gave Spencer a toolkit that transfers almost directly to sustainability leadership
• How the CSO and CDO roles are more connected than most organisations realise, and why data credibility is the foundation of effective reporting and impact
• Why CSOs who don’t own the data plumbing need “very good allies,” and how mandatory disclosure requirements are making it easier to build them
• What the Cambridge BSP adds even when you’re already a working CSO: a cohort that acts as a proxy for engaging diverse senior stakeholders
• Why APAC’s sustainability challenge is fundamentally about decoupling economic growth from rising emissions, not just decarbonisation
• How AI is already driving resource efficiency gains in Asian manufacturing and enabling smarter grid management across the region
• The three phases of corporate sustainability maturity — compliance, risk mitigation, strategic advantage — and why very few companies have reached the third

Timestamps

0:55 – Show Intro and Guest

1:44 – Consulting Roots at Bain

4:20 – From Strategy to CSO at SATS

6:29 – Data, Reporting, and the CDO Role

10:45 – Discovering the BSP

14:24 – Joining Google APAC

17:50 – APAC Priorities and the Art of Influence

22:16 – AI for Sustainability

27:33 – Corporate Sustainability Maturity

About our Guest

Spencer Low is Google’s Head of Regional Sustainability for Asia Pacific, the first person to hold this role. Based at Google’s APAC headquarters in Singapore, he leads sustainability strategy and programmes across carbon, circular economy, water, product integration, reporting, and employee engagement for a region spanning India, Japan, and the full breadth of Southeast Asia.

Before joining Google in 2024, Spencer served as Chief Sustainability Officer and CEO of Travel Retail at SATS Ltd., the Singapore-listed aviation services and food solutions company, where he built and led the sustainability function through the company’s post-pandemic recovery and a major global acquisition. Prior to SATS, he held senior management roles at Booking Holdings and Rakuten Group, and spent the first decade of his career at Bain & Company, rising from associate consultant to manager.

Spencer is an alumnus and faculty member of the Cambridge Prince of Wales Business and Sustainability Programme (BSP), run by the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). He holds a Master’s in International Affairs from Sciences Po Paris and an MBA from the Ivey Business School, Canada.

Disclaimer: The views in this podcast are those of the contributors, and don’t necessarily represent those of CISL, the University of Cambridge, or Insignia Ventures Academy, and should not be taken as advice or a recommendation.

The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund. Any and all opinions shared in this episode are solely personal thoughts and reflections of the guest and the host.

Transcript

Paulo: For this episode, we have another alumnus and faculty member of the BSP. For those who are interested in the programme, it’s a great opportunity not just to learn more about it, but to get to know the people, if you’re applying, and to hear their own journeys as leaders in sustainability.

So we have none other than Spencer Low, who is the first-ever Head of Regional Sustainability for Asia Pacific at Google. Prior to that, he was CSO, chief sustainability officer, at SATS, and before that he was in consulting at Bain. He joined the BSP in 2023, and then in 2024 he joined as faculty as well. We’re excited to have him back as faculty in this coming edition. So thanks for joining us on this call, Spencer.

Spencer: Thank you very much for the invitation, and thanks for having me, Paulo.

Consulting Roots at Bain

Paulo: I think, just to give some context for our audience, let’s dial it back to where your career began, at Bain & Company. I wanted to start there and explore how that experience impacted your view of sustainability, and how your time there shaped the way you look at sustainability for large organisations today.

Spencer: Thanks for the question. I would say it was foundational, the experience I had at Bain & Company. I joined as an associate consultant and left as a manager. The one thing you do learn in strategy consulting, and I have to say the industry has been through a lot of change since I left, is to be a quick learner and connect the dots. And I think this is critical for anyone interested in sustainability, because the state of understanding and the state of science is moving and progressing. At the same time, sustainability is very cross-functional and cross-disciplinary as an area of engagement. You’re not just talking about climate science, but also corporate and business ambitions and constraints, political and regulatory considerations, and geopolitical considerations.

Another major aspect I took away from consulting, for which I’m very grateful, is the ability to work with cross-functional stakeholders. That’s part of connecting the dots. But also, at a fairly young age when you join as an associate consultant, you get the opportunity to work with the C-suite, and as you get more senior, you engage with the board of directors. That gives you a sense of how people think about issues, how to rise to a particular level of discourse, and how decisions get made at very senior levels.

I think that ability to understand is foundational, because then it leads to the ability to influence, to speak the language. So I took away a lot from my 10 years at Bain. And actually, I tell people that the toolkit and the experiences I took away are remarkably applicable for careers in sustainability. Because it is very strategic, what you need to do when you are in the sustainability field. The end goal is perhaps not just growth and profitability, but actually the long-term sustainability of a business, if you’re thinking about all the different constraints and risks coming up. So it was a very relevant experience for me.

From Strategy to CSO at SATS

Paulo: I’m curious to know if you worked on any sustainability projects at Bain, and how you eventually decided to transition into a CSO role at SATS from your consulting career.

Spencer: I would have to say, and I will be dating myself with this, but when I joined Bain at that point in time, sustainability was still a fairly niche topic in the consulting industry. Certainly there were discussions about it, but nothing near what we see today in terms of sustainability practice areas within the major strategy consulting firms.

That said, what I was working on was typical corporate strategy, in terms of growth, M&A, and private equity. It was really good foundational training in terms of understanding how business works and what people care about, and I think we’ll come back to that in terms of how that’s relevant for people working in sustainability in the corporate world, certainly in Asia Pacific.

How I made the transition was actually during my time at SATS, when I was both CEO of Travel Retail and, just as the pandemic was getting going, chief strategy officer. There was a lot of work with the board around pandemic response and post-pandemic recovery. But within that portfolio, I was also chief sustainability officer, responsible for complying with the Singapore Stock Exchange’s mandatory reporting requirements. SATS had already put out a sustainability report before I joined, but I worked with the team to grow the function and raise the bar on both what we were reporting and the initiatives behind it.

It was subsequent to a major post-pandemic acquisition that I had the opportunity to become global chief sustainability officer. The acquisition brought operating footprints in the US and in Europe, and as a result, sustainability became a much more important consideration in terms of both strategy and compliance and risk mitigation.

Paulo: Yeah.

Data, Reporting, and the CDO Role

Paulo: So I think your role at SATS was really contextual to the needs of the time and the needs of the organisation. And I think apart from also being CSO, you also had a chief data officer role. That’s very important for any sustainability leader, having that access and visibility to data across the organisation. Can you describe what that dynamic was like, the dual role, and how it helped you? You mentioned the reporting aspect of your role, and how your scope expanded with the acquisition.

Spencer: It was a very interesting role, and it came at a moment when AI was just getting going. There was also this focus on regaining operational efficiency in the post-pandemic recovery. I did learn a lot, and I think it’s very applicable, if only because of the saying everyone’s heard: what gets measured gets managed. Or sometimes you hear it as: what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed.

To manage things, you need to have credible data that people understand and feel they can rely on to make decisions. And as you mentioned, in sustainability there is now a reporting requirement that applies to many stock exchanges across Asia. You need to have integrity in what you report, and in fact, with mandatory reporting, there are now more and more requirements for external assurance or even audit. So this is a journey for many large companies. As a strategy consultant in the past, even working with very large corporations, you do come to see that these are high-performing multinationals, but sometimes the data plumbing can still benefit from a bit of work.

It is really important to have good data, and you need technology to help you with that, because especially in an operating environment there is just so much data, all of which could have value, especially if you apply AI in terms of analysing and getting insights out of very large data sets that can be very unstructured, or in terms of cross-referencing against diverse data sets. The beauty of AI is that it can do things that a team of humans would struggle to do.

The chief data officer role is often tied to a lot of systems work, without necessarily being the chief technology officer or the systems officer. You need to understand data taxonomy, data integrity, data audit, data trail. All this really does help when you’re dealing with reporting. But going beyond that, you also need the data to understand your impact. There is a lot of measurement that goes beyond compliance frameworks, at the operational level, that’s the language where a lot of your operational colleagues would understand. They will kick the tires. It’s actually really important to have good, credible data, and you need to rely on technology to help you do that well.

Paulo: Just a quick follow-up to that. Would you recommend that CSOs, on a general basis, have that kind of remit or influence over the data plumbing of the organisation to be effective?

Spencer: If they don’t, they need very good allies, in terms of the other members of the C-suite, or the technology team in the company. Increasingly, I think there is some help from the fact that there are mandatory requirements. When that happens, your audit committees get involved and boards of directors want to have confidence in information that they disclose, especially for mandatory reporting. And so that helps you get resources to tackle this. As I mentioned, it’s a bit of a journey, and many companies, including large ones, are going through it. So there are people out there who can help, and increasingly technology is helping accelerate the process. You don’t have to do it all by yourself. But if you do have to do it yourself, you need allies.

Discovering the BSP

Paulo: At this point in time, as you were the Group CSO for SATS, you encountered CISL. I think we had a conversation outside of this call about how it was introduced to you through a colleague. Maybe you can share that story and what made you decide to join the programme, especially as somebody who had already been working as a CSO, and what it opened up for you in terms of learning and insight.

Spencer: Thanks for remembering this anecdote. As I said, I was building the sustainability team, and I had a young woman on the team from whom I learned a lot. She was very passionate about sustainability, and she had pushed the organisation to put out a sustainability report before it was even mandatory, so hats off to her.

As part of her upskilling, the company decided to sponsor her for a master’s offered by CISL. As we were going through that process, I said, let me learn more about CISL. And then I realised there was this programme, what was then called the Prince of Wales Business and Sustainability Programme, and I looked into it and said: “This sounds interesting. Maybe I should take it.” So that’s how I applied, and I really enjoyed it.

You may say: why? I mean, as you asked, I really had executive responsibility for this area already. And I would say it helped with the overall framing and approach to a very transdisciplinary field of engagement. As chief strategy officer, I had worked with the team to improve the sustainability reporting and the initiatives behind it. I was learning by doing. But in so doing, there were a lot of technical aspects you had to absorb in the process of preparing information to be disclosed.

When I joined the BSP, what was really important was the cohort. There was a great diversity of people, CSOs but also leaders from different industries and different functions. There were legal counsels, operational leads, business unit leaders, and so on. As you go through the programme, the way the conversation unfolds, the questions that get asked, how people react, probe, and debate, this was actually a lot of learning, because it was almost a proxy for working with diverse senior leaders in your own organisation, or with boards, or even with external stakeholders.

And everyone moved along the same arc as the programme unfolded. Even if you had some technical knowledge going in, it was important to see how it all fits within a framework that isn’t attached to a particular school like a business school or an engineering school. CISL draws upon all the different faculties of Cambridge University. That cross-disciplinary framework for understanding the different aspects that are at play, at risk, at work in terms of bringing all that together was critical.

Going through this with a cohort of people you get to know very well over a few days also gives a sense of community that continues even after you finish the programme. But for me, and I think for many others in my cohort, you also leave with a sense of purpose. Whatever your functional background, whatever sector you’re part of, there is a broader purpose, and that was really helpful for me as a takeaway.

Joining Google APAC

Paulo: And taking from that, leaving with a sense of purpose. I believe shortly after the BSP you transitioned into Google, where you are now, and became the first Head of Regional Sustainability for APAC. As you mentioned with your SATS journey, this wasn’t your first time putting together a sustainability team. But at the same time, you had also just come through the BSP where you’d gained a lot. How did those two experiences come together in your current role at Google, especially during the early days?

Spencer: Joining Google was a very interesting experience because it’s a very large organisation, as you can imagine. It’s also built with brilliant people, lots of engineers. It’s very technology-driven. What was critical for me was really getting to understand the context and figuring out the lay of the land in terms of the organisation, which is highly matrixed. As a former consultant, that was something I had some experience with, and I had to draw on those experiences to understand the organisational dynamics, because there are so many teams with so many very smart people who have their own objectives, and you have to understand how it all fits together in order to drive more sustainable outcomes.

There are three pillars that we work on. One is products. Google has products that billions of people use every day. How can they drive more sustainable outcomes, whether in mitigation, adaptation, or protection of biodiversity and nature? The second is operations. Google operates data centres, we’re building more data centres, we have supply chains to manage. How do you reduce the environmental footprint of all those activities? And then because of the scale of operations and of our ambitions, we need systems-level change, and so there is a lot of engagement and advocacy.

As you can think about these three pillars, you can see how highly matrixed it is in terms of your touchpoints across the organisation. And so the Cambridge BSP helped me in a few ways. First, that sense of purpose. Within such a large organisation, with lots of very smart people with their own goals, how you have to stay grounded in your sense of purpose. But also that training in terms of speaking with diverse stakeholders and framing things in a way that influences how they act, how they think, and most importantly, makes them want to help, not necessarily help us, right? It’s to help the situation, because ideally it’s helping themselves too, in terms of delivering their business results in ways that are motivating for stakeholders.

APAC, Asia Pacific, is a very diverse and fragmented region. I’m covering India and Japan. As you can imagine, those two are very, very different markets. And then within ASEAN, within Southeast Asia, there is so much divergence even among the eleven countries. So you’re dealing with a lot of complexity and uncertainty and a fast pace of change, and I think you draw on all your skills to stay grounded and make sure you’re still working towards the impact you want to see.

APAC Priorities and the Art of Influence

Paulo: When you first came in, you had to take a lay of the land from both the Google organisational perspective and from the markets themselves. You mentioned India, Japan, and even within Southeast Asia, a lot of varied cultures, regulations, and dynamics. How did you approach taking all this in over the first months or year, and framing it for senior leaders outside of the region, while trying to align incentives and gain buy-in?

Spencer: Asia Pacific has actually been the fastest-growing region for Google, which is perhaps not surprising. But as I mentioned, it is quite fragmented. People sometimes say there isn’t really such a thing as “Asia Pacific.” There is a thing called the European Union, which also has a lot of diversity within its 27 countries. But Asia Pacific doesn’t really exist as a unified bloc. And so what’s critical in a situation like this is to go back to the strategic aspects and the prioritisation.

You have to look at prioritisation both from the organisational perspective, in terms of scale of operations and opportunities for growth, looking at commercial aspects. But you also have to look at prioritisation from the sustainability impact you can have. One dimension is operations: where do we have operations? Where is the supply chain? How do you address and prioritise that? And the other is products: what sustainable outcomes can our products drive, and how do you prioritise for impact across this region? The impact comes from mitigation, meaning reduction in emissions through efficiency. But it also comes through adaptation and resilience.

In a region with an incredible amount of urban development and continued urbanisation, with very large cities in low-lying delta areas highly exposed to extreme weather events, and we’re seeing more and more of those, how can better geospatial data, better analytics, and better tools like AI actually help cities and regions become more resilient and build better going forward?

So it really is a lot of prioritisation and understanding how to motivate and attract allies. I used that term earlier. In your journey to drive impact, you have to piece it out.

Paulo: What are some of the interesting priorities for Southeast Asia in particular when it comes to sustainability? Maybe you can share some examples you’ve encountered so far.

Spencer: One thing I would say is that this also relates to your earlier question, Paulo, which is: how do you present the reality of what’s going on in Asia Pacific? I think in many countries there is still a very clear national development agenda. Many countries within the Asia Pacific are developing countries. There is this classic argument that if you look at per capita emissions, they are pretty low. But they do have large populations that are growing, both in terms of population and in some cases size, certainly in terms of economic activity and GDP per capita.

There tends to be this correlation with increased emissions that go into infrastructure, including digital infrastructure, but also industrial activities across supply chains. When you look at sustainability in many parts of Asia Pacific, it’s not just about decarbonisation. That’s really important. But you also have to look at the impact on lives and livelihoods, and the legitimate desire to progress. Economic progress is often correlated with increased energy consumption. But the challenge is: how do you decouple increased energy consumption from increased emissions? That is the core aspect.

And so I think a fundamental topic for us is the energy transition. The energy transition is, fortunately, recognised as important by leaders across the region, including in Southeast Asia. But the way they approach it, in terms of deregulation, market incentives, how they built their generating capacity or their transmission capacity, all this differs by country.

AI for Sustainability

Paulo: You mentioned AI as a technology that’s really helping the CSO role. I’d love to hear any specific use cases within the scope of your work as it relates to how AI has been helpful. Obviously there’s also the whole data centre topic that we could go into. But from a CSO role perspective, how has AI been helpful for you?

Spencer: Thanks for asking that, Paulo. I’d split it into two.

One is: how is AI helpful to sustainability practitioners? The answer is hugely helpful, because AI can help synthesise a lot of information and help with your analysis. This is something that all sustainability practitioners should use. You can use it to learn things very quickly, to connect the dots. I’m constantly asking it to compare and contrast, to find the difference between this and that. This is helpful on a day-to-day basis, putting aside reporting, which of course has obvious applications.

But AI goes beyond just personal applications. At a systems level, when you look at Asia, I think AI has a number of massive opportunities for impact.

One is that, more so than in other parts of the world, I think Asia is ahead in embedding AI in operations, whether in manufacturing, logistics, and so on. This is true even outside of China. And we are seeing significant gains in resource efficiency through the use of AI. Sometimes this is taken as just an advantage: great, you use less to create more output. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this is a more sustainable way of doing business. You’re using less material and less energy to produce each unit of economic output, as a corporation or as an economy.

Beyond that, I had mentioned the importance of grids and the energy transition. Asia has an advantage insofar as it’s building a lot of grid infrastructure and generation capacity in a greenfield way, because it’s serving new demand and new growth. In parts of the world like the United States and Europe, the grid infrastructure is fairly well-established, and for many years they’ve seen slightly declining electricity demand. That’s something to be celebrated; it’s usually the result of more efficient lighting and more efficient machinery. But right now, with electrification for EVs, data centres, and so on, they’re seeing an increase in electricity demand that’s causing a lot of challenges, because there are bottlenecks in terms of connecting new energy sources, preferably carbon-free, into existing grids. Often where you have the renewable energy, it’s not where you have the consumption, and so you need the transmission. For older infrastructures, there are many bottlenecks.

For Asia, there are somewhat fewer of those bottlenecks, because the infrastructure is newer and they’re still adding and building. And this is where AI can and already is playing a major role, in terms of giving better analytics, better understanding of where the bottlenecks are and how you can build around them as you expand the grid. How do you manage the grid better in terms of load balancing? AI is really excellent at this, because it takes in a huge amount of information and can drive insights in real time. And as you think about ASEAN’s plans to connect grids, add more battery storage and more intermittent renewable sources, all this can be made much more efficient, effective, and secure through the application of AI.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t speak about adaptation and resilience. How AI can help cities prepare better for the typhoons that are becoming more intense. AI can give you extra days of advance certainty in terms of how strong a storm is going to be and what its likely track is, allowing local communities to prepare. But from a chronic perspective as well, you can look at increasing risk over time, and that sends a signal as to where you need more investment in more resilient infrastructure, whether that’s roads or sea walls. This is another area where I think there are lots of opportunities for AI to add real value.

Paulo: Thanks for sharing all that. A lot of big topics, but thanks for really putting it together. And even on your last point, as somebody from the Philippines, I think the implications for food security and agriculture are also very impactful, in terms of having the data and the tools to act in time.

And going back to the energy transition, there’s always this common framing of how sustainable AI really is, if you look at it from a productivity perspective but also the whole supply chain aspect. But if you factor in the energy transition, then you can reframe the cycle, so to speak, where AI can actually help itself become more efficient from a resource and supply chain perspective.

Corporate Sustainability Maturity

Paulo: Just to wrap up our conversation: you started your career at Bain, and you mentioned that sustainability wasn’t really as prioritised back then as it is today, especially from a corporate strategy perspective. How would you describe where we are today, now being at Google, and how has the corporate view of sustainability evolved, not just in terms of importance but also in terms of priorities and how to be effective?

Spencer: The key point to note is that it’s still quite different depending on the company, the country, and the region. I first need to acknowledge that there’s a lot of divergence. But I think there’s a certain direction of travel, which is that increasingly this is being factored into critical decisions around strategy and long-term planning.

There are typically three phases of this journey.

The first is compliance. Companies take their compliance responsibilities very seriously, all the more so if they’re listed. And as there are more regulations and more disclosure requirements, you think of ISSB and similar frameworks in different parts of Asia, this is becoming a topic that is hitting the agenda of boards, hitting audit committees, because there is direct responsibility for a lot of this. And so that at least is the start. Increasingly, in Singapore for example, these regulations are going to the next level. It’s not just listed companies, it’s large companies, and increasingly there will be requirements for even medium-sized enterprises. So that’s the first phase, and that’s usually when there’s a bit of a scramble: where’s the data, how can we get it in a more automated and accurate way?

Many companies are now in the second phase, which is when they see the risk mitigation case. Sadly, over the last few years, we have seen extreme weather events impact not just crop yields, but supply chains in terms of raw materials and logistics. And more and more board members are getting asked questions by investors about what they’re doing to protect themselves against those risks. To protect yourself, first you need to understand what those risks are and acknowledge that they are changing and perhaps intensifying over time. This forces a conversation about what is the trajectory, what is the cost of doing nothing, and how do we strengthen our operations based on different scenarios of potential impact. This is all a very good discussion, much more interesting than just compliance, because now you’re talking about really core topics.

The third phase goes beyond compliance and risk mitigation to ask: where is the strategic value? In terms of business model transformation, key strategic options for further growth, mergers and acquisitions, new product development. How can the fact that you are working towards a more resilient and more sustainable business drive strategic advantage and hopefully corporate longevity? I think there are fewer companies in that stage. Many would aspire to be there, and they’re thinking about it, but to be able to act on it, I think it’s still a minority. But that’s where it can get very exciting and interesting.

That whole transition in terms of the conversation around corporate sustainability, from risk mitigation to building strategic advantages, is actually also reflected in the BSP. As I’ve learned, you start off with understanding the risks, and then you go beyond that to how you can actually build organisational longevity, thinking of sustainability as an advantage you can build within your organisation. And I might add, beyond advantage: how does it become part of your purpose? Is that meaningful? Does that give you a different path to a more secure future, beyond just strategic advantage?