AI for Earth

This meeting remains the densest gathering of decision-makers anywhere: public, private, science, technology, and civil society, all compressed into one intense week. There’s nothing like Davos, and overall we do need Davos, imo. I was on the ground, but our whole team worked incredibly hard to make this week count. Between interviews, articles, meetings, panels, and strategy sessions, the pace was unrelenting. And yet, looking back at the blur of 72 calendar entries and the “who’s who”, it is hard for me not to feel the familiar tug of “more”. One more session. One more corridor conversation. One more unexpected connection. ...

I’ll miss bedtime stories next week. Not because I love the 75 events in my calendar at Davos, but because I’m carrying something personal with me. My kids are growing up in the EU, in Denmark, where safety, nature, and independence are built into everyday life. That kind of childhood isn’t magic. It’s the result of decades of public investment, data, and care. For most of the world, that model has simply been out of reach. At LGND AI and Clay we’re building extremely horizontal planetary intelligence: tools designed to understand the world at scale. Child infrastructure, air quality, climate risk, food security, disaster response. This is just one possible use. ...

Eleven years ago, I wore a traditional Asturian dress to the World Economic Forum gala in Davos. At the Forum, I spoke on our work doing tech innovation at the World Bank. The outfit made more headlines than the work. Turns out symbols help translate complexity. The outfit helped connect elite spaces with grounded realities of my rural cultural roots. This January, I’m going back, for the 4th time, with the same mission. This time, the technology is AI — AI for Earth. At LGND AI (and Clay), we’re making Earth searchable: turning satellite and geospatial data into usable intelligence for climate, energy, infrastructure, risk, nature, and defense. The models work, the products are real. The hardest part is not building the AI. It’s conveying just how transformative AI for the physical world can be. We’re not alone in this work. But we do need help reaching out. ...

Just finished a road trip through the Deep South, and I’ve been reflecting on how much kindness persists in unkind realities — and how our work tries, in its own small way, to make them fairer. My dad and I were on a music road trip, driving from New Orleans (jazz) to Baton Rouge, Clarksdale (deep blues), Oxford (Faulkner’s house!), Memphis (soul), and Nashville (country). Much of it follows the famous “Blues Highway” — though it could just as well be called the Cotton Highway, for the constant white specks lining the roadside and the long, painful history they carry of slavery and unfinished recovery. ...