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

<p><strong>🎙️ Dr. Kiri Trier, Chief Marketing &amp; Growth Officer at Risk Management Partners, part of Munich Re</strong></p><p><strong>👋🏻 Opening paragraph</strong></p><p>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&#39;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.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>🧭 Episode overview</strong></p><p>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 &quot;human in the loop&quot;. 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.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>💡 Key themes</strong></p><ul><li>When a model judges a policy wrong, who carries the liability - and why the autonomy still lies on the human side</li><li>Whether the EU AI Act repeats the German supply chain law: does checklist regulation produce compliance or trust?</li><li>What greenwashing predicts about AI washing, from someone who watched the first one form</li><li>Can trust be installed at all, or only earned as an outcome of credibility and reliability?</li><li>The gut feeling as a leadership instrument the LLM does not have</li></ul><p><br></p><p><strong>👤 About the guest</strong></p><p>Dr. Kiri Trier is Chief Marketing &amp; 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.</p><p><strong>⏱️ Chapters</strong></p><ul><li>[01:31] Trust is a behaviour - so what is trust in a technology?</li><li>[04:09] The overnight experts return</li><li>[09:32] Human in the loop, turned around</li><li>[16:10] The foresight existed - Sustain what?</li><li>[26:00] When regulation becomes Excel lists</li></ul><p><br></p><p><strong>🔗 Links</strong></p><ul><li>Dr. Kiri Trier on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-kiri-trier-97bb1611/</li><li>Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/</li><li>Risk Management Partners website - https://www.munichre.com/rmp/en.html</li></ul><ul><li>Related episode: &#39;Designing regenerative futures&#39; with Karel Golta - https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-in-between-tech-and-trust-podcast/id1828521905?l=en-GB&amp;i=1000721908996</li></ul>