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GenAI for Sustainability Practitioners ​
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The GenAI for Sustainability Practitioners Series is designed for busy professionals working in sustainability. Over several months, participants will gain practical, hands-on experience using AI to support research, communication, strategy development, data handling, and ethical client engagement.
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Unlike fixed curricula, this series adapts to your actual needs. The programme began with a diagnostic session (recording) to assess participants' interests, current skill levels, and sectoral priorities. From there, the facilitator shapes the pace and focus of subsequent sessions. This flexible approach ensures the course evolves to match your priorities, whether that's deeper technical exploration, applied project work, or ethical practice.
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The programme (see full Prospectus below or linked here) balances skill-building with real-world application, offering a manageable pace of approximately one 90-minute session per month. Between sessions, you'll experiment with freely available tools and share reflections through brief, optional practice exercises.
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About the Instructor​
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Gary Sharkey created this series for a friend who asked for help navigating AI in their sustainability work. When other friends asked if they could join too, he realised there might be broader interest. And if even friends are curious, there's probably a real need.
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Gary is a dual US/UK citizen with over 25 years of international consulting experience, helping clients in more than 40 countries tackle sustainability, innovation, and technology challenges. He's been applying AI tools for over a decade, long before ChatGPT made headlines, using them for work like reviewing corporate sustainability disclosure and evaluating sustainable innovation efforts. At PwC, he founded the global Sustainability Academy, which trained nearly 200,000 staff in 2024, and led the firm's effort to build a generative AI-enabled sustainability knowledge platform for professional upskilling worldwide.
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In 2025, Gary left PwC to focus on other passions, including his community interest company Sharkey and Friends, which he uses as a vehicle for sharing health and wellness coaching for body, mind, planet, and spirit, especially with London's nonprofits and small businesses. Teaching is where Gary gives back, and this series reflects that commitment: helping practitioners navigate new tools while staying grounded in the values that drew them to sustainability work in the first place.
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Booking and registration​
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Registration for individual sessions is via the Luma calendar. As outlined in the Prospectus, commitments to join 3-sessions or to join the full series convey discounts to the base session price of £60. Since this pilot run of the series is only for friends and friends-of-friends, you can access those discounts on an honour basis when registering for individual sessions.
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While participants need to register for sessions individually to track numbers and get people the correct reminders and Zoom links, some people have asked for batch processing for 3-session packs or series passes to make it easier for expensing within business contexts, or when purchasing for others. You do get Luma-generated invoices and receipts for individual session purchases but if you would like an invoice for Session Packs and/or Series Passes, please click below.
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