By Betsy Vereckey

Artificial intelligence has tons of promise for solving some of climate change’s biggest challenges, from tracking fossil fuel emissions to managing electricity loads during extreme weather events. 

Jessica Francisco T’09 is seeing it being used in real estate, too. “Sustainability is an area that is very rich in data,” says Francisco, Cushman and Wakefield’s first chief sustainability officer. “Everyone’s excited about how we can leverage AI to streamline data collection and management so that we can spend less time on collecting data and more time on extracting insights and taking action.” 

Francisco traces her data and analytics skills back to her time at Tuck. She relies on data more than ever in her day-to-day work, whether she’s helping clients build a roadmap to get to net zero or giving them strategies to lower their energy consumption. 

“I spend a lot of time coaching and mentoring people on how to develop data models to support the decisions they make,” she says. To avoid greenwashing, “companies have to be confident in the data and reporting strategies that they’re putting out there.” 

Real estate can be an especially carbon-intensive business. Data centers, for example, are a huge contributor to greenhouse gases. But the news isn’t all grim from where Francisco sits. Companies are working hard to meet their sustainability goals and achieving them sooner than expected. Francisco gets to help them develop their strategies and execute them. 

“At first, many leading companies around the world said they wanted to have a low environmental impact for their real estate operations, but now many are aspiring to have no environmental impact,” she says. “We’re working for a global financial institution that is going to hit net zero in 2025 for real estate. They’re hitting these pretty ambitious goals that people didn’t think that they could achieve. And they’re proving them wrong quicker than anyone anticipated.”

Francisco has more than two decades of experience in sustainability, starting with a deep background in environmental consulting. She led Arcadis’ sustainability practice in North America, managed the renewable energy and climate consulting team at 3Degrees, and served as director of strategy and operations for Pacific Gas & Electric. 

Francisco was attracted to environmental causes at a young age. She majored in environmental engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and had the opportunity to conduct research with Princeton University on environmental remediation, intern for the Clean Air Council, and participate in Superfund projects with the EPA, where she had the chance to fly in a small plane down the eastern coast to look for turtles in the ocean. 

Having been in the industry for over two decades, Francisco has a unique perspective on how it’s changed over time. People are interested in making a difference now more than ever.

“Climate change used to be a topic that people felt removed from when they talked about it, but that’s not the case anymore because we’re seeing the impacts of climate change every day,” she says. “Every time I have a conversation about it now, people are engaged. This is a once-in-a-generation issue that we are all tackling together, and everyone wants to get it right.

This story originally appeared in print in the Summer 2024 issue of Tuck Today magazine.