On this episode of In the Arena, host Allyson Klein sits down with Melissa Evers, Head of Ecosystem and Co-founder of Kreneon, to unpack why the water crisis isn't a technology problem; it's a financial one.

Melissa draws on a career that spans wastewater engineering at ExxonMobil, finance and strategy, and years leading software and open-source initiatives at Intel to explain how Kreneon is building a digital market platform to commodify water, bringing the same price transparency that transformed oil and clean energy markets to the world's most essential resource. She and Allyson dig into what it takes to standardize water as a tradable asset, how virtual water purchase agreements can unlock bank financing instead of relying solely on equity, and why building trust across producers, regulators, and buyers is the key to scaling private investment into water infrastructure.

In this episode of In the Arena, Allyson Klein sits down with Jean-Simon Venne, CTO and founder of BrainBox AI, to explore how AI is transforming the energy performance of existing buildings.

With roughly 3 billion buildings consuming about one-third of global energy on outdated template programming, Jean-Simon makes the case that the most impactful sustainability opportunity is not in what gets built next, but in how intelligently we operate what is already standing. The conversation covers predictive versus reactive control, the complexity of optimizing across competing stakeholder objectives, and the responsible AI principles guiding BrainBox AI's next phase of innovation out of Montreal.

In this episode of In the Arena, host Allyson Klein sits down with Senthil Padmanabhan, VP of Engineering for Global Commerce and Developer Platform at eBay, to talk about what AI adoption looks like inside one of the world's largest online marketplaces.