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As New York City shuttles between Climate Week, the UN General Assembly, and Fashion Week all in the same breath, our community is stepping into the spotlight. This month, we're spotlighting the moment we've been building toward all year: the Wallet Max Emerald Summit: Sustainability & AI for Business.
Sustainable finance, AI, and the global leaders are bold enough to bet on both, all in one room, for one day only. We’re thrilled to be hosting our full-day Emerald Summit event on September 18th, 2026 at the Civic Hall in Union Square.
Keep reading to know more about this extravaganza (and tap into a new risk lesson from my upcoming book). You won’t want to miss this event of the year.
Looking Ahead: Tomorrow Is The Day
🌿 Emerald Summit 2026: AI in Action for People and Planet
Join Wallet Max for a full day at the intersection of climate finance, AI, and capital, happening at the same moment as Climate Week NYC, the UN General Assembly, and NYC Fashion Week. Expect 30+ speakers across keynotes, panels, and fireside chats, built around this year's themes of Fundraising Community, AI Sustainability, and Enterprise Transformation.
Highlights from our exciting schedule:
9:00 AM — Breakfast, Registration, and Networking
10:30 AM — Welcome Keynote: Shaping Sustainable Futures With Community
Alissa Miky opens the Summit with the story of Aqua Theon, the seaweed technology company she founded, connecting entrepreneurship, health, and sustainable innovation to show how personal purpose can become a scalable solution for people and planet.
Bhuva Shakti sets the challenge for the day, based on her three decades of enterprise transformation experience and today’s AI and climate fintech challenges: How do we use AI, capital, and business growth to create a future that works for people and planet?
11:00 AM — Unlocking Capital Flows for Climate Solutions
Eric Williams, Martin Avidan, Neha Arora, and Parichat Wrolstad dig into how institutional capital actually reaches climate ideas, evaluates impact investing, and what businesses really need to access that capital.
11:45 AM — How Overlooked Founders Build On Their Own Terms
Betsy Fore, Blair Carl Smith, Elana Margulies-Snyderman, Sacha Awwa, and Will Hogan share strategies to building fundable companies outside the traditional venture pipeline, and how AI is reshaping capital.
12:30 PM — Climate Fintech Fireside Chat
Shameek Bose, drawing on his experience across JPMorgan, the World Economic Forum, Accenture, and Okta, explores where climate fintech is heading - from capital flows and carbon markets to AI, emerging markets, and public-private collaboration.
Bhuva Shakti, Global Ecosystem Champion & CEO of Wallet Max, brings the conversation back to business decisions: How do we turn global climate and AI innovation into trusted, profitable solutions that create tangible value for people and planet?
1:00 PM — Networking Lunch
2:00 PM — Finding The Right Mix Of Advisors For A Startup
Enes Karakullukcu, Katie Palencsar, Scott Ryan, Sonam Velani, and Tiya Gordon bring perspectives from investing, operating, founding, and advising to explore what founders actually need from an advisory team - and how to choose the right mix of networks as your company grows.
3:00 PM — The Scarcity Trade: Investing In What We Cannot Live Without
Cody Ley, David Chan, David Lanning, Karen Gamba, and Richard Freund examine how growing scarcity and climate volatility across water, land, and agriculture is turning climate risk into investable opportunities.
3:45 PM — Powering Tomorrow: Innovation, Policy, and the Future of Renewables
Eddy van der Paardt, Jillian Foster, Karen Gamba, Kayla Urquhart, and Manail Anis Ahmed discuss how AI’s growing energy demands, geopolitical instability, and inflation are reshaping the energy landscape and what it will take to scale renewable and clean energy solutions.
4:30 PM — Closing Keynote: Accelerate Impact Beyond Climate Week
Peter Fusaro, founder of Wall Street Green, closes the Summit by drawing on decades of climate and sustainable finance leadership to challenge us to carry the momentum beyond NYC Climate Week.
Bhuva Shakti calls on the global Wallet Max community she has built to take the momentum beyond the Emerald Summit: How do we turn AI, sustainability, profitable growth, and the connections we made today into greater impact for people and planet?
5:00 PM - Mocktails & Networking Lounge
Learn from all of these leaders and more with our breakfast, lunch, and a networking lounge built in for connecting with executives, investors, founders, operators, policymakers, researchers, students, and community leaders. See the full schedule on our summit page.
🎟️ Seats are almost gone — get your ticket now before the Emerald Summit sells out.
Risk Lesson: Tech Cannot Fix What Culture Avoids
Every leader I worked with wanted the “right system.” Few realized that no system survives a broken culture. Technology can transform a business, but culture determines whether that transformation endures. You can install the best systems in the world, but if the people using them don’t feel safe, valued, and engaged, the system will break down.
I watched this play out repeatedly. A firm could spend millions building cutting edge risk platforms, only to see them fail because teams were siloed, fearful, or burned out. Meanwhile, leaner firms with less sophisticated tools outperformed because their culture encouraged collaboration, accountability, and care.
In 2022, we saw the same pattern in AI ethics debates: algorithms flagged for bias, yet companies treated it as a technical bug instead of a cultural failure to diversity teams and invite uncomfortable truths.
The lesson is simple: Invest in culture because you invest in code. Culture is the operating system. Technology is just the application.
Read real case studies that helped me to develop this insight in my most recent risk lesson 👇
In my upcoming book on risk, Everyday Risk Wisdom: How to Thrive in a Complex World as an Overlooked Business Leader, I cover a variety of lessons from my career.
Explore my book website below and get notified when this lesson is available for free!
The BIG Reflection Quiz
Every new technology requires a culture check before adoption. Which questions do you ask in your culture-first diagnostics?
Do people feel safe raising early signals without fear of retaliation?
Does everyone know why this change matters and how their role connects?
Are leaders protecting human needs while demanding results?
Are values, policies, and incentives pointing in the same direction or are they contradicting each other?
WIll accountability live in culture or just paperwork?
I ask something else (let me know!)
I ask all of the above.
I ask none of these.
Read the lesson for my “Tech Cannot Fix What Culture Avoids” action steps. Explore my book website below and get notified when this framework is available for free!
Grow Your Network on September 18th
We are thrilled for the long list of events at this year’s Emerald Summit. And even more excited about our ever-growing network, who will be attending as speakers, experts, participants, partners, investors, and leaders.
Don’t forget to grab your ticket before it’s too late and learn from our amazing community.
🎟️ Grab your seat now: luma.com/EmeraldSummitWM26
See you tomorrow.
Thanks for supporting us to build a better world!
Bhuva Shakti, Founder of Wallet Max and Bhuva’s Impact Global.