Title:GTA Spotlight: Sonal Somaiya (SFS’14)

Meet Sonal Somaiya, Chief of Staff to the Chief Sustainability Officer at Google

Please introduce yourself.

I’m Sonal Somaiya. I am a 2014 grad of the School of Foreign Service. I majored in International Political Economy while I was at Georgetown, and I later on went to pursue an MBA at University of Chicago Booth. While I was at Georgetown, I worked at the Georgetown University Investment Office, helping manage our endowment, which was a great opportunity and I had an amazing time there. I started my career post-grad at Goldman Sachs in New York and I was in the TMT group (tech, media, and telecom). When I was off at business school, I worked for the city of Chicago, which was really cool. I did a handful of other internships there, and then I joined Google after doing my MBA internship there in corporate development. I started working on M&A and investments. I focused specifically on our frontier innovation portfolio and worked really closely with one of Alphabet’s main subsidiaries, Sidewalk Labs, which was doing smart cities and urban innovation–the thing I’m passionate about. Then I stood up our climate investing efforts while I was in corporate development. I then took on a role leading go-to-market and commercialization for our climate AI portfolio in my capacity as Chief of Staff to the Chief Sustainability Officer. That’s the role that I’m in now.

How did your time at Georgetown influence your career path in the tech industry?

You’d be surprised! There actually are a lot of Georgetown alums in technology. There’s a strong robust community in the Bay Area, but also just globally working in technology. For me, I studied International Political Economy, so I took a lot of classes focused on economic development. I’ve always sought this intersection space between technology, society, and impact. That first led me to work when I was at Google with Sidewalk Labs, among other areas. It now has expanded to include our climate AI portfolio. Not only was it the classes I took, but finding this intersection of things between finance, impact, development, and technology. Technology is infused in all of those equally, so it felt like the most innovative and forward-thinking application of what I studied at Georgetown from an academic perspective. That desire has guided me and been my north star.

I’ve really pursued this intersection of technology, global impact, and urban innovation. The other thing I did was the tour of duty on the Hill. I interned for a Congressman, and worked for public organizations. This made me well-suited for product areas, especially now with AI, that have this policy component. Climate is very influenced by domestic policy but also international policy. The EU is at the cutting edge of writing policy not just for climate but for technology as well. Being able to be well-versed in that has been a huge asset in technology and has really influenced the types of products I’ve pursued working with.

Working with the investment office and the endowment at Georgetown really enabled me to be well-versed in how innovation and technology is financed. Being able to empathize with the investor really gave me the language to be innovative.

Tactically, Georgetown prepared me well in terms of my ability to write. And I think that’s a really underrated skill, but it’s a really critical one in my arsenal. Being able to communicate about hard, often really technical concepts succinctly and efficiently is a huge asset in technology. That’s something I learned in seminar classes and writing papers at Georgetown. All of that pays dividends.

What are your top priorities in your current role?

In my current role, I am focused on commercializing our AI products to support customers’ climate efforts. I lead our revenue and go-to-market OKRs across the entire portfolio of climate AI products. That includes a wide diversity of things. One example is we’ve developed a solution using AI that models out where contrails will form (that’s the white cloud you’ll see behind air planes). That’s a huge driver of carbon emissions – almost a third of airline emissions come from that. How do we actually bring that to market? How do we get airlines to adopt that kind of solution? We have all this AI innovation sitting in our back pocket.

Another example: we used Google Maps data to develop a way to lessen and coordinate traffic systems such that you’re idling for less time. In an era where we still have a preponderance of gas powered cars, how do we enable people to idle less, which drives a huge chunk of carbon emissions but also is a really frustrating part of driving in a city? So that’s another element of what I’m working on today. AI is the fundamental technology behind all of those innovations; it’s really about bringing those to the market.

How do you balance the technical possibilities of AI for climate solutions while ensuring there’s feasibility for market adoption?

This is really drawing on things I learned at Georgetown, particularly in the SFS. It’s critical to have the right market and financial conditions for any sort of innovation to succeed. Climate innovation in particular is subject to a lot of the structures and incentives that are put in place. Unique market structures are cropping up that foster the environment for early innovation that you need to invest now to get climate impact 20 years from now. Some of these technologies have a very long horizon. How do we create market structures that bridge the time horizon with the innovation that needs to happen now, and then enable the capital markets to come together and support that innovation today?

The other philosophy that I really espouse is this double bottom line concept. You need to be able to seek revenue and seek impact, and not just impact for impact’s sake. That’s really true in the climate space, where you have companies charging money for their products and solutions, and having a climate impact. Those two things really go hand in hand. And again, create the right market conditions for there to be innovative startups that are building businesses. That’s what I focus on right now – go-to-market and commercializing our AI products for climate.

What do you wish more people knew about the tech industry?

Tech has this incredible space for people to chart their own path. It’s really rewarding to people who take initiative and take risks, and pursue what they’re passionate about. There’s so much space and creativity to be able to do that. I have crafted roles for myself and raised my hand for opportunities that I was passionate about, and that has really enabled me to be able to pursue the type of impact in technology that I want to have. That’s pretty unique relative to more traditional industries where it is a little more structured. Tech has this infinite horizon where you can take it in whichever direction you want.

The other thing, putting myself in the shoes of a current student, is that non-engineers are valuable too. You don’t need to have a computer science degree. I, for example, don’t – I was in the SFS. There are policy and business teams here. You can learn to be a technical person later on in your career. It’s really nimble and forgiving to people from lots of different backgrounds. I think that diversity is what makes tech really exciting and interesting. It’s not just filled with people from the exact same academic background; there’s diversity and it gives you space to chart your own path.

What is your favorite app or website, and why?

I am quite a creative person, I actually run a nonprofit in the performing arts outside of work. I am really big on all these new creator tools. With AI these days, they have exploded in terms of what functionality they can provide. One I’ve been using a lot lately is Canva. It’s democratized access to these formerly hard to use or expensive technologies in a way that an average person running a nonprofit, or trying to build their presence online, can access. So that’s one that’s top of mind this month.

What is one quick piece of advice you would give to a Georgetown student that is interested in tech?

Two prongs. One is to really pursue cura personalis – that attitude to really balance out your classes, your clubs, and things that you’re passionate about with practical things. When you enter into the workforce it becomes so much more clear that the history class you took or the Justice and Peace Studies class actually have such a huge impact and you might not know it yet. Really encourage yourself to grow as a person, not just thinking about classes and trying to see what’s next.

One thing that Georgetown really excels at is these kind of philosophy, ethics, history, and culture classes. They’re going to serve people really well in the age of AI. We are entering this new frontier where nobody knows what the societal impacts of AI are going to be. People who have studied what’s happened in the past and understood the frameworks of our ancient philosophers—that’s going to be really important to develop a hypothesis of what the future is going to look like.

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