From Madrid to Singapore: The Water-AI Nexus Goes Global

This summer, the conversation at the confluence of water and artificial intelligence traveled well beyond our own events. It showed up on two continents and among the people actually shaping the sector's future.

It started in Madrid. At the Global Water Summit, which convened more than 1,300 water leaders from across the globe, the Water-AI Nexus™ Center of Excellence set up shop with a dedicated interview backdrop and a simple goal: capture how our founding leaders and Advisory Council partners are thinking about water and AI right now. Ralph Exton also joined the "Watering the New Economy" panel alongside partners Beau Schilz from Amazon and Al Cho at Xylem to dig into data centers and water.

And in a "Scale Up Success" fireside chat with Nick Dyner of Moleaer, Ralph got candid about what it really takes to move water innovation beyond the pilot stage and into the systems utilities actually run.

The result is a series of eight conversations now live with leaders including Fred Royan (SWAN), Bruno Pigott (WateReuse Association), Scott Bryan (Imagine H2O), Therese Noorlander (Grundfos), Roi Otero and Boaz Brudner (Autodesk), and Snehal Desai and Radhika Fox (Xylem). We kept the questions open and the format casual. Why they're part of this work, where they see the biggest opportunity, and what success actually looks like across sectors. The answers are worth your time. Watch the full lineup of GWS partner conversations here: https://water-ai-nexus.org/resources/

Then the momentum carried to Singapore where WEF took part in Singapore International Water Week as a Supporting Partner. Our presence spanned leadership, workforce, and partnership. John Ikeda, our Chief Mission Officer, represented WEF and the Water-AI Nexus at the Utilities CEO Roundtable, a day-long convening of global utility leaders on transformation and AI, and led a Leading Utilities of the World session on AI strategy, culture, and change management.

WEF President Keith Hobson was there too, opening our Circular Water Economy workshop co-hosted with EESS, our Singapore Member Association. He helped frame the conversation around reducing waste, recovering resources, and regenerating ecosystems.

And we brought U.S. water leadership with us: seven U.S. utility leaders joined through the NACWA/WEF/WRF Singapore Scholar Program, taking part in the Utilities CEO Roundtable and a mini–Circular Water Economy tour of the Changi Water Reclamation Plant and Marina Barrage. Scholar Scott McClelland even took the stage as a panelist on "Achieving Water Affordability: Aligning Workforce Capacity, Investment Strategies, and System Efficiency." Partners including Autodesk and Amazon were part of the broader conversation too, a sign of how connected this network has become.

What ties Madrid and Singapore together is the same idea we launched a year ago: sustainable water management and digital infrastructure can reinforce each other for good. A year in, that idea is no longer just ours. It’s being carried by partners around the world.