Arnaud Blandin

With more than 20 years of global experience across Fortune 500 corporations, private equity funds, family offices, and high-growth ventures, he helps boards and executive teams move beyond ESG compliance to redesign how value is created, measured, and allocated.

His work sits at the intersection of strategy, sustainability, artificial intelligence, and capital allocation. He helps organizations connect impact data, financial performance, technology architecture, and executive decision-making into coherent systems that can guide transformation at scale.

Most companies today invest heavily in reporting frameworks, sustainability programs, and AI tools, yet these often remain disconnected from strategy, operations, incentives, and investment decisions. Arnaud’s work focuses on closing that gap. He builds practical decision architectures that allow leaders to understand where value is created, where impact is generated, where risks are emerging, and where capital should be deployed.

What differentiates his approach is his ability to bridge worlds that are too often treated separately: engineering and strategy, AI and sustainability, financial performance and human development, innovation and governance.

He began his career as an engineer in Silicon Valley, contributing to Java language standards and building enterprise systems for organizations including NASA. That technical foundation gives him a deep understanding of how data, software, and AI systems actually work — beyond the language of strategy decks. He later scaled technology and intelligence businesses across Asia, Europe, and North America, building the commercial and strategic experience that now underpins his advisory work.

From 2019 to 2024, as founder of the Beyond Institute, Arnaud led a global inquiry into the systemic issues, contradictions, and paradoxes preventing organizations from acting at the level required by environmental and social transition. Working with companies, investors, entrepreneurs, academics, and decision-makers, he developed frameworks to identify, measure, and prioritize the real-world impacts of economic activity.

This work evolved into a broader conviction: the next generation of companies will not be defined only by their ability to report impact, but by their ability to manage financial performance, environmental boundaries, technological change, and human flourishing as part of the same system.

Today, Arnaud works with boards, CEOs, executive committees, investors, and transformation leaders on three core types of engagements:

Sustainability and impact integration diagnostics that turn ESG, CSRD, and reporting efforts into strategic intelligence and capital allocation tools.

AI-powered transformation strategy that uses scenario modeling, impact data, and financial analysis to help leaders navigate uncertainty and structural change.

Ongoing board and executive advisory supporting multi-year transformation, responsible innovation, and the integration of sustainability into business models, governance, and investment decisions.

His work has included circular economy initiatives in the tire industry, impact and intelligence platforms for energy companies, sustainability and AI strategies for aquaculture, and transformation programs for global corporations, financial institutions, private equity firms, and startups.

Alongside his advisory work, Arnaud is the program director for the innovative program at CEDEP: Sustainable Value Creation that gathers every year executives and decision makers to build concrete action plans towards more sustainable value.

Arnaud teaches and mentors more than 500 executives annually through institutions and programs including INSEAD, Singapore Management University, SKEMA, EDHEC, IUM, and other global executive education platforms. He also mentors founders through initiatives such as Creative Destruction Lab and the Monaco Ocean Protection Challenge, supporting entrepreneurs building ventures with measurable positive impact.

Arnaud is currently CEO of Vela Intelligence and founder of the Institute for Responsible Innovation and Sustainability (IRIS).

Based between Europe and Asia, he works with organizations that are ready to move beyond sustainability as a reporting exercise and use AI, data, and impact intelligence to redesign how value is created in the first place. Arnaud Blandin designs the operating systems that embed sustainability and AI into the financial core of companies.