About Us

We shepherd the Age of AI into sustainable ecosystems.

AIforE is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation that benefits the Earth, Everyone, Everywhere — with Efficient use of energy and resources.

Our Mission

We are AI for E.

A 501(c)(3) that shepherds the Age of AI into sustainable ecosystems and technologies that benefit the Earth, Everyone, Everywhere — with Efficient use of energy and resources. We're focused on the Five R's: ROI, Right-Sized, Renewable, Recycled, and Remediate, and we put them to work through Project Stardust.

We're a collective of experienced and enthusiastic tech and sustainability professionals with hundreds of years of aggregate experience at the top tech companies and sustainable organizations.

501(c)(3)
IRS-recognized nonprofit corporation
100s
Years of aggregate tech + sustainability experience
E·E·E
Earth, Everyone, Everywhere — our scope, by design
The AIforE Sustainable AI Lifecycle: a five-step cycle of 1 ROI, 2 Right-Sized, 3 Renewable, 4 Recycled (shown with recycling, heat and water symbols) and 5 Remediate, around the words AIforE, Sustainable AI Lifecycle, AI For Ecology, over a green landscape with trees and a pond.
What We're Building

Project Stardust: from measuring AI's footprint to reducing it

AI's electricity demand is growing exponentially, yet no standard, shared way exists to measure what real AI workloads consume, and every provider reports differently. Even organizations that know their footprint have no simple, standard path from measuring it to reducing it.

So we're building Stardust, the codename for an open, end-to-end AI sustainability operating system. It makes the energy, cooling, water and emissions of AI observable everywhere AI runs, then connects that measurement to action, in four parts:

1

Stardust Telemetry Standard

An open schema for per-request AI energy, cooling, carbon and water, published as RFC 0001 and built on OpenTelemetry.

2

Open Benchmark Harness & Leaderboards

In development: will measure energy per token and useful output per kWh across models and hardware, with all methods and raw results published.

3

AIforE Efficiency Control Plane

Planned: right-sizing AI to use only what is needed, with an open-source reference efficiency router and fully measured trade-offs.

4

Sustainability Ecosystem Connections

Measured footprints linked to verified providers of carbon removal, restoration, clean energy and recycled water, through the AIforE carbon marketplace.

How the four parts serve the Five R's · Open source on GitHub ↗

Why Us

Uniquely qualified. Genuinely passionate.

Our team isn't assembled — it's converged. We've spent decades building the technologies that now must become sustainable, and decades building the sustainability practices technology must adopt. We've shipped products at the world's largest tech companies, and stewarded ecosystems in some of the world's most fragile ones.

We've also managed the costs, ROI, and efficiencies of leading tech products and services — the same discipline AI sustainability now demands at scale. That dual fluency — deep technical expertise paired with real ecological conviction — is rare, and it's exactly what AI sustainability now requires.

We're not consultants circling the problem — we're practitioners who've lived on both sides of it. That's why we're building AI for Ecology now.

Team

Leadership, at the intersection of tech and sustainability

Charles FinkelsteinCF
Charles Finkelstein
CEO & Founder

40+ years of tech leadership across engineering, innovation, product incubation, security, sustainability, sales, and marketing. Passion for tech and the ecology of the world. Microsoft, Salesforce, NetApp, Startups.

Daniel JoyceDJ
Daniel Joyce
CTO

Systems architect and AI-native engineer who builds lean, efficient software in Rust. Built energy-optimization analytics at Optimum Energy and engine telemetry at Blue Origin; now leads governed AI agent teams that ship faster at a fraction of typical cost. Founder of Snohomish.ai.

Stu SutherlandSS
Stu Sutherland
VP & Secretary, Board

Partner at Cardinal Insights, based in the Greater Seattle area.

Forrest FisherFF
Forrest Fisher
VP, Outreach

20+ years of product leadership across identity, AI, and platform strategy. Co-founded MeeBoss, a chat-first AI job-matching platform. Led initiatives at Disney, Adobe, FloSports, and startups. Grew up in Honolulu, transplanted to the PNW, with a passion for environmental stewardship.

Erwiena WrichnyEW
Erwiena Wrichny
VP, Finance & Treasurer

Finance manager at Amazon Web Services, focused on capital expenditure and AI infrastructure capacity planning.

Anusha KandelAK
Anusha Kandel
VP, Data Engineering

Data engineer at Blue Origin.

Jack BurnsJB
Jack Burns
VP, Technology

Senior Software Engineer at Datadog, leading the Data Streaming and Temporal platforms; previously at Nordstrom and founder of multiple startups.

Advisors

Board of Advisors and Consultants

Sanjay Joshi
MS, PhD candidate

Accomplished technologist and executive leader in healthcare, life sciences, and enterprise IT architecture. Known for his expertise in large-scale data architecture, biomedical informatics, and artificial intelligence, he has spent over three decades designing advanced technology infrastructure for some of the world's most complex technical environments. He is also a staff lecturer at the University of Washington.

Eli Finkelstein
MD, PhD

Highly experienced, board-certified radiation oncologist practicing in Florida. With over four decades of clinical experience and saving lives, Dr. Finkelstein specializes in using advanced technology in therapeutic applications of radiant energy to target and treat various forms of cancer, with a particular focus on prostate and lung cancer. Eli has been a lifelong outdoorsman and is an avid master diver.

We also have advisory relationships with well-known consultants in environmental technology economics, specializing in connecting sustainability commitments to data systems that deliver measurable target outcomes. They may be engaged at nonprofit rates through AIforE.

Governance

Board of Directors

AIforE is governed by a Board of Directors. Several of the leaders above — including Charles Finkelstein (Chairman), Stu Sutherland (Secretary) and Erwiena Wrichny (Treasurer) — currently serve as board officers. One of our Year 1 goals is growing the board toward 8 members.

Ecosystem

How AI for Ecology complements related organizations

Many organizations are doing vital work at the intersection of AI and the environment. AI for Ecology complements them — we focus on the piece few address directly: open standards, benchmarks and, in time, independent certification for the sustainability of the AI industry itself, and the tools that turn those measurements into action.

Earth Species Project

Builds AI models to decode animal communication, expanding what we can understand about other species. We work to keep the AI behind research like this efficient and accountable as it scales.

WattTime

Provides real-time grid emissions data and automation that shift energy use toward cleaner power. That kind of signal feeds directly into the time-of-use grid data in the Stardust telemetry standard and the AI-specific benchmarks we're building.

Rainforest Connection (RFCx)

Deploys AI-powered acoustic sensors to detect illegal logging and track rainforest biodiversity. Their field work shows AI delivering ecological value; we focus on making the AI side of it sustainable.

Climate Policy Radar

Uses AI to organize global climate law and policy into open, searchable data — the evidence base for climate action. We add the standards layer: defining what low-impact, responsible AI looks like in practice.

Green Software Foundation

A Linux Foundation project setting broad green-software standards, including the Software Carbon Intensity spec. Our telemetry standard, RFC 0001, is aligned with SCI (ISO/IEC 21031) and extends it to the AI-specific questions that training and inference raise, proposing new attributes back upstream.