Our Speakers

Senior Vice President – SVP Supply Chain Operations and Chief Sustainability Officer, Verizon, and Chairman of the GeSI Board. As Verizon's Chief Sustainability Officer, Gowen is responsible for setting the direction of the company's sustainable growth strategies and for reducing its carbon footprint. He oversees initiatives being implemented across Verizon including fuel and energy reduction, paper suppression, waste reduction and recycling, and management of end-of-life- cycle material recovery. In his supply chain capacity he leads centralised operations and the global customer premises equipment programme, directing more than USD 2.5 billion in annual throughput and roughly half a billion dollars in inventory, with responsibility spanning regional distribution centres, purchasing and materials management, investment recovery, international supply chain operations and centralised fleet management. A long-standing advocate for the role of the ICT sector in climate action, he has used that combined mandate to embed environmental performance into procurement and operations rather than treating it as a separate reporting exercise. Gowen holds an MBA from Long Island University and a bachelor's degree from Manhattanville College.