Jaycee Pribulsky is Partner and Chief Sustainability Officer at Apollo, where she oversees the firm's sustainability efforts. Before joining Apollo, she was Chief Sustainability Officer at Nike, and earlier in her career held roles at Bloomberg, Citi and the White House. In this episode, she joins Jenn to make the case that the sustainability field has reached a turning point where aspiration alone is no longer enough and operational excellence is essential.
Episode 48
Jaycee Pribulsky
Operational Excellence
From Aspiration to Execution
The early years of sustainability in private equity were about making the case that it mattered. That work is largely done. What the industry now needs, in Jaycee's view, is the discipline to operationalise it, embedding sustainability into investment decision-making, measuring its impact in financial terms, and holding itself accountable to generating results.
Sustainability Data Is Just Data
Jaycee offers a simple reframing: stop thinking of sustainability information as a separate category. It is another dataset that helps investment teams make better decisions. On the credit side alone, Apollo completed over nine thousand sustainability risk assessments last year, integrating environmental, social, and governance considerations directly into pricing and deal structure.
AI as a Scaling Tool
The volume of analysis required across a portfolio the size of Apollo's is significant, and AI is starting to change what is possible. For Jaycee, the most immediate value is in automating work that was previously highly manual, freeing the team to focus on research and insight that can genuinely inform investment thinking.