Scott Mauvais recently retired from Microsoft after 23 years with executive roles spanning a variety of leadership positions. Most recently, he was the Senior Director for AI and Global Partnerships in Microsoft Philanthropies where he built a new initiative and led the team that jointly invested in social impact projects with Microsoft’s largest customers and partners where he raised over $100 million in philanthropic funding.

Scott works with tech-intensive organizations to build cross-sector partnerships and where, together, they can achieve significantly more social impact and scale than the individual organizations could achieve on their own.

His areas of expertise are in Trustworthy Tech, the Future of Work, and Urbanism with a specific focus on AI for good, sustainability, social entrepreneurship, and accessibility.

Scott held a variety of leadership roles in consulting, technical architecture, corporate innovation, sales, smart cities, and philanthropy. Prior to joining Philanthropies, he was the Director of Microsoft Cities where he worked with city leaders and the local community to apply the global resources and expertise of Microsoft and its broad network of partners to strengthen cities by fostering the civic tech ecosystem and create opportunities for inclusive economic growth.

Mr. Mauvais has been a fixture in the San Francisco tech ecosystem for 30 years. He started his career initially in politics using dial-up bulletin board systems to organize campaigns. After a short stint in publishing where he pioneered the use of desktop publishing for full-length books, he built a consulting company implementing integrated ecommerce systems during the first dot-com boom.

He originally joined Microsoft as a performance expert to help Microsoft Consulting Services build tools and processes that could address the scalability needs of internet companies. He moved to Enterprise Services to help the company learn how to architect solutions and services that addressed the needs of global companies. He was the Director of the Microsoft Technology Center, a state-of-the-art innovation lab where he led a team of Microsoft’s top architects who worked hand-in-hand with Fortune 500 companies to envision and prove out solutions that addressed their most complex business problems.

Scott is a regular speaker on topics such as sustainability, urbanism, innovation, and the role of global tech companies in society. He often brings the contrarian viewpoint by highlighting the unintended consequences of introducing well-meaning changes to complex technical and societal systems. He has written extensively for Microsoft Press and Ziff-Davis.

Scott serves on the national boards of Upwardly Global and the Urban Age Institute and co-owns The WELL, the ground breaking online community founded in 1985. When not working, Scott enjoys skiing in the winter, backpacking in the summer, and seeing and photographing as much live music as possible year-round.