Some careers are built around a single discipline. Others evolve by connecting ideas that many people see as separate. For Jason Kennedy, the most rewarding work has always happened at the intersection of technology, business strategy, and sustainability. Throughout his career, he has focused on solving complex problems, building high-performing teams, and helping organizations create value that extends beyond quarterly results.
Today, as General Manager and Senior Director of OneHP Sustainability Portfolio Strategy at HP, Jason is helping shape how one of the world’s most recognized technology companies approaches sustainability across products, services, and customer experiences. His work sits at the crossroads of innovation and responsibility, where decisions about design, operations, artificial intelligence, and business strategy have implications that reach far beyond the technology sector itself.
What makes Jason’s perspective particularly compelling is that he does not view sustainability as a separate function or corporate obligation. Instead, he sees it as one of the defining business opportunities of our time. Having spent years leading product strategy, managing large-scale technology initiatives, and contributing to breakthrough innovations, he understands that long-term success increasingly depends on an organization’s ability to combine performance, resilience, efficiency, and responsible growth.
His journey from engineering and product leadership to sustainability strategy reflects a broader shift occurring across industries. As businesses navigate rapid technological change, environmental expectations, and evolving customer demands, leaders like Jason are demonstrating that sustainability is no longer a conversation happening on the sidelines. It is becoming a central part of how organizations innovate, compete, and create lasting value.
A Foundation Built on Curiosity and Systems Thinking
Long before sustainability became a boardroom priority, Jason was fascinated by the challenge of understanding how systems work. His academic background in industrial engineering with an environmental focus introduced him to the concept of systems thinking, the idea that individual decisions often create ripple effects across larger networks.
That perspective would later shape much of his professional philosophy.
“I’ve always been drawn to complex challenges, with the belief that human ingenuity and technology innovations can overcome the most daunting constraints,” he explains.
Early in his career, Jason developed an appreciation for the interconnected nature of product design, operations, supply chains, customer experiences, and business outcomes. Rather than viewing these elements in isolation, he learned to see them as parts of a larger ecosystem where one decision could influence economic performance, environmental impact, and societal outcomes simultaneously.
Over time, that understanding evolved into a deeper conviction about the role technology should play in the world.
“Technology should not only drive performance, but also resilience, efficiency, and better experiences for organizations, people, and the planet,” he says.
For Jason, sustainability became a natural extension of this mindset. It was not a departure from technology and business strategy but rather an expansion of them. As industries became more connected and stakeholder expectations grew, he recognized that responsible innovation would become one of the most important challenges facing modern organizations.
“What pulled me into this space was recognizing that sustainability is not a side initiative,” he says. “It’s one of the most powerful business imperatives of our time.”
Lessons Learned Through Innovation at Scale
Before joining HP, Jas on built a significant part of his career at Intel, where he played key roles in advancing technology platforms, driving profitability, and helping launch AI-enabled computing solutions. Among his milestones, was leading the development, launch, and sales ramp of the Celeron platform, the first brand to follow the famous Pentium family and created a new segmentation category for value-conscious consumers, plus Jason introduced the first Xeon processor with built-in AI acceleration, achievements that reflected both technological advancement and changing market needs. Yet what stands out most to Jason are not specific product launches but the broader lessons that come from operating at scale.
“My years at Intel taught me how to connect technology roadmaps to business outcomes at global scale, while addressing specific human needs,” he explains.
Leading large initiatives required balancing multiple priorities simultaneously. Technical innovation needed to align with customer requirements, ecosystem readiness, supply chain realities, geopolitical factors, and long-term market shifts. Success depended on bringing diverse stakeholders around common objectives and ultimately win, together.
Those experiences proved invaluable as Jason’s work increasingly intersected with sustainability strategy. “Success requires a similarly high level of discipline, agility, and resilient stakeholder engagement,” he says.
He points out that many of the same skills required to commercialize emerging technologies are equally important when embedding sustainability into business operations. Both involve aligning engineering, product management, operations, customers, suppliers, and external stakeholders around a shared vision and persevering through roadblocks along the way.
His work at Intel also exposed him to initiatives involving eco-design, lifecycle management, energy efficiency, supplier engagement, and operational resilience. These experiences reinforced a lesson that continues to guide him today.
“Sustainability is most powerful when it is embedded in strategic decision-making, not layered on as an afterthought,” Jason asserts.
Turning Ambition Into Real Customer Value
One of the themes that runs throughout Jason’s work is the importance of translating strategy into practical outcomes. Ambitious goals may capture attention, but he believes real value emerges only when those ambitions truly improve experiences for customers and businesses.
“To me, it means translating broad sustainability ambitions into concrete outcomes that matter to customers,” he explains when discussing what it means to turn strategic insight into differentiated customer value.
That value can take many forms. It may mean lowering operating costs, reducing resource consumption, improving compliance readiness, strengthening supply chain resilience, or enhancing trust among customers and stakeholders. Regardless of the outcome, Jason believes strategy becomes meaningful only when it produces tangible benefits.
“Strategy only becomes meaningful when it changes the customer experience or improves business performance,” he says.
This philosophy encourages organizations to ask deeper questions about how products and services are designed. How can technology be developed with lower lifecycle impacts? How can circular approaches improve both economics and resource efficiency? How can emerging technologies help customers become more productive while reducing complexity and waste?
For Jason, the answers often lie in making sustainability practical rather than theoretical. The more measurable and relevant sustainability becomes to everyday business priorities, the more effective it will be as success motivates others to join in and accelerate momentum further.
Embedding Sustainability Across the Entire Lifecycle
At HP, Jason approaches sustainability as a lifecycle discipline rather than a checklist item. For hardware, that means considering sustainability from the earliest stages of design. Decisions involving materials, repairability, reuse potential, energy efficiency, packaging, and end-of-life planning all influence the long-term impact of a product.
“Sustainability starts with design choices,” he explains.
This philosophy extends beyond products to the spaces and systems that support innovation. A notable example is HP’s new LEED Gold-certified facility in Vancouver, WA, which incorporates mass timber construction and a solar-ready design, reflecting the company’s commitment to embedding sustainability principles into both its operations and infrastructure.
The conversation extends beyond products themselves. Supplier engagement, documentation practices, regulatory requirements, and customer expectations all play important roles in shaping responsible outcomes. Software and services introduce a different set of opportunities. Rather than focusing solely on physical materials, the emphasis shifts toward smarter holistic decision-making and extending the value customers derive from technology.
“We look at how digital experiences drive resource efficiency, improve workflows, extend product utility, and help customers make smarter decisions throughout the full lifecycles,” Jason explains.
His role involves connecting these different dimensions into a coherent portfolio strategy that aligns engineering, product management, operations, and go-to-market teams around shared goals. He is particularly focused on ensuring that sustainability is communicated in ways customers can understand and appreciate.
“Our Sustainability Progress story should clearly show how intentional design and innovation can help customers reduce their environmental footprint while strengthening outcomes for their business, and reflect that success is a relentless journey, not a destination,” he says.
The impact of these efforts is reflected in the growing recognition HP has received for its sustainability leadership. More than 70 percent of HP’s 2025 revenue came from products designed to help reduce environmental impacts, underscoring how sustainability has become embedded within the company’s business strategy. HP was also named by Corporate Knights among the 2026 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World. In addition, the company was ranked among the top 1 percent of companies globally by EcoVadis, recognized by Omdia as a Sustainability Ecosystem Champion, ranked among the top five on Forbes’ 2026 Net-Zero Leaders list, and named the #1 Overall Most JUST Company in America by JUST Capital.
Jason’s commitment to innovation and impact has also been recognized throughout his career. Among his notable achievements are a U.S. patent granted for enabling secure delivery of post-sale feature upgrades enhancing product capabilities, extending device lifecycles, and creating new services-based revenue streams and his receiving the Intel Achievement Award, Intel’s highest honor, recognizing exceptional contributions and leadership in driving meaningful results.
The Technologies Reshaping Tomorrow
As conversations around sustainability continue to evolve, Jason sees emerging technologies playing a central role in shaping future business models. Among the most significant are the Edge computing and artificial intelligence. These hybrid AI technologies are creating new opportunities for organizations to understand their operations, improve efficiency, and make better-informed decisions by utilizing capabilities at the point of use.
“Physical AI, with on-device intelligence, that may or may not extend out to the Cloud, can help organizations better understand how assets are being used, where inefficiencies or data vulnerabilities exist, and how maintenance, energy, and utilization can be optimized in real time,” he explains.
Edge to Cloud hybrid computing environments are enabling organizations to scale intelligence and transition from reactive decision-making to more predictive and efficient approaches. Yet Jason believes the greatest opportunity lies beyond operational improvements alone.
“These technologies are unleashing entirely new business models and support users in create work beyond their past limits,” he says.
Service-based offerings, predictive operations, digital workflows, and more accurate measurement of environmental impact are becoming increasingly possible because of these technological advances. Combined with AI, Jason believes this will help people and organizations improve productivity while reducing waste and friction to deliver growth, fulfillment, and ultimately their best work possible.
Communicating Complex Ideas with Clarity
As a public speaker and an industry thought leader with over 25,000 LinkedIn followers, who frequently discusses technology and sustainability, Jason understands that even the most important ideas can lose impact if they are not communicated effectively. His approach begins with why it actually matters.
“I try to begin with relevance, not jargon,” he explains.
Topics like AI and sustainability can quickly become overwhelming when discussed solely through technical language. Jason focuses instead on connecting these subjects to real-world decisions and outcomes.
“People connect more deeply when they understand how a topic affects business resilience, customer value, workforce experience, or societal progress. You must appeal to both the head and the heart,” he says.
At the same time, he believes credibility requires balancing optimism with rigor. While innovation creates exciting possibilities, responsible leadership demands transparency about trade-offs and limitations.
“The best communication combines strategic clarity, practical examples, and a genuine sense of urgency about what responsible innovation can unlock,” he notes.
Rethinking the Relationship Between Sustainability and Growth
One of Jason’s strongest beliefs is that sustainability and business performance should never be viewed as competing priorities.
“I think that separation is one of the most outdated assumptions in business. A growth mindset starts with a “I wonder…” approach to challenges and iteratively builds upon initial solutions with ‘Yes, and’ focus” he says.
Rather than functioning as a reporting exercise, sustainability can serve as a framework for innovation, resilience, efficiency, and long-term value creation. It can influence everything from product design and operational effectiveness to customer trust and market differentiation.
In his own work, Jason focuses on connecting sustainability directly to outcomes leaders already care about.
“Growth, efficiency, differentiation, resilience, and long-term value creation,” he says, listing the priorities that sustainability can support.
While sustainability often must overcome initial skepticism when it becomes embedded in strategic decisions and measurable outcomes, it transforms from a perceived constraint into a source of momentum.
“With great power comes great responsibility” – Stan Lee (Spiderman)
Building Teams and Developing Future Leaders
While Jason has contributed to significant technology initiatives throughout his career, one of the achievements he values most involves people rather than products.
“I am proud to be known as a talent multiplier, but I am never satisfied with my abilities, nor do I hide areas that I am working to improve. Vulnerability is a Superpower!” he says.
Helping others grow, aligning teams around meaningful goals, and creating environments where people can perform at their best are accomplishments, he considers just as important as business results.
“The business outcomes matter, but how you build them matters just as much because I want us to win today AND tomorrow,” Jason reflects.
This perspective has shaped his leadership style throughout his career. Whether leading product organizations, sustainability initiatives, or cross-functional programs, he believes strong teams create lasting impact. His own transition from product leadership to global sustainability strategy was not a dramatic career shift but rather a continuation of a broader mission.
“The transition into sustainability strategy was not a departure from that path. It was an expansion of it,” he explains.
Creating a Legacy of Responsible Innovation
When discussing the future, Jason returns repeatedly to a central idea: technology and responsibility should advance together.
“I hope to help prove that technology can be both high-performing and deeply responsible,” he says.
He envisions a future where organizations design more intelligently, operate more resiliently, and create better experiences for customers, employees, and communities alike. Beyond technology itself, he hopes his leadership leaves a lasting impact on the people and teams he has worked alongside.
“I hope my legacy is that I helped people think bigger, move faster, and build with greater purpose,” he says.
As businesses continue navigating the opportunities and challenges created by AI, sustainability expectations, and rapid technological change, leaders like Jason Kennedy are helping redefine what progress looks like. His career demonstrates that innovation does not have to come at the expense of responsibility. In fact, the most meaningful advances often emerge when organizations pursue both together.
The future Jason envisions is not one where sustainability exists alongside business success. It is one where the two are inseparable. Through thoughtful leadership, practical innovation, a commitment to creating lasting value, and recognition that there are not easy straight lines to achievements, he continues to show that responsible growth is not only possible but increasingly essential for the world ahead.
“Success is not linear” – Bob Kennedy (Jason’s dad)
