Speaker:

Raiford Smith

Global Market Lead for Power & Energy

Google Cloud

Details:

Date : 17th November, 2025
Time: 4:00 PM -  6:00 PM
Location: Rooms 103A and 103B, Building BH2 14004 University Blvd, Sugar Land, TX 77479; UH Sugarland Campus

Seminar Overview: 

Growth of AI and energy are inexorably linked. How will these two industries work together to solve 21st-century challenges? This talk will explore how growth in AI is leading to record investments in energy infrastructure. Additionally, we will discuss how that growth is expected to transform the energy sector - from the technologies and benefits of widespread AI adoption to growth in both traditional and carbon-free energy resources. 

About the Speaker:

Raiford Smith is Google Cloud’s Global Market Lead for Power and Energy. Raiford began his career as a unionized call center clerk at Savannah Electric and Power Company and has spent over three decades in the electric, natural gas, and high-tech industries. Raiford has also led Google’s global energy infrastructure, water and wastewater, economic and community development, and supply planning teams, managing over $1.2Bn OpEx and $15Bn CapEx budgets to help Google transition from 100% renewable energy to 24x7 carbon free energy. 

Prior to his work at Google, Raiford held a wide variety of roles at other energy companies, including Chief Utility Innovation Officer at AES as well as other leadership positions at CPS Energy, Duke Energy, Entergy, and the Southern Company. He has led initiatives that contributed hundreds of millions of dollars of recurring EBITDA, grew customer engagement, and improved service reliability through new customer products and services, analytics, smart grid, and distributed energy resources. His career has spanned a very diverse set of roles in legal, mergers and acquisitions, energy trading, transmission & distribution, product management, regulatory, information technology, and customer support. Raiford graduated from the University of Georgia with a BS in computer science, earned an MBA from the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia, earned a JD from the Charlotte School of Law, and received a business analytics certificate from Harvard University’s Business Analytics Program. Raiford is a licensed attorney (North Carolina), holds multiple patents for distributed computing at the grid edge, and has published numerous papers on the future of the electric industry, energy regulatory economics, and energy-related technology.