Andi Cross

Andi is an international leader fiercely dedicated to redefining how businesses coexist with the natural world and the communities they directly and indirectly affect. With 15 years of experience helping major corporations scale and nearly a decade in marine and terrestrial conservation, she bridges the gap between corporate ambition and environmental responsibility, vying for a future where people and planet both win. Her work spans industries, guiding businesses, agencies, and venture capital firms to integrate sustainability into the heart of their strategies.

Since 2017, she has been the Strategist in Residence at H/L Ventures—a firm championing historically underserved founders—where she has helped build purpose-driven companies. Previously, as Vice President of Strategic Growth at Huge, Inc., she helped grow the leading digital and design firm to be more effective service-focused leaders. She’s worked with world-renowned brands such as Coca-Cola, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, Hyundai, and Norwegian Cruise Lines during her tenure at Ogilvy & Mather and other leading agencies around the globe.

A pivotal moment in her journey came when she combined her corporate expertise with field expeditions to some of the world’s most vulnerable regions. Seeing the disconnect between corporate ESG strategies and the realities faced by communities on the frontlines of climate change, Andi founded a sustainability consulting firm in 2018.

Since then, she’s partnered with over 250 field experts in 33+ countries, guiding 50+ partners toward delivering tangible change.

The approach behind all of it has a name: Andi works as an accelerant strategist, the framework she developed and writes about at andicross.com. An accelerant does not start the fire — it makes an existing one burn faster. Applied to climate, that means finding the people already doing the work in a place, then clearing whatever is slowing them down, instead of arriving with an outside plan and calling it a solution.

She is also an expedition diver, and that is not a side note — it is how the fieldwork gets done. Andi is a certified tec diver on both closed-circuit rebreather and cave, the two disciplines that let a diver stay down longer and reach places open-water training cannot follow. CCR recycles exhaled gas instead of venting it, which means no bubbles, far longer bottom times, and animals that behave as though nobody is there. Cave is overhead-environment diving, where there is no direct route to the surface and every dive runs on redundant gas, a continuous guideline and a hard turn-around rule. Roughly 3% of tec divers are women. Andi is deliberately loud about that number, diving and creating with Scubapro and Dive Rite so that the next woman into technical and cave diving finds it a little less unusual than she did.

Andi’s next-gen and powerhouse approach is rooted in lived experience, bringing practicality and positivity to even the heaviest climate challenges. While the scope of climate issues may feel overwhelming, she helps businesses find actionable paths forward without compromising their financial objectives. Her work and insights have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, Forbes, Time Magazine, The Today Show, and more, highlighting her relentless drive to push boundaries in environmental stewardship and corporate sustainability.