AI this Earth Day: Your best opportunity to advance your sustainability initiatives

This Earth Day, we call for action to preserve our scarcest resource: our planet. To drive real change, it is important for individuals, industries, organizations and governments to work together to identify new opportunities to use data and technology to help advance sustainability initiatives globally.

The world is lagging behind in responding to climate change. With 2024 expected to be the hottest year on record, data and AI can be applied across a variety of areas to strengthen sustainability efforts. We believe there are three key areas every organization should focus on: sustainability strategy and reporting; energy transition and climate resilience; Intelligent asset, facility and infrastructure management.

Sustainability Strategy, Data and Reporting

Use data and AI to drive your sustainability strategy while meeting your reporting needs.

In speaking with customers around the world, we’ve found that sustainability is still a priority on their agenda. CEOs say sustainability investments will help their businesses perform better over the next five years. However, despite strong commitment and action, some organizations struggle to progress at the desired pace. An IBM survey of business leaders found that one of the key challenges they face is a lack of trusted data and insights.

AI technology can help overcome these challenges by turning Intel into insights faster, enabling businesses to achieve their sustainability and financial goals faster. AI allows business teams to “clean” data, manage gaps, and report across multiple frameworks. This will help you deliver competitive insights that are key to making strategic decisions faster, more consistently, and with fewer errors. This approach can help organizations more easily establish sustainability strategies across their business. You can also leverage that data and insights to accelerate progress in a way that improves performance and meets regulatory requirements.

At IBM, we act as “client zero” for some of our own solutions. For example, IBM Global Real Estate uses our technology to track, analyze and report progress against our sustainability goals in a timely and accurate manner. We use IBM Envizi to collect data from more than 6,500 utility bills received globally each year and summarize total energy consumption, costs and renewable electricity purchases across IBM. Saves a lot of time calculations. This technology allows you to pull reports and filter them by location, geography, utilities, and more to identify where energy consumption is highest, identify unexpected changes, and find where IBM has the most opportunities to drive energy savings. can.

Energy transition and climate resilience

Accelerate the transition to sustainable energy sources by applying AI and IoT

There is a clear need to accelerate the transition to low-carbon energy sources and transform infrastructure to create more climate-resilient organizations. Our approach includes applying AI, Internet of Things (IoT), advanced data, and automation solutions to support this transition.

For example, supermarket chain Salling Group leverages IBM Consulting’s Flex Platform to balance its power consumption with renewable power supplies from the grid. Created in collaboration with Denmark’s Andel Energi, the platform uses IoT sensors, AI and the cloud to provide an energy ecosystem where consumers can participate in real-time intelligent grid optimization. The technology facilitates operation of intermittent energy sources such as renewable energy and facilitates interface with existing building management platforms. This allows large buildings, such as grocery stores, to partially pause their energy use (e.g. heating or cooling) and pay based on the electricity available through renewable electricity generation, to the extent that it does not significantly impact operations. there is. For this flexibility.

We’re also committed to helping organizations become more climate resilient by providing them with the tools they need to predict climate impacts. For example, we are working on geospatial-based models that can be fine-tuned to track deforestation, detect GHGs, or predict crop yields. The underlying models identify and analyze data, surface trends such as where and why populations are moving, provide insights into how to provide renewable energy, where carbon is stored, how long it takes for carbon to decompose, etc. It helps in estimating. We also know that AI requires enormous amounts of energy and data. As AI becomes more widely deployed, organizations must consider how to design and manage AI systems sustainably. This could include running processing systems in regions powered by more renewable energy sources and ensuring computing workloads use this energy efficiently. According to the AI ​​Ethics Committee, IBM has taken many steps to mitigate the environmental impact of its AI systems. For example, 70.6% of IBM’s total electricity consumption in 2023 came from renewable energy sources, including 74% of the power consumed by IBM data centers. Additionally, IBM Hursley Datacenter uses proprietary technology to save power across 4,500 physical computing systems.

Intelligent asset, facility and infrastructure management

Leverage AI to build efficient physical operations, manage costs, and reduce environmental impact.

The key to achieving the United Nations’ goals by 2030 lies in improving the performance of assets, facilities and infrastructure. This will help you make progress by optimizing the resources used.

For example, the city of Atlanta, USA, uses IBM Maximo to maintain 51 facilities, including fire stations, police stations, parks, public works and all city-owned buildings. The solution provides a single, integrated platform to access comprehensive monitoring, maintenance and reliability applications across city departments. This application allows you to plan and schedule maintenance, track work orders, manage maintenance, and more, all within a single platform. Ultimately, this technology contributes to the city’s sustainability plans by maintaining and preserving assets and operating facilities more efficiently, saving the city time and money. Atlanta plans to continue expanding Maximo’s capabilities, particularly in the area of ​​AI.

We’re already developing innovative technologies to enhance these capabilities and address future challenges as we keep pace with new regulations and an ever-changing industry. The emergence of AI and new sustainability regulations are driving the industry shift from Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) to Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM). ALM allows you to extend the overall life of your assets and increase efficiency in ways never before possible. Downer explored this by working with IBM Consulting and using our technology to leverage real-time data from more than 200 trains across Australia. Analytics supports predictive maintenance, reduces malfunctions and improves train reliability by 51%.

Looking at the future of AI

Accelerate progress with the help of generative AI

When thinking about the future of sustainability, generative AI comes to mind as it has the potential to play a significant role. Generative AI refers to deep learning models that can take raw data and “learn” it to produce statistically possible output when prompted. Leveraging generative AI to advance sustainability goals can help companies quickly realize both their sustainability and financial goals. According to IBM research, organizations that operationalize sustainability (read: embed sustainability practices within their business) are 52% more likely to outperform their peers in terms of profitability and have 16% higher revenue growth rates. According to additional IBM research, 61% of executives surveyed said generative AI will be important to their sustainability agenda and plan to increase their investments in generative AI for sustainability. As always, you need to carefully consider how you deploy these technologies to deliver both business and sustainability benefits.

At IBM, we are exploring different ways to leverage data and AI to help organizations achieve business advancement and embed sustainability into their core, everyday business operations. Environmental problems cannot be solved unless companies, governments, and society work together. Earth Day reminds us that we all need to take action to make real progress. Everyone has a role to play in meeting today’s challenges, and IBM is committed to helping guide organizations toward sustainable practices and implement data-driven technologies to have a positive impact on the environment. there is.

Turn challenges into solutions