🍃9 Practical Ways to Apply AI in Your Sustainability Work and 1 Watch Out (Part2)

Welcome back 🖐,

(this is Part 2 of a two-part series. See The Green Tea library for Part 1)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic for the last few months, but how can you actually apply the technology to advance sustainability in your company?  Or maybe you have been asked by your management how AI can be used for sustainability, and you want to show you did your homework? In this edition of the Green Tea Academy, I am sharing with you a few practical use cases for the technology.

Here are 9 ways for you to apply AI in sustainability and 1 watch out! 👇 

USE CASE 6: Solve a difficult problem

Could AI help you crack one of your industries' intractable sustainability issues? AI technology is particularly helpful when you have large quantities of data, geolocations, and/or the need for pattern recognition, categorization and optimization. If your issue involves one or multiple of these, AI could help although you will need consultative support from external and internal tech partners as this is one of the most complex and less turnkey AI applications. As an example, see here how American Airlines worked with Google to use AI to determine how pilots can minimize climate-warming aircraft contrails. Contrails are responsible for ~35% of the global warming impact of the aviation industry. An added bonus of this use case is the potential for positive PR for your organization as demonstrated by the example.

USE CASE 7: Avoid greenwashing in your Marketing

You might unintentionally end up using marketing claims that are considered greenwashing, but such mistakes can be costly to your company’s reputation and pockets as legislations and lawsuits emerge to fight false or misleading marketing claims around sustainability. Startup Greenifs.ai AI tool is helping companies avoid greenwashing in their marketing considering factors such as geography and relevant regulations to provide suggestions and help stay complying and out of trouble.

USE CASE 8: Optimize your fleet and EV vehicle deployment

With transportation being one of the main sources of CO2, this is a prime area for company emission improvements and also one where AI excels given the abundance of data. Companies such as VivaDrive are using AI in their analytics to simulate clients’ fleets, create multiple scenarios based on tasks and types of vehicles, and provide optimal execution for EV vehicles deployment and charging infrastructure.

USE CASE 9: Innovate your operations for sustainability

AI is among the most active venture capital verticals at the moment and the financing is feeding a torrent of startups applying the technology to existing business needs so you could probably find a startup applying AI+sustainability to your industry and almost any area of your business. Some examples of startup using AI in different aspects of business include Refiberd which is optimizing textile recycling and Mortar IO which is helping decarbonize built infrastructure. To find startups like this, you can read The Green Tea 😉, do web searches or use platforms like Crunchbase or CB Insights.

WATCH OUT: Address any AI biases

Avoiding biases is something to keep in mind when applying AI. It would not be a good look if you are driving diversity and inclusion at your company or broader audience access to your products and you find out that your AI deployment has been trained on biased gender or racial data. This article from Rolling Stone talks about a group of female scientists who are leading an effort to make sure AI systems are trained on unbiased data sets so they do not continue to reinforce stereotypes and perpetuate discrimination.

See The Green Tea library for Part 1. I hope this gives you a few practical ways to use AI to save time and solve existing needs in your role. Obviously, do your due diligence before pursuing any of the solutions or suppliers mentioned here or others available. This is particularly important given how new the technology and some of these suppliers are.

Feel free to share with me any reactions to these use cases or other ways in which AI has supported your efforts 🙋‍️.

Enjoy and reflect 💭. Warm regards / saludos,

Julio