Sustainability The IBM Way
In an interaction with Urvi Shrivastav Editorial Lead, BW ESG, BW Businessworld; Dr Amith Singhee, Director IBM Research India, CTO for IBM India and SE South Asia, and Shantanu Godbole, Global Lead, Sustainability IBM Research, speaks about ESG trends today and IBM's approach to the same.
How seriously are corporates taking climate protection right now?
Dr Singhee: Climate protection is part of the overall ESG strategy that many corporates are looking at. It is becoming increasingly important. There is so much awareness within the corporate community, within the company but also from the board room and consumers. That has resulted in a very structured approach that many corporates are taking towards this it. From IBM we engage with them in a very structured way because we see certain key imperatives that a lot of the corporates across the key industries are embarking on to address climate change and sustainability.
Godbole: ESG now is something people are taking a lot more seriously and not just doing it for the sake of announcement. According to some of these global surveys that IBM runs with our clients, which are - some of the largest enterprises in the world, four out of five CEOs are expecting sustainability to impact their bottom line and top line in the next five years or so. Only about a fourth of them are using their data or AI to really make that happen. That is the kind of friction we see. As technologists we are trying to bring solutions to address that gap.
What kind of work is being done at a ground level?
Godbole: From the technological stand point we can make the fastest impact on the environment aspect of ESG. This includes not just climate change, that is, those changes which we will see in the next decade, but also emissions. This includes the negative contributions in the environment in terms of carbon emissions, methane emissions, carbon dioxide emissions, etc. This is true for all industries like natural gas, heavy industries, agriculture, retail and many more. The idea is to start with taking the data you have and reporting where you are today, because over the last few months we have seen corporates make commitments who claim they will be net zero by 2030, 2040 or 2050. What everyone needs is a tactical and scientific operational plan on meaningfully cutting down emissions whole protecting business and cost. The first step is to understand, measure, and report where you are today. Once there is clarity about the present, one can chart out where one wants to be three to five years from now. This matters to heavy asset industries, offices, supply chains, data centres, all of which require technology. We have seen organisations starting to use data and data used for that technology, to start measuring, reducing and it. This is an activity we have seen happen post-pandemic.
Since we have ESG across every facet of the corporate world, what are the issues we witness while implementing the same?
Dr Singhee: One is having the visibility, that is, figuring out where are the hot spots, opportunities. Even if the technology is available for the same, there is a struggle in figuring out their starting points and priority areas. For example, supply chains can be a big contributor to carbon impact. Even if one player tries to make a change, it is so interlinked with everybody else, the ecosystem has to collaborate and come together. We need to supply the technology to corporates so they can leverage the same.
Godbole: Another roadblock we have encountered, there is still a siloed approach. People want to solve their problems. This could be the government, enterprise, or academic institutions trying to do their own thing. Definitely what we have understood is there has to be broad based collaborations. We are trying to bring technology consortiums together, because the kind of problems that need solving cannot be solved by one enterprise alone. Having that foundational base where people can come together with large amounts of data, with petabytes of data and the scale to process this data, we need massive collaboration. for this.
How has artificial intelligence impacted the sustainability space?
Godbole: I would like to address this in three clusters. One First is the operations of an enterprise, which depends on their facilities, offices, buildings, etc. All of this generates massive amounts of data, and it is this data that has golden nuggets stored across it. The machine learning and AI techniques which help cover those insights. Second is decarbonisation, climate change, and overall responsibility to the environment. Identifying and bringing together the data will help in running infrastructure and machinery better is something that is being done. The other notion is of supply chains, which is a global problem. Any meaningful supply chain right now is a cross border supply chain, given the complexities of transport, assembly, and sales. All of these supply chains have so many entities involved. Not only the big companies but also small players like small and medium supply chain. The question is to get all of these together on this whole roadmap of popularity, and making the whole supply chain more sustainable is certainly an area of work. Emerging technologies like AI, block chain, etc play a great role in data visibility, quality, trust and bias issues that emerge in data. The third space is of cloud and IT infrastructure, where people run their workloads around simulations of climate, or financial world running/operations or its like these big oil and gas companies doing drilling and mining etc who generate a lot of data. All of this requires huge compute power.
Dr Singhee: I would like to shed light on an example that IBM Research worked on a few years ago. It was quite relevant, for example, in the area of fashion. It is tied back to the supply chain example. Fashion serves the masses but has a tremendous impact on the environment. There are many reasons for it. We used AI as a lever to figure out how successful a product would be in the market, and where should it be stocked and where it is not required.
How does IBM utilise this technology?
Dr Singhee: IBM uses it in all the areas previously mentioned. We have our supply chain for our server technology. There is a global supply chain that we have for the software and hardware. We have one of the most intelligent supply chain processes in the world using AI and optimisation technologies to make it very effective. Around managing our assets and infrastructure, whether it is Tririga or Maximo, or energy reduction targets, we have internally implemented IoT technology. It helps bring visibility and optimisation, which helps bring optimisation in our processes.
As Dr Singhee mentioned, there is a sustainability report that comes out. Can you mention some of the targets that you have achieved in the reports?
Godbole: It has been over 50 years since IBM has been reporting on our responsibility to the environment. We call it our ‘Corporate Environmental Report', and it has been coming out every year. We have set a 2030 as our target for net zero, without depending on things like carbon offsets or purchasing our way out of it, like using renewable energy certificates. We are really committed to reducing our carbon footprint with more and more purchase of renewable energy and enacting some of the optimisations and AI based hot spot reductions. IBM is a great believer in ‘client zero', so we out our own cooking. A lot of innovations in research are tested out by our own CRO or CFO team. We use those innovations ourselves before they make headway into some of our flagship products.. All of these are data and AI driven technologies.
What are IBM’s plan henceforth, in addition to what has already been done?
Dr Singhee: We have big plans and in fact, a lot of these are also published in the last report. There are many targets within our enterprise, with respect to reducing our energy consumption and reducing our consumption by hundreds of thousands of MW over four years or so. Our data centres have existed for years, so you have to expand by using IoT and AI. We also see ourselves as a catalyst for bringing technology in the world. We have also committed to engaging 100 clients, to help them and implement the learnings.
