The CTS tech roundtable attracted sustainability experts from several industries: government, electronics, healthcare and finance. It was great to see that these professionals shared their experience and best practices in an inspiring setting: the Google office in Amsterdam. They all emphasised that technology is the key for progress, but progress can’t happen without setting sustainability ambitions.
Highlighting opportunities
The roundtable started with a presentation of the host, Google, highlighting the opportunities for using data in a sustainability framework. A great example of this is the Project Green Light, a Google Research initiative, that is helping cities improve traffic flow at intersections and reduce stop-and-go emissions. In this case, trends and data from Google Maps in combination with artificial intelligence make it possible to reduce GhG emissions. Another opportunity concerns the aviation industry. AI and satellite imagery are used to reduce the warming effects of contrails. And finally, the roundtable participants learned more about the Solar API, that surfaces important building, rooftop, shading, and panel configuration data. In this use case it is possible to put the panels in the right place in order to optimise efficiency.
Sustainable cloud solutions
In addition to these great initiatives, some of the participants mentioned their own ‘sustainability with data’ projects. One was about collecting data anonymously on how customers use electronic devices. With these data the supplier can advise customers to use the devices in a way that saves energy. In all these examples, access to data is paramount. The connection with Google Cloud is obvious, as CTS is a prominent GCP partner. And since CTS is a proud B Corp certified company, helping customers to develop sustainable cloud solutions.
Impact on the carbon footprint
In this respect, awareness about the footprint of data was mentioned as an important issue for the participants. Do you really need to store all your data in a tier 1 datacenter? Do you really need to send a 20 MB e-mail with 20 people in CC? Data storage has become really cheap, but we have to take into account what the impact is on the company’s carbon footprint. One of the professionals at the roundtable explained that they have a huge data cleaning operation twice a year, with which they save terabytes of data. Google itself has the policy that data that is not used for more than a year, is automatically removed. Another suggestion was to organise a game within the organisation, urging employees to store data wisely.
Sharing knowledge, sharing data
The last topic at the roundtable was AI. We all know that training AI-models is consuming a lot of energy. As the earlier examples show, AI can be of great help in reducing the carbon footprint. But an important question to ask yourself: do you really need AI in every solution? Gen AI is now a big hype, but be aware that a platform like ChatGPT also comes with impact on the environment. And next to that, another part of sustainability concerns ethics. Is the dataset unbiased, is the data that is used of high quality? These remain questions that organisations have to address.
The conclusion of the roundtable was that organisations can learn a lot from each other. Sharing knowledge, sharing data and sharing best practices are key elements in the world of sustainable tech. CTS was happy to accommodate this discussion and we hope to see you again in the next tech roundtable.