How can AI help sustainability?

Common refrains from AI skeptics revolve around its unknowns: Will AI take people's jobs? Do all these AI companies steal personal data? Is AI going to destroy the planet?

No answers to these questions are certain yet, which has led many sustainability leaders to question AI's potential to help with their own initiatives. They are cautiously optimistic -- or, at least, not willing to reject the technology just yet, said Dr. Matt Gardner, founder and managing partner of Sustainserv, a sustainability consultancy. In fact, AI's early promises of efficiency and time savings have interested many leaders in this space, who often work in small teams or lack substantial resources.

The following interview took place at GreenBiz, a conference for sustainability business leaders hosted in Phoenix. In it, Gardner explores how AI can help sustainability, as well as other concerns and promises of the technology that could affect sustainability and broader workflows.

Editor's note: The following interview was edited for length and clarity.

AI is a tricky subject for sustainability. How do you justify it?

Dr. Matt Gardner: There's many layers to this onion.

AI, in my opinion, is clearly here to stay. It has already penetrated far and wide into our lives, the economy and business. I tell my team all the time that AI is going to fundamentally transform our business and other professional service providers' businesses, so we need to stay on top of it.

AI is clearly, as it's currently implemented, an energy hog and will continue to be. A couple years ago, when DeepSeek launched, there was a lot of hope and buzz that it could perform the same functions that ChatGPT could, but with [fewer] compute cycles and therefore less energy consumption, which was exciting. Turns out, it's not the case.

Because of the power it has, the ability to streamline processes and things we have been doing manually for years, we have to understand it, and we have to pay attention to it. Our job, at some point, is to do that soul searching and say, 'The power and benefit we get out of it, does it outweigh the impact?'

We are just beginning to scratch the surface on the role AI can play in corporate sustainability. We owe it to ourselves -- we owe it to the planet -- to see if this tool brings a net benefit.

Personally, I would like to take a more expansive view and look at the net benefit AI can bring the world; weigh it against the demerits it's going to bring; and, at some point, make a moral, spiritual business decision around that.

At the same time, as the technology continues to mature, there's going to be a tipping point when the efficiency of the algorithm gets to a point where we're getting more and more AI benefit for less and less of a footprint. The grid is generally getting greener and will continue to.

There's no simple answer to it, but AI deserves a nuanced conversation. I'm not willing to say, 'AI is an energy hog, therefore we're not going to use it.' We are just beginning to scratch the surface on the role AI can play in corporate sustainability. We owe it to ourselves -- we owe it to the planet -- to see if this tool brings a net benefit.

Ultimately, data centers are being built at a blistering pace by companies -- some that have some aspirations around clean energy, renewables and other kinds of things.

We need to let this shake out for a little bit and keep a close eye on it. Five or 10 years from now, we'll have a better picture as to what the rate of AI deployment is going to be and what the energy portfolio of the world is going to look like. Then we can start to have some more focused conversations.

All of this is centered on the climate impacts. There is a boatload of other potential impacts and issues that AI represents around data privacy and the concentration of compute power. There's so many different things we could look at, pick apart and worry about that are also worthy subjects of conversation, and we don't know the answers to them.

AI is currently the least evolved it will ever be. How do we plan for its potential future?

Gardner: It's similar to the automation of factories, cars and these things that, when they were first rolled out, they blew people's minds. As time has gone on, we see the value it brings and the impact it has. AI is going to be similar.

There's already indications of this from an environmental perspective. Elon Musk is talking about parking data centers in outer space. Well, that would fundamentally change the energy and the climate impact question. It would not remove some of the other equally important questions, though.

I'm taking a step back and not getting sucked into that conversation right now, because it is so early. It is in its infancy in terms of infrastructure, the role AI is going to play, the sophistication of the models and the technologies we have. We're a nanometer into the surface of this, so I'm willing to step back and have us take our time and be thoughtful about it. And I'm not going to, in a knee-jerk way, just reject it, but we have to keep our antennas up. We have to pay attention to all these issues.

Be aware of them. Acknowledge them as relevant issues that deserve conversation and thoughtful consideration.

What advice do you have for IT leaders on handling sustainability rollbacks from the current administration?

Gardner: The conversation is absolutely shifting. Whether that is a long-term shift or a reflexive shift to what's coming out of Washington remains to be seen.

Sustainability is not stopping. The tone is changing. Companies are keeping their heads down a little bit. But by the same token, they're continuing. There are opportunities to introduce efficiencies, make workflows better and get the benefits of AI-enabled systems and processes.

The potential that AI represents in the business world -- again, we're just starting to really wrap our heads around the potential, pie-in-the-sky stuff, the what-ifs. What if we could do this? There's a universe of stuff out there we don't even know how to begin to think about. That's for the Isaac Asimovs and the big thinkers of the world to dream about.

What if we could do this? What could that do to our field? That's fun to think about.

Michaela Goss is a senior site editor for the IT Strategy team at TechTarget.