This Earth Day, we are calling for action to conserve our scarcest resource: the planet. To drive real change, it’s crucial for individuals, industries, organizations and governments to work together, using data and technology to uncover new opportunities that will help advance sustainability initiatives across the globe.

The world is behind on addressing climate change. With 2024 on track to be the hottest year on record, data and AI can be applied to many areas to help supercharge sustainability efforts. We believe there are three core areas that every organization should focus on: sustainability strategy and reporting; energy transition and climate resilience; and intelligent asset, facility and infrastructure management.

Sustainability strategy, data and reporting

Using data and AI to drive your sustainability strategy while meeting reporting requirements

In speaking with our clients around the world, we found that sustainability remains a priority on their agendas. CEOs say that sustainability investments will help drive better business results in the next 5 years. However, some organizations struggle to progress at their desired rate despite having strong commitment and acting accordingly. One of the key challenges they face is the lack of reliable data and insights, according to an IBM survey of business leaders.

AI technology can help overcome this challenge by turning intel into insights faster, enabling businesses to drive toward sustainability goals and financial targets more quickly. Using AI, business teams can “clean” data, manage through gaps, and report across different frameworks. This will help unlock competitive insights that are key for making strategic decisions, more quickly and consistently, and with less error. This approach can help organizations to more easily establish a sustainability strategy across the business. Also, it allows them to leverage said data and insights to supercharge their 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 instance, IBM Global Real Estate uses our technology to track, analyze and report progress toward sustainability goals in a timely and accurate way. We use IBM Envizi to collect data from 6,500+ utility bills we receive globally each year and summarize total energy consumption, cost, and renewable electricity purchases across IBM to save many hours of calculations. With this technology, we can pull reports and filter by location, geography and utility, among others, to understand where energy consumption is highest, identify any unexpected changes, and find out where IBM has the most opportunity to drive energy conservation.

Energy transition and climate resilience

Applying AI and IoT to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy sources

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

For example, the supermarket chain Salling Group takes advantage of IBM Consulting’s Flex Platform to balance their electricity consumption in relation to the supply of renewable power sources in the grid. The platform, created in partnership with Andel Energi in Denmark, uses IoT sensors, AI and the cloud to provide an energy ecosystem for consumers to participate in real-time, intelligent grid optimization. This technology facilitates working with intermittent energy sources such as renewables, interfacing with existing building management platforms. This enables large buildings, such as grocery stores, to partially pause their energy use—for example heating or cooling—up to a threshold where there is no material impact to their operations, based on electricity available via renewable electricity production-and to be paid for this flexibility.

We are also working to help organizations become more climate resilient by providing them with the tools needed to predict climate impact. For example, we are working on a geospatial foundation model which can be fine-tuned to track deforestation, detect GHGs, or predict crop yields. Foundation models help identify and analyze data, surface trends such as where and why populations are moving, provide insight on how to serve them with renewable energy, and also estimate where carbon is stored, how long it will take to degrade, and more. We also know that using AI requires vast amounts of energy and data. As AI is becoming more widely leveraged, organizations should consider how to design and manage AI systems sustainably, which can include running processing systems in regions powered by more renewable energy sources, and ensuring that compute workloads use this energy efficiently. IBM has taken many steps towards mitigating its AI systems’ environmental impact, according to our AI ethics board. For example, In 2023, 70.6% of IBM’s total electricity consumption came from renewable sources, including 74% of the electricity consumed in IBM data centers.  Additionally, in our IBM Hursley Datacenter, we are leveraging our own technology to conserve power across 4,500 physical compute systems.

Intelligent asset, facility and infrastructure management

Leveraging AI to build efficient physical operations, manage costs and reduce the environmental footprint

The key to achieving the United Nation’s target through 2030 lies in enhancing the performance of assets, facilities and infrastructure. This will help advance progress by optimizing resources used.

The U.S. City of Atlanta, for example, uses IBM Maximo to maintain 51 of its facilities including Fire, Police, Parks, Public Works, and all city-owned buildings. This solution provides a single, integrated platform with access to comprehensive monitoring, maintenance, and reliability applications across city departments which can use this platform to plan and schedule maintenance, track work orders, manage maintenance, etcetera, all within a single platform. Ultimately, this technology contributes to the city’s sustainability initiatives by helping maintain and preserve their assets and help facilities run more efficiently, saving the city time and money. Atlanta plans to continue expanding upon Maximo’s capabilities, particularly in the area of AI.

We are already developing innovative technology that can improve these capabilities and tackle the forthcoming challenges, while keeping up with emerging regulations and the ever-changing industry. We are seeing an industry shift from enterprise asset management (EAM) toward asset life cycle management (ALM) due to the rise of AI and new sustainability regulations. ALM allows us to extend an asset’s overall lifespan, increasing its efficiency in ways we couldn’t before. Downer explored this by working with IBM Consulting and using our technology to harness real-time data from 200+ trains across Australia. The analytics support predictive maintenance, reduce malfunctions, and increased train reliability by 51%.

Looking to 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 an important role. Generative AI refers to deep-learning models that can take raw data and “learn” to generate statistically probable outputs when prompted. Leveraging generative AI to advance sustainability targets can enable businesses to realize both sustainability goals and financial targets quickly. IBM research shows that organizations that operationalize sustainability (read: embed sustainability practices within the business) are 52% more likely to outperform their peers on profitability, and enjoy a 16% higher rate of revenue growth. Additional IBM research shows that 61% of surveyed executives say generative AI will be important for their sustainability agenda accordingly and that they plan to increase their investment in generative AI for sustainability. As ever, how these technologies are deployed needs careful consideration to ensure the delivery of both business and sustainability benefits. 

At IBM, we are exploring different ways to tap into data and AI to help organizations achieve progress for their business and embed sustainability into day-to-day core business operations. Environmental issues will not be resolved without the collaboration of businesses, governments and society together, and Earth Day is a reminder that we all need to take action to achieve real progress. Everyone has a role to play in addressing today’s challenges, and IBM is committed to helping guide organizations toward sustainable practices as well as implement data-driven technologies to deliver positive environmental impact.