How generative AI can help organisations be sustainable

Generative AI has seen a huge uptake in organisations over the past year helping them reduce repetitive tasks and creating efficiencies.

This popular technology can be used by business leaders to help them reach their sustainability targets.

Kelly Brough, managing director, applied intelligence ANZ, Accenture spoke to Digital Nation about how the processing power of generative AI. 

“At the end of the day, it's super powerful because one of the big strengths of foundation models is the ability to analyse multimodal datasets and create that bring together overlays what is, what is the geographic lens on this,” she said.

Accenture uses its Reef Cloud capability, harnessing AI to help them understand through different lenses the impact on the Great Barrier Reef of different actions over time.

“By being able to see that underlying geographic lens, whether that's impact from bushfires, it's impact from commercial activity and measure that over time, but overlay that with other data sets that have different modalities,” she said.

“Generative AI allows a much richer vision and the ability to create, a view of that outcome that we haven't had in, in the same way in the past. There are definite benefits to being able to create visibility and then make good choices about how to protect different aspects of the environment.”

According to Brough, AI can also be used within the social and governance areas of ESG to solve and create visibility on some of the main challenges like modern slavery.

“If you take the topic of modern slavery in supply chains, organisations have been using AI to help identify that challenge for a number of years,” she said.

“I spend a fair bit of my time working in the retail sector and the way AI and increasingly generative AI allows us to simplify the process of creating visibility on the supply chain.”

Brough said AI can be used across the entire supply chain for retailers to help them understand their social and governance impacts. 

“How is your cotton grown that goes into your t-shirt all the way through to the working conditions of the production of the garment is an interesting area that has been simplified by this technology,” she explained.

At Accenture, Brough said they are working with their clients leveraging AI to help them on their sustainability journey.

“We are working with one client in a heavy asset industry who is using generative AI coupled with analytic AI to be able to understand their impact on land and environment in different ways,” she said.

“Then to be able to assemble that into a generated report to be able to report back to both stakeholders, shareholders, and even in certain circumstances, regulators on their performance and how that improves.”