AI: The New Tool for Improving Sustainability
Corporate sustainability — consideration of the environmental and social impact of business practices — is a leading priority for many organizations. Now many of those firms are enlisting artificial intelligence to further their sustainability initiatives.
“Digitizing documents, data deduplication, and process automation can all work together, optimized by AI, to generate efficiencies that shrink your carbon footprint,” says Healey.
57% said AI will help them transition from paper to digital.
56% said AI will assist in deduplicating data, thereby reducing data volumes and the required storage infrastructure.
50% said AI will help reduce power use.
Eliminating paper is critical for improving sustainability, and the reasons why go beyond just reducing use of paper, which requires trees, water, and energy to produce. In businesses where paper must be filed away, often off-site, electricity is used to run the storage facility and fuel is used to transport files to and from it. This process not only consumes energy but also impacts office workers’ time. By putting information at workers’ fingertips, digitization reduces energy use and eliminates these processes.
But digitization is just the first step.
“Efficient use of digitized data requires enterprise content management, in which data is cleaned, deduplicated, and tagged with metadata so it is both trustworthy and available on demand,” says Jackson.
Organized data speeds up workflows, says Jackson, because it is ready for leveraging AI to increase the efficiency of searches and automate processes. OpenText™ Aviator Intelligence (Magellan) AI platform can spot and even predict process inefficiencies, she notes, helping an organization economize on computing and storage hardware and thereby reduce power consumption.
Developing code more responsibly registered interest among 45% of the CIO MarketPulse survey respondents. Here, AI can help programmers write code faster and create software that uses IT infrastructure more economically. “You will use less hardware when you optimize using AI,” Healey says.
In the CIO MarketPulse research survey, 82% of the participating IT and business decision-makers indicated that they expect AI to positively impact their organization’s sustainability efforts. The most likely improvement would be in the supply chain, according to 64% of the respondents.
The advent of GenAI creates even more possibilities. GenAI tools such as OpenText Aviator can take over report writing in many cases, conserving employees’ time and effort. This, in turn, conserves the use of computing and data storage resources.
Another benefit: All of these steps will give you a good story to tell when interviewing job applicants. Many of today’s workers care deeply about sustainability and are knowledgeable about carbon footprint issues. “Companies are finding that when they hire talent, candidates really do care about the company and its sustainability message,” says Jackson, adding, “When they learn that your organization shares their concerns, they are likely to become more enthusiastic about joining the company.”
