In this episode of CXO Bytes, Sanjay Podder is hosted by Beliz Kudat to talk about the dual role of technology in driving sustainability while also contributing to environmental challenges. They explore how businesses can integrate sustainable strategies into their technology operations to minimize carbon footprints, optimize data center energy consumption, and leverage tools like AI and cloud solutions responsibly. Sanjay highlights actionable techniques such as carbon-aware scheduling, efficient coding practices, and emerging tools to measure the energy impact of AI. The discussion also emphasizes the business value of sustainability, including improved ESG scores, employee attraction, and outperforming competitors in shareholder returns, making sustainable technology a critical strategic imperative for organizations.

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Resources:

Key Findings Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2023 - Central Statistics Office) [10:55]
Carbon Aware SDK [12:54]
CarbonCloud [15:40]
Impact Framework 15:56]

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Sanjay Podder: Hello and welcome to CXO Bytes, a podcast brought to you by the Green Software Foundation and dedicated to supporting chiefs of information, technology, sustainability, and AI as they aim to shape a sustainable future through green software. We will uncover the strategies and a big green move that's helped drive results for business and for the planet.

I am your host, Sanjay Podder.

Beliz Kudat: Okay, Sanjay, welcome to our business summit.

Sanjay Poddar: Thank you so much for having me today. My pleasure.

Beliz Kudat: It's a pleasure having you. So, you know, in today's rapidly developing digital technologies and this digital transformation, a significant dilemma arises, especially for sustainability. And on one hand, these technologies offer substantial, huge potential to address environmental issues.

And on the other hand, there exists an entire substantial resource consumption. So first, we'd like to start by asking your perspective on this and how can technologies both solve and exacerbate environmental problems?

Sanjay Poddar: Great question. And there's a duality here between technology and sustainability. You know, when you look at sustainability, and if you look at sustainable development goals that we have, the 17 sustainable development goals, one thing that strikes you that they are exponential in nature.

The impact is huge. You know, we are not talking about small things. We are talking about scale. And you cannot do anything at scale without technology. And in this case, if we talk about information communication technology, we talk about artificial intelligence, for example, these are precisely the kind of tools we need today to address the sustainability challenges that we are facing, whether is it climate change, whether it is, you know, issues of building a more inclusive society, for example, biodiversity destruction that is happening. Each of these areas, you need technology, you need AI, you need blockchain, you know, you need digital, right? There is no second thought about it. In fact, we did a survey of companies and we found out that 70 percent of the companies we surveyed, who were able to reduce the carbon emissions in the production, in their operation, they were able to do it because they use artificial intelligence.

Now, so there is absolutely no question about the role of technology in sustainability. But what we miss out is, you know, if we are not using this technology in the right way, in the right manner, technology itself has a carbon footprint. Technology can cause a big environmental impact. For example, technology can amplify the issues of bias.

For example, privacy. So, we have to make sure that while we use this technology, we have to use it in a very sustainable and responsible way. And the data points, are very interesting. For example, the same AI that is going to help us so much. You know, if you look at AI, you know, you take a large language model like Bloom, which is open source, so some of the data we have, we know.

A 160, 176 billion parameter model. When they trained it, you know, I think the carbon emission out of it is somewhere around 24.7 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. And if you look at all its life cycle, including the embodied carbon of the hardware on which it was trained, it goes up to 50 metric tons of CO2 equivalent, for example.

And if you take larger models, you know, all the more popular large language models, they may go as high as 500 metric tons of CO2 equivalent. So the same technology that is helping us on one hand is also causing emission, carbon emission. And the impact is not just restricted there, as we know. It is also on other resources like water.

You know, we can, you do some, you know, very harmless query to your, you know, the large language models for some questions, "where do I, which other cities I should visit in Turkey in my next trip to Turkey?" Right? You know, you asked 20, 30 questions. Behind the scene, that's half a liter of water that was used.

For cooling the data centers, for generation of electricity, and we also know about the other dimension about energy use. So, that's the whole thing. Now, the good part is, we don't necessarily have to have such a severe impact. There are tools and techniques and methods whereby we can design, develop, deploy these systems in a way that they are much more, having lower impact on the environment.

For example, they are safeguarding privacy, they give you much more safer response, so you know, there's less bias. So overall, it is very much possible to bring a culture such that the software you write is more sustainable and more responsible. So that's the silver lining, right? So to your first question, a big duality.

If you are in business, therefore your strategy, your technology and sustainability strategy needs to be integrated. And you have to look at it very holistically, not just at sustainability by technology. And "how do I use tech to do sustainability," but sustainability in technology, "how do I make sure that the technology is being used in a much more sustainable and responsible way?"

Beliz Kudat: Yeah. This is the crucial question as you said, and technology is crucial, as you mentioned in all those sustainability efforts as well. And we also know that software is at the core of all these technologies and companies need to adapt the way software is designed, developed, deployed, as you said, and used to minimize its carbon footprint.

So how can they achieve this?

Sanjay Poddar: Well, you know, the software stack, there are many decarbonization levers in the software stack. When you talk about a software stack, there's obviously the code itself, which has to be written in a manner that it makes less demand on the underlying hardware, for example, right?

So you need to bring that kind of design patterns, architectures, choice of programming languages, all that have a bearing on the emissions or the energy use and emissions. For example, you know, there is a whole study about interpreted languages and compiled languages. You know, a language like C++, if you write a code and you write a similar code for doing the same thing with Python, obviously it is found that the C++ code will need less energy and will emit less carbon.

Now, not to say that people have to write in C++ but it's just a data point that, are you even thinking about, you know, which language are you selecting? And then there are, around architectures, for example. And then a very interesting decarbonization lever is the migration of your workloads to hyperscalers, for example, to the cloud.

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