Let's start it in a minute. So my name is Lara. Very honored to join this conference for the second time. I'm very happy that you have joined me.Before we jump in, a little bit about me and, why what we're going to talk about it today. So when I submitted this speech about a year ago, I thought it was quite brave to talk about AI and sustainability. By now, it's not innovative anymore because there's been quite a bit said about this. So I thought, what am I going to do to do something that will be meaningful to you and will add value to this audience, which is already quite sophisticated? And I thought, well, first, let's define what we're solving for.

I think you're all familiar with AI and with technology, but I don't know how familiar you are with sustainability. Then we're going to make examples and have a discussion. So I have slides to guide the conversation, but I always welcome your questions. And I'm happy also to talk for each of the teams who are going to talk about trade offs, pitfalls, as well as what concretely you can do and hopefully bring some inspiration. And I'm also hoping that we're going to have the opportunity to have a bit of a q and a and a conversation. So it's not just me talking at you for forty minutes. And on that note, by the way, I apologize. My note my voice is very low. I just turned 50 this weekend, and I was very blessed that I had friend joining from all over the world.

But my voice is definitely not there anymore, so bear with me, and thank you for your patience. A little bit about me. So I'm I'm currently the head of Europe at Worldwide Generation. We do technology for sustainability, but don't worry. I'm not going to be talk talking too much about us. I also do a few other things. I serve on a couple of boards primarily in the built environment as well as in education. So I'm going to bring that board perspective and the trade offs that boards have to make sometimes when it comes to sustainability. I also teach sustainability and run workshops with different organizations in different parts of the world. And my background is actually in tech. So I spent a long time at Microsoft and at Salesforce before freelancing and before joining this organization.

My focus is really how do we apply technology to solving issues at scale? Because the scale of the issues we are facing requires that, and we really need to be all hands on board. So, hopefully, you'll come out of the session with a few new ideas as well as with, an inspiration that we can all make a difference. And on that note, I'd really like to hear a little bit about you. So I'm going to open this Menti if you want to scan the code or if you want to log in. And in a second, I'm going to shift to that, and I look forward to seeing your responses as well.

And if you can tell me, first of all, let's start with this is okay. So that's great. That's a good start. I see a few who are curious. A few who feel well versed. None whose daily job it is. Yeah. We're all a bit confused, even the ones who are in this world, so no worries about that. Let me give it a couple more minutes because we have 17 in the call. So I want to give you all time to join in. So I see a lot of curious, which is great. It's the right mindset and it is the right place to be. Let me see if I can get a couple more answer. And if not, I'm going to move forward to the next question.

And then what does sustainability in business mean, Jean? So and and I know a few of you said that you feel well versed, but it's still something where there's a lot of interpretation. And so I'm the one who's curious to hear what it means for you. Any answers? Giving you a little bit of time maybe to get on. Just put a word, a sentence, a couple of words, anything that comes to mind to you. Okay. Not many answers. Is this working properly for you? Okay. Nice. Now we start to see answers. So eco products, reducing waste. Yeah. Absolutely. And in general, circularity. The more we can the more we can reuse, the more we can do with what we have. Absolutely. Any other answers coming in? So I see eco products. Absolutely.

Sustainable consumptions, recycling, reusing. Okay. There's a good team here, and it is something that technology can help us with. And you're absolutely right, by the way. Too much, for example, of the food we produce is wasted. Too many of the clothes we produce are wasted. Remote work. Yeah. To a point, that's true as well. Obviously, there are pros and cons, but if we can work remote most of the time, we will save on commute. This said, sometimes we have to look also at how efficient we are when we work from home and what it takes to have good connectivities. Work conditions, absolutely. Sustainability is not just about the environment. It's also about human factors. And until we get people on board and we have fair practices and transparency and allow people to work for a decent wage and in decent conditions, we cannot have sustainability.

We have to engage the local communities. We have to make sure it's sustainable for all. So that's great. A few good answers here. Thank you for doing that. And let me go back then to my slides. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for your responses. And with that, I'm going to go back to my slides. And I'm going to go back to present. So how we define sustainability? We first from you. In the end, sustainability is something that's a little more deep than managing waste or than products. It is about our ability to meet the needs of the present without compromise compromising the ability to meet future needs or the needs of the future. And this encompasses everything we do. So it encompasses from education and for labor to how we use the earth. It's not something new. It was defined in the eighties.

And as you know, a lot of the work has started and has going on for decades. If you think, for example, of the treaty that was created to protect the ozone layer, that's a clear success story with good international collaboration. Now it does seem, however, that this is a bigger a little bit abstract, and that's why told us a few years ago that the biggest challenge is really to take something that feels so abstract and so far from us. Future generations me meeting our needs today, maybe with our families, with everything we are doing. How do we take it from the abstract and turn it into a reality for all the world's people and for us? How do we do things in our job? And so what's stopping us from doing sustainability first of all?

Well, the first is lack of clear priorities, and I'm really going to start from there because I'm going to start from what issues we are trying to solve when you do sustainability and then how we can use technology for them. The first is lack of clear priorities. My students were talking last week of a soup of acronym. Oh my god. I don't know where to start. There's so much regulation. There's so many things. If I report in The US, in The UAE, in Europe, they're all different, and I struggle to make sense of it. And this becomes a barrier. This becomes wasted energy. The other thing with lack of clear priorities is in partly as a consequence, many people and many organizations choose one thing, and it may be the forest for the tree. So many, many organizations have been focusing on carbon. Many individuals look at how can I, for example, reduce travel or eat or eat differently, change my consumption?

But it's very easy to miss the big picture and to understand that, actually, sometimes there is a lack of consumption of of consensus. So did you know the carbon footprint of a paper bag is actually bigger than the carbon footprint of a plastic bag? So on the one side, we'll say, well, we have to reduce plastic because, obviously, our oceans are driving in plastic, so we want to stop using plastic. This is a personal pledge for me as well to start a single use plastic. But then we're all going to paper, and one of my friends was telling me, well, I wanna go to the coffee shop or the bakery. They give me this plastic bag these paper bags, and they feel that it's okay because they're renewable.

But if we were focusing on carbon solely, we would actually ship back the plastic. Now that would be the wrong thing to do. So you end up having this conundrum of data and this lack of consensus where if you're measuring your carbon footprint, you get a different answer. If you're measuring labor conditions, you say, hey. But I get a different answer, but I can't ignore that problem. So how do we get to a point where we have one vision for things? And then that lack of consensus runs into competition for use of resources. For those of us who are in The UK and I am London based, there is this huge debate now on user plan. So green belts have been built have been designed around cities to preserve the green spaces close to cities, but, of course, cities want to grow.

So should we build on the green belt because people need homes? Should we respect the green belt because people need access to green spaces and because we need agriculture? How important is it to go to renewable? And for example, on the board where I sit at Magna, we get a regulator telling us value for money. You need to build more home. You need to build cheaper home. And we're like, because we want to build homes that will be good in the next forty years. And you get articles like The Economist saying, well, some people seem to think that the transition to renewables in energy cost too much. It doesn't have to cost too much. In fact, a lot of the newer data center use renewables not out of kindness of heart, but because it's the fastest way to get to produce energy and to produce it cheaply and to produce it without having the, you know, the energy travel long distance.

So you'll get, again, all this lack of consensus, and that's slowing us down. We have to take fast decision. We can't do it. The other thing is lack of resources and capabilities. So how can I contribute to this? And this is personal as well. When I decided, well, I have my career. I want to do something. What do I do? I realized that our skills and tech are actually valuable. But what happens in many, many cases is people, one, companies struggle to find the right level of skills, and that's pretty much across the world. Two workers are saying, well, I've done this all my life. I don't know how to install a heat pump. I know how to install a gas heater. What am I going to do? And then you get this pushback. As with technology, as we have seen before, we create innovation. Well, who's going to benefit from it?

Should we dig on the seabed and in the deep seas, first of all? But if we do, how do we make sure that all the nations in the world benefit and not just a few companies? So these are significant trade offs as well. And the last is really storytelling. How do we tell the story so that people don't see it as a trade off between having a home and having a forest between their budget, which is often limited, and having to do sustainable consumption? And, you know, many, many times, we go and we talk about things that are far away from us. We talk about tons of carbon. What's a ton of carbon? A ton is difficult to imagine for many of us. And then you see these little pictures.

A ton of carbon is as big as a three, four building, whatever, and it feels very abstract. And then we go into the emotional, and we talk about these gripping pictures of children and fields that are dry and polar bears. But polar bears are very far from us, and even if I wanted to save them, what do I do here living in London? And so we have to do a better storytelling that talks to people and makes more practical and funnels that energy so that if I'm deciding that I need to do something about it, what am I going to do? And with that, I really want to go back to you and go back to Menti for a second. And I want to take us to the next question I have for you, which is how comfortable are you in your own ability to make a difference?

The mentee is the same as before, by the way. I should have told you to keep it open if you have it open. Okay. That's good. To give it just a couple minutes. But, actually k. That's still pretty confident, actually. And I see that curve at the top. So many of us are confident, which is fantastic. Because without that confidence, we don't go out and do it. And sometimes it starts with a little thing. And we give it still a couple of minutes, and I'm going to go to the next one. Now let's take it to a bigger question, which is how comfortable you are you in your organization sustainability strategy. And I'd like to invite you to think about your main organization.

So if you're like me and you're doing a million things and involved in many organizations, don't pick the volunteering that you do, which is helping lives. Take where you spend the most of your time. And what I find often is that interestingly, many smaller organizations were not confident. And the higher we grow, maybe the least confident we are, which is a conundrum because that's where we are the most able to make an impact. Whereas I find people who work in larger companies often feel a little bit more comfortable because talking about my employers, Microsoft and the Salesforce of the world, have a decent sustainability strategy and are able to invest funds. But I think this is very, very interesting because individually, in this case, you tell me, well, I feel I can do stuff, but I'm not really comfortable that my company has a vision and the the things that I participate in has a vision. But that's where you really make a big difference because it's aggregated. It's multiplying our power.

So that's something I think to reflect upon and to reflect how can we do things not only individually, but through others and create movements. And, personally, I've seen the power of that many, many times. During the pandemic, we ended up with 300 mutual help volunteers here. I have a small piece of woodland, and I've seen how by starting and getting going, now we have 20 volunteers. But how do we move the bigger organizations, the ones that we where we spend the most of our time? So let me exit here and go back to my slides. Sorry. I'm juggling two screens to keep it clean for you. And let me go back to presenting. And this is a quote that's quite oops. Present. This is a quote that I think is very important to me, which is, don't wait for extraordinary circumstances.

We shouldn't be waiting for a pandemic. We should really be getting going with this. And even if you do a small thing, even if you decide to bring your lunch to work and avoid plastic or to to consume sustainably, all those differences sum up. But, of course, if we look for what most material will have the big difference. And I think part of the problem when we talk to people and in the storytelling is we tend to put a lot of owners on the consumer and the choices we make, whereas we have a chance to change structurally, to vote, to change at much more scale in the job we do, especially with tech.

So let's take things one by one. We've spoken about the lack of clear priorities, and in part, this is a data issue. It's not only a data issue, but it is in large part. Well, first, materiality and double materiality can be simplified. So I didn't create a ton of slides for this, but as you know, materiality is in a sense, I am aware and I communicate on what is relevant to my stakeholders for their decision making. It could be an investor. They want to know where they put their money. They want to know where the pension pot is invested. It could be consumers. They want to know that the coffee they buy comes from sustainable supply chains, that we are not deforestating, that we are paying our way wages fairly in Central America. So that analysis is complex because it will depend on the countries where you operate in and, typically, the country risk in those.

Some are more, vulnerable in the use of water, for example, or in the use of land. Some are more exposed to, bribery and to governance issues. Some are more vulnerable to supply chain resilience and to other things. How large my organization is, and so what duty of reporting do we have, and what apply what regulation applies to me. And some will depend on our stakeholders, including how evolved our consumers are. And a bit like in finance, if you're dealing with consumers that are well educated, if you're dealing with large companies in your supply chain that have all the tools, your duty of care is a little bit different than if you're dealing with consumers that can easily be misled or with, you know, social housing tenants that are vulnerable.

That analysis can be simplified. My company, the worldwide generation, does that and helps you to simplify the data cross reporting standard, but also to put a level of automation into that double materiality. Why that is important? Because many, many times, you're dealing with incomplete data. Some data was entered from 2023. Some data is a time series. Some data is from 2025. Some data was in in square hectares. Some data in square meters. How do we unify all of this? Can really ease your burden. Companies like TieriMesh, one of my clients for full disclosure, ensures traceability and supply chain collaboration. And one of the other organization I'm on the board of does collaborative contracts. So how do we turn the need for data into not excluding the smaller suppliers, into sharing data, into educating my supplier, my supply chain?

Carbon calculators, many of them are good and can help with scenario planning. So for example, I've worked a lot with customers in hospitality, and they were tempted to go granular. They were tempted to say, I want to know the carbon footprint of every dish. And that's nearly impossible because the carbon footprint of strawberries will depend on the season, will depend where they come from. The carbon footprint of fish and the environmental implication of fish depends again on where it's from. Is it wild caught from sustainable fisheries? Is it farm raised? Where and how? So you really can do scenario planning and instead look at your purchasing. Don't try to do it downstream at consumer level. Try to do it upstream.

Look if you're a supermarket or in your if you're in a food supply chain or you're purchasing data, which usually exists and is in in your tools already, and then do an analysis there. If I trade off, if I reduce this, and very small trade offs, maybe using, one type of grain instead of another, maybe using things in season or out of season provenance and so on can make huge, huge, huge differences. And then we have companies like Saxentura, one of our partners, that can can help with natural assets. And many, many times, the challenge is you have to take financial decisions and you have to associate what is material with data. But it's very hard to assign a data value and a monetary value to nature. Why? Well, you can have different approaches. You can look at how nature is used, which is many, many different cases. For example, I've lived in Frodo many years.

If you have natural sea barriers, mangroves, etcetera, they will protect buildings. I'm protecting assets. I'm having lower insurance cost. I'm having healthier communities and so on. Materializing that is not easy. The other thing is, for example, health benefits. We know that in cities like London, by having electric cars, I have we have reduced the incidence of pulmonary disease for young and the old particularly. Now we know that we can discuss the environmental impact in general of electric cars. There's big debates around batteries and their provenance, but I can already try and put a quantification when I look at the health impact. And then I can look at the asset value of things and the fact that people simply enjoy that natural parks are there, and in many cases are willing to make a sacrifice for things they have never seen.

Like, for example, you know, polar bears or natural resources. I've never been to the Arctic, but it is important to me that the Arctic thrives. I'm willing to spend a little bit more on products. I'm willing to travel a little bit less to make sure that we protect that. So trying to put a value to this and make insurance saying, well, I can make the business case in using compostable plastic even if it's a more a little bit more expensive because there is this natural value or because there is a consumer preference is important. What can you do for this? Well, one is understand what there is in market. A lot a lot of my clients, a lot of our clients say, well, I was thinking to build a carbon calculator, to build an add on to my ERP, to look at my supply chain, to build this and that. Understand what's in market first, because everything we build will be a waste of resources. You know it. Everything you build in household in the maintenance.

So if you have a good understanding what what's there out there already, what solutions we have, what's possible, many times customers say, I didn't know it was possible to operate at scale and to do forest traceability in, Southeast Asia so that I can see which fields things come from, where things come from.

I didn't know it was possible to have, grains traceability because in many cases, they get built in batches so that I can actually try check check which coffee is managed in specific ways. So that's important. Work on integration and simplification. Again, if we all each build our own island, it's not going to go very far. Be an advocate and challenge in your company. Many of you said, I know what I can do. I'm not very comfortable that my organization have a strategy. Let's participate. Let's be willing to innovate. And we see how innovation pays off. It's hard to finance sometimes, but we see how the cost per watt of green energy has gone down dramatically and keeps going down. So if we keep it at something that was a complete prototype will become affordable.

Compostable plastics today are getting to the point where they're almost at the same cost as traditional plastics. So that's fantastic. And then define your personal priority and make sure they are material. So I have lots of conversations. I'm sure you do as well. But try and assess what are the biggest impacts that you are having through your job, through your volunteering, through your consumption, and then make change. But don't do the same as many companies. They look at the sustainable development goal. They look at 13 goals, and they say, I feel at loss because I can't address all 13. Choose to. Choose to enable and mentor and coach. Choose to develop technology that innovates. Choose simpler APIs. Go for that. The safeguards, probably this doesn't require a I, but it does require a lot of digitization.

So the work we've done with Theory Mesh, we had all this algorithm ready, and then we realized that when you get into Africa, land register don't exist or are treated as confidential. When you talk with some farms, the data is there. It's grandpa's handwriting up in the corner. So how can we make sure that our data is inclusive, make sure our data is representative, make sure we don't over index in the mature markets, in the markets we're in. But, also, we take that time. We don't want to start from scratch. We want to have those time series because they give us a starting point. Be aware of those data biases. I mean, the cases in health care are well known, but there are many others. Be flexible. Be creative. We don't have to necessarily split the land and decide this land is is for city, decide this for nature. We can do a lot with nature in cities.

Many of you will be working on this. Using this for standards and collaboration when you don't have the data. Particularly, if you're in a small business, it's totally okay not to use your data and your time series to look at industry standards as long as they are relevant. Obviously, what's true in one geography is not true in another, and then try and benchmark yourself. Were you good? Were you not? And choose a couple of bets again where you're really good and you can lead the pack and you can share. And companies like Bernard Ricard have done really good, really good work in the food and beverage sharing their practices and understand when you're not good and when we have to get better. At AQA, we were looking at our carbon footprint, and it wasn't that big because we're a services company being in education, and then we realized plastic.

And all the way we ship, exams material, which has to be printed in and out was much more materials. And make sure we track progress. Don't let yourself, your company, your organization make this 2050 pledge and not have a plan. We're seeing a lot of companies step back on their pledges, and it's not necessarily bad as long as it means, well, now I have a plan, and I did it. But let's share with you now. Let's share with track progress. And, yeah, obviously, it we tend to think about this duality, people in nature. We we are people. We are also made of carbon and water, and we are also natural being and know that we feel better when there's nature around us. I spoke about lack of consensus. Part of the problem is the data is changing fast. We knew the cost of renewables was higher.

We knew the cost of batteries was higher. It's getting better and better and better all the time. And if we use projections, we can know that we can make it even better. But it's also about dialogue and compromise, not purity. A lot of the green hashing we see today is I can tell you, if you're at board level, darn if you do, darn if you don't. You pro you share a plan. Regulator will say, well, why are you building five homes less to keep wildlife corridors? Because we want as many homes as we can. People will say, well, how come you're just looking at wildlife corridors? So it is important that we understand where the community comes on, and we understand that if the changes we're making to supply chain end up penalizing people, we won't have get waste recycling if people are living in shanty towns.

It's just not happening. Sustainable finance is a key key partner. Having the right data and showing how with the right data, you can get more sustainable finance. With all the geopolitical turmoil we've seen, the changes to CSRD in the EU, the changes in The US, actually, sustainable finance has kept the course. And then think at scale, but we're willing to incubate. We have to be able to try. We have to take companies like Accenture who are very, very tiny startups, finance the EDU, start at a housing level, start the building level, and then take it from there. And the ICE has produced some fantastic materials which are free, looking at carbon capture in cement, low carbon cement, and so on. So there is a lot that we have to be willing to incubate and to try first and then to scale.

If you do something that's not scalable, probably not worth doing, but it will start small. What you can do, you can use scenario planning tools and monitoring tools. Satellite and all the work we can do with satellite is fantastic to really look at use of data. Visual analysis, also very important with its own safeguards, but I have friends who are working on how do you detect all of the big farms in The UK, and it is not easy. But once we get there, it will make us so much more efficient in understanding what's going on. Public private partnerships, whichever your side, be open to those if you're less tech friends on and more business side of tech. And then collaboration. A lot of what we do with with tools is is very hard to get that data and to get people to collaborate.

So anything that you can do to simplify supply chain collaboration, to simplify collaboration within the same company so people have the right access, can get involved, can share the data. As we said, a lot of the problems is gathering the data. If you have a 12,000 people organizations gathered across Europe and The Middle East, collaboration is the first tool. How do I effectively delegate, gamify, get people involved? And then, of course, security and blockchain. And blockchain is important both for assurance and that sustainable finance and for making sure that we're using resources well, that I'm not five buying five tons of sustainable wheat from fields that only produce three. Safeguards, we have to keep collaborating internationally.

I know there are challenges to this, but I think a lot will depend on our ability to strike deals, collaborate, and share even with safeguards. Be an advocate for stakeholder and community engagement. We've all seen wonders when we can get people involved, things like citizen data and so on. And then let's make sure that we stick to time and the KPIs again. Let's not have vision not supported by KPIs and much rather we keep it simple. And, of course, we need ethical use. The debate about vision recognition is critical. We have to make sure that particularly with visuals, we respect privacy. We respect the safeguards that need to be done. And at the same times, our communities and the community can be engaged. And in many cases, if communities feel safe, they are okay for some with some users, not others.

And, again, the greatest worry is we think somebody else is working on it. We all have to pitch in. Lack of resources gets to this, you know. Well, at the moment, I'm too busy. I have a company to run. I have kids to feed. I have whatever's on my mind today, and I'm sure we all have a lot. The biggest problem is when there is change, the losses are always more visible than the game. The job losses because people can now work from home, work differently, need more skills are visible. The people who are working today in construction, in agriculture, in transportation, in you name it, and would say, well, if we consume less, if we, you know, if we buy less fast fashion, some people will lose jobs.

It's a fact. How do we make sure that we don't get rid of fast fashion as soon as possible, but we also make it in a way that people get involved. And over the long term, the gains will over is always overruled. Tang, you know, whoever we want to tank, whoever we call God, it's an expression that we don't need to have people in minds every day in Europe anymore and less and less in people at Chile and Latin America. But those people need other job. In time, they will gain, but we have to make those gains visible sooner. Otherwise, you get pushed back. That's when people start saying, I don't want I'm who lost my job. I still want to be fishing. Yeah. But the fisheries are getting depleted. Let's do something else.

We need to use technology to make the most of resources, and that's where AI has a fantastic role to play as well as Internet of Things, making maintenance easier easier, making, anticipation of problem easier. So all of those devices, those are fantastic use cases for using less water, using less fertilizer, doing preventative maintenance on masks, for phones, and so on and so forth. What you can do, the first is keep learning. We all need to scale up. There is enough free material. There's enough affordable material. We all need to do it. Volunteer and engage. Work on integration again. Let's try and avoid silos. Is that something this community can do very well? But also in design. Some things don't need huge tech. I've seen fantastic innovation come out of Oxford, come out of, many places where we interact with people with Alzheimer or people with reduced mobility, and it's very simple.

It's actually a video. It's actually somebody guiding them through things. The interfaces can be made very simple, and that's fantastic for inclusion. So I think that's another real front. The data security at the back end, the interfaces at the front, and, of course, security. Think of translation language, how we can preserve lost languages, but, also, there's this huge bias in the data today, around English, and we can solve it. We have all the tools to solve that today. And the safeguard, again, connectivity, security. Let's make sure our data is in the right place. But, also, let's make sure we keep advocating for circularity and for inclusion, for sharing benefits. And this is a good place to meet, actually, because some things resonate universally. You know? We've gone through a lot as a species. We've gone through a lot of words.

We've gone through a lot, and usually it comes down to knowing each other, to our common humanity. Storytelling, and we were talking about that. Those who you of you of us who are in sales know you can't sell to people. People hate that. You have to let them find out, but citizen science is a good way to involve. I have people who are I have a 13 year old kid who's been volunteering at Woodland for two years. Give him something. He's in charge of our inter of our Instagram account. I don't mind how he's run. I'm okay for having a 10 year old. It's good enough. Let him have a say. Let him be involved. And citizen project can do fantastic things for things like natural surveys, data visualization.

You can see my slide because I know we're out of time. Translations, sentiment analysis, anything we can do. You can do that too, particularly, again, at the edge where AI meets the community, where AI meets getting back to getting people involved, getting people to participate in research, generative AI as well. How do we tell about things and creating safeguards? And, you know, sometimes it feels like I don't really know where to start, but let's start with what you can and ask the right questions. And if you can ask the right questions, we're already half the way because in this community, with the people we have, we know in many cases it's not a technology issue. It's access to capital because capital is there. There are enough funds, enough foundations, enough investors wanting to do green tech.

It's building the business case, building the story, and rebuilding trust with consumers. I too often hear, we want to shop sustainably. We're willing to pay a premium, maybe not as much as companies would want. Companies are thinking often over 20% price premium. Maybe families are willing to put a 5%. With the technology innovation we have, we're getting to the point where it's possible. So we have the capital. We have the tech. We have the willingness. It is about bringing it together and doing our part.