Giving Compass' Take:

• Heather Clancy shares the various ways that artificial intelligence can make an impact on corporate and environmental sustainability, from automating energy management systems to verifying provenance across supply chains. 

• What are the ways that donors can help support these AI programs? How can funders work to ensure that the potential harms of AI are addressed? 

• Here are seven things every company should know about AI and sustainable business.

Where will AI-enabled applications really make a difference for environmental and corporate sustainability? Here are five areas where I believe AI will have an especially dramatic impact over the next decade.

  • Automating energy management. Considering that the system of record for tracking sustainability data today is a technology that first showed up on personal computers 40 years ago (here’s looking at you, VisiCalc), we could use a reboot.
  • Improving soil conditions and crop yields. Drones and sensors that monitor fields are seen as a key component of helping the agricultural sector make better decisions about hydration and plant nutrition, and in fighting disease.
  • Modeling future climate risks. A great example of what’s possible is AT&T’s collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory.It’s mashing up its proprietary database of information about the AT&T telecommunications network with Argonne climate models to predict how impacts of climate change — such as sea-level rise, high-intensity winds and coastal and inland flooding — might affect operations 30 years into the future.
  • Protecting biodiversity. The Wildlife Insights project is just one example of how scientists are using imagery combined with insanely powerful data-analysis technologies to get a better picture of how the planet is changing.
  • Verifying provenance across supply chains. The headline for many next-generation traceability systems being piloted across different industries — from cotton to coffee to seafood — is the blockchain, which is really a fancy name for electronic ledger technology.

Read the full article about how artificial intelligence will impact corporate and environmental sustainability by Heather Clancy at GreenBiz.