We recently attended the Stockport Climate and Nature Business Forum where a panel of local entrepreneurs discussed ‘How can AI help businesses achieve their sustainability goals?’.
AI within the sustainability and ethical business space is a slightly controversial topic (considering the catestrophic environmental impact of AI) so we were quite intrigued as to what would be discussed at the event.
It was hosted at Stockport’s new cultural space Stockroom which is quite an impressive venue if you haven’t visited it already!
The panel of speakers was varied, which I think worked well for some diverse conversations.
Dr Graeme Heyes of Litmus Sustainability is an expert in their sector and really brought some great insights into the use of AI in his business journey. He claimed to be a new adopter of AI who uses it to speed up his learning journey by asking AI to summarize European legislation documents into short, digestible content. Graeme’s insight on using AI to improve his business goals was to use it to ‘save time and gain knowledge’.
Lisa Roberts, Managing Director of supply chain company SQS was a relatively newcomer to the use of AI but admitted to having a real breakthrough when the company replaced a manual process with an automated AI driven process. Lisa also mentioned that using AI to speed up workload meant that staff were able to work a 4-day working week, which on paper sounded quite impressive!
David Pearce, Sustainability Engineer at CQUEL, a company helping developers of commercial properties to decarbonise their projects focussed on the energy usage of AI queries. He uses AI in a very targeted way to speed up systems and reduce the number of queries needed. This in theory limits the energy usage of certain systems whilst ultimately reducing the length of time to complete projects.
Phil Birchenall of Diagonal Thinking provided some useful info into the world of AI to people like ourselves, who have a very limited knowledge of the subject. His business relies on harnessing AI systems for his clients to achieve their goals. Phil’s takeaway was that if we are using AI for business gains then we should all consider “keeping the human element” in order work.
Amy House from The Growth Company touched on the subject of AI driven Chat Bots on websites, something that are becoming scarily ‘life-like’. She also mentioned speeding up her working processes using CoPilot for tracking client meetings. Again, we’re really not sold on this idea as a business use. We find it intrusive and quite a lazy approach to engaging with clients or team members on virtual meetings.
We must admit, at Root we’re certainly not active AI users or even fans of the use of AI (business or personal). We’re sceptical of its long-term capabilities and certainly aware of its detrimental impact on the environment.
With that in mind, we were glad to see that there were some fellow AI sceptics in the audience at the event. And at times, the debate did get quite heated. The obligatory mentions of SKYNET were thrown around (much to our amusement) but it did seem that the majority of the audience were clued in to the negative environmental and ethical impact that AI has. This is only going to build and build.
One interesting topic that we ended the event on was around misinformation to basic questions thrown at ChatGPT. An audience member asked AI to confirm some basic information regarding the UK Prime Minister and the almighty computer brain got the answer completely wrong. This sparked a spirited debate on whether we should all be putting our trust in AI responses for any information. In a world of misinformation then we should all be wary of following blindly into the answers generated by AI.
All-in-all the event was worthwhile. It certainly stirred up our thoughts and opinions on the use of AI for business related activities and it was great to meet some like-minded local business owners.