TL;DR: Last week at New York Climate Week I leaned heavily into sessions from financial and consulting organizations. In the process, I got a lot of insights into macroeconomic trends, power (in every sense of the word), and of course, AI. I'm going to cover each of these in the coming weeks, because hitting all at once could easily be the length of a new book. (If you need a brief recap of the strange way that Climate Week operates, you can find that in last week's newsletter.)
I'm going to start with AI because it probably has the most direct overlap with your professional lives.
AI was being hyped at the solution to everything from sustainable supply chains and port operations, to daily life and professional networking. It wasn't until I took a step back at the end of the week that I started to see some bigger-picture context.
"AI will solve climate." This was a common refrain. Yet we know that the increasing use of AI and the buildout of the related datacenters has a significant climate impact. There was a surprising lack of acknowledgement of this. My assumption was that any discussion of AI use would have a cost benefit analysis associated with it. I am clearly a naive fool.
Speakers aren't distinguishing between agentic AI and generative AI. As I've said in my book, there's a big difference between using AI tools to forecast hurricane paths or Amazon deforestation impacts, and using AI to write copy or create stock art. They are not the same thing.
Inexplicably, people seem to not be distinguishing between the two, nor the tradeoffs of emissions to value. One VC cornered me at a networking event and talked about how he's all-in on AI, which is why he's invested in systems that model supply chain transport logistics to minimize emissions from traffic and idling, as well as AI therapists to address eco-anxiety built on a ChatGPT base.
Are they really all-in on AI, or is it just providing political cover? It seems like organizations that previously didn't involve AI in their business model have now AI-ified it to seem hip, cool, and economically viable. Are there some people who are clearly just throwing gobs and gobs of money at the cool new buzzword? Yeah, absolutely. (See AI therapist, above.) But there's also a clear political aspect to it.
"I have a business that addresses sustainability challenges." Bad, unfundable, possibly a political target.
"I have an AI-based tech business that just happens to address sustainability stuff." Good, aggressively fundable, politically acceptable.
The problem is that all of this is requiring more energy than last year's business models, and generating more emissions... all to support projects that might otherwise reduce overall emissions.
There is a noticeable split along gender lines when it comes to confidence in AI. I try not to make these kinds of generalizations, but after five days of nonstop meetings, it was really clear. If I had walked into one of these conversations and said, "I develop AI-based content strategies for global organizations," every single one of them would have offered me money before I finished my sentence (probably in the form of a Bitcoin transfer, but still...). Women, on the other hand, talked openly and thoughtfully about the environmental, social, and psychological impacts of AI, and how it's changing individuals, organizations, and communities.
If you're reading about how the AI bubble may soon burst, I think that's incorrect. I, too have seen these articles, but given the fact that money is still being aggressively pumped into anything with AI in the description, we're looking at another year or more of the AI upswing.