A cautious approach

With a role to transform leading ideas on sustainable business into action in Aotearoa, Sustainable Business Network is mindful of the impact ongoing innovations in AI could have on the environment.

Treading cautiously into this brave new world of AI, Andy Kenworthy, Senior Communications Advisor of the Sustainable Business Network shares with NZBusiness insights from his organisation’s interactions with the technology, and offers a word of caution for businesses on their own AI journeys. 

How is Sustainable Business Network embracing AI? 

We’re using AI tools sparingly across several areas of our business in research, creative planning and some document preparation. 

However, all our work will remain ‘human-led’. Ours is a cautious approach. We’re mindful of the energy and resource impact of this technology. We’re also alive to the ethical concerns around bias, errors and use of creative material. For example, we don’t currently use AI generated imagery at all, or use AI text without a human editor. We have an AI policy to guide our usage of AI, which we keep regularly updated as AI tools evolve.

AI is having an impact on almost every part of society, how do you think it’s going to impact on future work around limiting emissions and the circular economy? 

Our recent research for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment with Aurecon and thinkstep-anz found that AI could play a variety of roles in fostering a low waste, low pollution, circular economy. 

These include; processing data to optimise material use; enhancing design and material selection; connecting markets for resource return and remanufacturing; improving monitoring for regulation; supporting nature restoration and the bioeconomy with sensing and data processing. 

But of course it is also comes with its own environmental impacts and is presently still mostly being used to further unsustainable consumption patterns.  

Can you share examples of businesses who are doing great things with AI when it comes to sustainability action?

It’s still relatively early days in the use of this technology, and its uses are rapidly advancing. 

Some examples include:

• CattleEye uses overhead cameras and computer vision algorithms to monitor cattle health and behaviour.
• Project ‘Accelerated Metallurgy’ was a pilot demonstrating the use of AI to rapidly develop and test many thousands of metal alloy formulations designed with circular economy principles.
• Winnow’s software analyses food waste data and generates targeted waste reports in large commercial kitchens to reduce food waste. Similarly, ReFED is an interactive online platform that uses big data and AI to analyse food waste in the United States by sector, cause, impact, location, and more.
• AI is used to improve electronic waste sorting by Reconext and for materials from plastics to wood chip by Tomra.
• Deep learning is a subset of machine learning. It uses mathematical functions to map the input to the output. Deep learning is being used to diagnose plant disease, with an AI model trained on apple black rot images. It’s able to identify and diagnose with an accuracy of 90.4 percent. This indicates the proposed deep learning model may have great potential in disease control for modern agriculture.
• AI and robotics: Ecocycle provides high quality sorting of e-waste to improve recycling and recovery rates.

We expect to see many more examples emerging in Aotearoa, including in our network, in the near future. 

We would recommend all business people learn all they can about the uses and possible pitfalls of AI. There’s a lot of information already out there – you can ask the AIs themselves. More is coming all the time. This is an area we will be keeping a close eye on, and will be offering more support and guidance on it for our network in the near future. 

This article was originally published in the June 2024 issue of NZBusiness magazine. To read the issue, click here.