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TECH & AI
Data is often the foundational issue in business sustainability challenges. Juggling data from thousands, millions and sometimes tens of millions of streams is not a simple spreadsheet job.
Charlotte Degot co-founded CO2 AI to tackle this challenge and has seen the business benefits that clear sustainability data can bring firsthand.
CO2 AI is a sustainability action platform that helps the world’ s largest organisations end-to-end on their net zero journey. It works with businesses like General Mills, Pernod Ricard, Reckitt and Sysco to build clear, actionable carbon footprint data. The platform manages more than 720 million tonnes of CO₂e – equivalent to the emissions of the entire country of Germany.
Charlotte shares her expertise with Sustainability Magazine.
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720
MILLION TONNES
of CO₂e managed through CO2 AI
HOW DOES CO2 AI WORK? Let’ s start with the issue of carbon accounting. To some level it’ s comparable to financial accounting – you need to account for all the activities that a company performs and transform this into a metric.
A big challenge is the magnitude of activities that you need to capture and account for. For the companies we work with, we’ re talking millions or tens of millions of lines of activities. It has taken a hundred years in the financial accounting world to structure and mature these systems. We have to do this with carbon in a much shorter timeframe, and luckily we have today’ s tools and technologies to do it with.
Until now, things were done in spreadsheets and were therefore not at the right level of quality and granularity. There were a tonne of approximations and averages that made it very difficult. You need carbon measurements to be good enough to make decisions with. With our clients, we solve these issues. Thanks to AI and the platform that we’ ve built, we are able to pump lots of different sources of data in and match them with the right conversion factors that transform data into carbon. It’ s a long journey in terms of the data that gets processed, but ultimately at the press of a button you get a carbon footprint that can be refreshed in an automated manner and gives you very good data.
What we bring in CO2 AI is a data model that sets companies up for success, not just in measurement,
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