Focus Innovations

11.02.2021

Artificial intelligence as a tool to reduce emissions and costs of industries

Thanks to AI reduction of industrial costs and emissions
A firm of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the U.S. multinational worldwide leader in strategic consulting, has released a report by BCG GAMMA, the expert team in applied artificial intelligence and advanced analysis for companies and industries. The group is made up of more than 800 data scientists and engineers who use advanced data analysis to find solutions to business problems.

The document, published on BCG’s website, illustrates the options many business sectors have in order to do just what the document’s title says: “Reduce Carbon and Costs with the Power of AI”.

The experts explain that the difficulty for businesses is not so much in adopting tangible solutions to the global warming threat but in the inability to measure their carbon emissions accurately.

An industry that does not know how much it is consuming and, as a result, how much it is polluting will never know how to reduce its volumes, be it to safeguard our climate or to cut related costs.

The BCG report identifies artificial intelligence as the solution to these problems.

In fact, artificial intelligence is the most appropriate tool for the task, because it provides specific information on what a business is consuming and spending. By accessing a huge amount of data, it can take the actions necessary towards reducing expenses and sustainable transformation.

Boston Consulting Group’s study shows that, applied to different organisations, artificial intelligence can have an overall potential impact ranging from $1.3 to $2.6 trillion in value, derived from savings and revenue, achievable by 2030.

The great strength of AI lies in its capacity to learn from experience: it gathers huge amounts of data from its environment, makes associations that humans don’t detect, and suggests the appropriate actions on the basis of its conclusions. 

According to the report, companies wanting to reduce their carbon footprint need to put their mind to using this technology because, through highly advanced data collection, it can monitor current emissions and predict future trends. This enables the company to plan specific actions to reduce its own level of emissions.

The advantages of using artificial intelligence to reduce costs and the environmental impact of industries across various sectors, including transport, pharmaceuticals, packaged consumer products, energy and others, are evident and should not be taken for granted in an economically critical and environmentally alarming period such as the one in which we are living.