“If I hear ‘AI’ one more time, I’m leaving,” one chief sustainability officer announced to a room of peers at our GreenBiz conference in February. Later that day, I attended a crowded session about how big tech companies are managing the growing demand for water and energy at data centers, along with 223 other attendees. I had to sit on the floor. Sustainability leaders seem to be simultaneously exhausted by AI and intensely curious about it. Last month we surveyed Trellis readers to understand why, and what to do about it. They told us that they believe AI will dramatically reshape the profession, yet most have only just begun to understand how to use it. Sustainability professionals have a difficult needle to thread: how to use AI to accomplish their goals without undermining them. Eighty-one percent of the 195 sustainability professionals who responded believe that AI will change how they do their jobs in the next 3-5 years, and the vast majority (78 percent) are already using it in their day-to-day work. But most of the 147 written-in examples in response to “How are you using AI in your day-to-day work?” could be categorized as basic use cases to “speed up grunt work.” These words were mentioned most frequently in verbatim comments: “research” (47 times); “summarize” (28); and “email” (23). One participant put it best: “Nothing too impressive in my opinion.” Only eight survey takers described using AI in more complex ways to accomplish tasks like greenhouse gas modeling, monitoring…
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