It’s time to champion responsible tech

TEXT: DAVID J. CORD

What is tech’s role in the climate crisis?

“ Keep two things in mind,” says Jesse McCrosky, Head of Sustainability and Social Change at Thoughtworks Finland. “Responsible technology includes the greening of tech and greening by tech. We need to make tech greener, but tech can also help us solve other sustainability challenges.”

Thoughtworks is a global technology consultancy that integrates strategy, design and software engineering. McCrosky’s remit of social change is progressive, but so is the company.

“Thoughtworks was founded with public interest at our core,” he explains. “We have about 12,000 employees in 18 countries and have been helping our clients with technology for almost 30 years, and we have never lost sight of our socially responsible philosophy. Technology shapes society and the climate crisis is fundamentally a social problem, but responsible technology can help.”

Technology has a deserved reputation of not being very green. McCrosky mentions one estimate that digital technology is responsible for 4% of global emissions, but there are ways to improve.

“What gets measured gets managed,” he says. “We created an opensource tool called Cloud Carbon Footprint which allows you to measure and monitor your carbon emissions from cloud computing. Then we can advise clients how to improve their architectures to reduce costs and emissions.”

Thoughtworks enables people to bring carbon as a factor into architectural decisions. For instance, they helped the Spanish green energy company Holaluz design their cloud infrastructure more efficiently.

Technology can also play other roles in making us more sustainable. McCrosky mentions how they helped one company use AI to improve their logistics chain, reducing emissions without increasing costs. At Kittilä airport in Finland they used AI to optimise aircraft parking, reducing delays, lowering emissions and saving about half a million euros in costs.

“The climate crisis is fundamentally a social problem, but responsible technology can help” says Jesse McCrosky, Head of Sustainability and Social Change at Thoughtworks Finland.

“AI can help companies integrate sustainability into their strategic decision-making,” says McCrosky. “Our human-centric, augmented AI-based systems can combine AI with human expertise to unlock new possibilities.”

Many companies want to be more socially responsible because it is the right thing to do from an ethical standpoint. Yet being socially responsible can also be a competitive advantage: the younger generation in particular want to patronise businesses that share their societal concerns. Thoughtworks works to help companies become more socially responsible while improving their bottom line.

“Thoughtworks sits uniquely at the intersection of tech and sustainability, so we can offer special and powerful solutions to help organisations meet their sustainability goals,” says McCrosky. |

thoughtworks.com