Giant Machines was deeply involved in the 2023 edition of Climate Week. Our team members traversed the Javits Center and surrounding venues, with highlights including:
- Sponsoring Women and Climate’s annual dinner. In addition to networking with women from all over the world, Giant Machines led a panel discussion around the role of climate tech in climate equity, specifically in NYC.
- Sponsoring Innsure’s event with Amazon Web Services, which featured both a panel and a handful of climate-related insurance projects that Innsure is working on, including creative concepts like community-embedded insurance and a climate risk and insurance sandbox that enables R&D in the insurance space.
- Attending Zero3’s discussion about tackling Scope 3 emissions and using climate tech to build software and decarbonize at scale.
Climate Week was variously challenging, daunting, insightful, and inspiring. The world requires urgent and concerted action to mitigate the impacts of climate change and move to a decarbonized future. Moreover, this shift has to occur across complex global political, economic, and social contexts. As a firm dedicated to making tech that matters, Giant Machines believes it has a part to play in creating an equitable low-carbon future. Climate Week highlighted several lessons and reminders for us about how best to contribute to this endeavor.
There is still significant whitespace at the intersection of climate tech and digital solutions
Giant Machines refers to the convergence of climate tech and digital solutions as Climate Digital. Our lives are largely lived online, so reducing our collective carbon footprint should intuitively include digital solutions. According to a recent report from the World Economic Forum and Accenture, widespread adoption of digital solutions in areas such as energy, materials, and mobility can deliver up to 20% of the emissions reductions needed to reach 2050 targets.
Giant Machines has spent nearly its entire existence focused on Climate Digital. Our first client worked in fashion tech and hired us a decade ago to create the digital tools it needed to tackle waste and inefficiency in its supply chain. In the years since, the world has moved even more online, and the use cases for Climate Digital have grown.
Climate work provides value to the environment, the economy, and everyone’s overall humanity
Climate Week underscored the array of Climate Digital opportunities to create new workflows, efficiencies, and connections between companies, markets, and people. For example, Zero3’s launch event highlighted how firms can use a digital platform to quantify their Scope 3 emissions and identify partnerships to collectively decarbonize supply chains. At the Women and Climate event, meanwhile, the focus was on the ways in which working in climate can be more than just good for the environment but good for us as people, too.
“We need climate action but it can be fun and it can be joyful,” said Michelle Li, founder of Clever Carbon and Women and Climate.
Climate Week highlighted how addressing the world’s most pressing issue will involve pushing the boundaries of tech innovation, including artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, machine learning and cloud computing. Notably, despite the importance placed on corporate citizenship there was a clear connection made between innovating for the sake of sustainability as well as for driving business performance. These imperatives did not compete with one another: instead, sustainability and commercial performance reinforced each other.
Giant Machines sees Climate Digital implementation as a key way for businesses to unlock value. In 2019, Giant Machines started building new digital technologies for a large utility company to reduce its reliance on analog processes such as using paper documents to manage field projects. While Giant Machines helped this organization conserve 1.6 million gallons of fuel as well as 500,000 gallons of water, the partnership also enabled the client to reduce its spending by $13 million a year.
Giant Machines’ mission and purpose are more relevant than ever
Climate Week was a reminder that Giant Machines can and will continue to lean into the company’s mission and purpose: making tech that matters. To fulfill this objective, Giant Machines is making commitments of its own.
- We will develop differentiated pricing models and alternative fee arrangements for climate tech startups in their infancy to enable their development and capacity to scale
- We will invest in technologies most used in Climate Digital, including IoT, Cloud, 5G, and AI/ML
- We will organize our Giant Machines Studio efforts around sustainability concepts and approaches
- We will invest in climate-related causes to align with and activate our social mission
- We will increase our partnerships with nonprofits and startups to drive climate action and act as a community leader
- We will expand our collaborations with Fortune 500 partners on projects to decarbonize their activities and value chains to create meaningful carbon reduction as well as drive efficiencies for their bottom line
Giant Machines looks forward to keeping the Giant Machines community apprised of its progress in the months ahead as attention eventually turns to Climate Week 2024.
