Q&A: Rahul Sareen, GM of Global Sustainability at AWS

Remember that old phrase "necessity is the mother of invention"? Well, it should come as little surprise to our readers that sustainability is an absolute necessity.

For scientists around the world, mitigating climate change is priority number one. So, we turn to science for new technologies that can help us solve this problem.

In the coming years, emergent technology will be completely intertwined with the global sustainability mission. At Sustainability LIVE 2024, Rahul Sareen, GM of Global Sustainability Solutions & Technology at AWS delivered a keynote speech touching on just this subject.

After coming off stage, Rahul stopped by to discuss his fascinating insights with Sustainability Magazine.

What inspired you to get involved in sustainability and ESG?

I come from a tech background. I always used to lead emerging technologies, like IoT and machine learning.

Funnily enough, I happened to be in Singapore leading my team for emerging tech and that's where we actually worked on a couple of these projects, but then when we spoke with the business stakeholders they eventually said that they were doing it because they were finding more sustainability benefits.

For example, we worked on a project with Coca-Cola that actually wanted to reduce or just get more visibility across the factory operations. And then the end result was actually 20% energy reduction and 9% water reduction. So once we started doing these things it was kind of a lightbulb moment that maybe we should try to explore that.

Our leadership has been supportive enough, they actually gave us the platform.

Are there any trends or innovations you're excited about in sustainability?

One of the things that we are seeing is a great adoption is around Gen AI. A lot of our executives are actually asking us how they can get started with Gen AI within their sustainability realm.

What we are seeing is pretty much all the industries — the financial sector, telecoms, customer experience, IT technologies — a lot of these customers are really trying to adopt Gen AI and the Gen AI practices for their sustainability transformation.

What are your biggest takeaways from Sustainability LIVE so far?

Just talking to people who are actually doing sustainability day in, day out — you can really see the interest.

I remember when I started sustainability: sustainability and technology used to go hand in hand. But now we are seeing a lot of Chief Sustainability Officers and business leaders who are actually driving sustainability within their own organisations or within their own departments.

They're really trying to figure out how technology can really help them. It's good to see and to talk to these people.

We are seeing a lot of partners who have actually built some amazing solutions. Talking to them and just understanding what exactly they're doing is really rewarding.

Can events like this contribute to the broader sustainability movement?

We need to have more of these events because this is an area where we actually get to network with a lot of people.

You'd be surprised — we have our annual event, re:Invent, and I was talking to an executive from a sustainability background there. I brought in their executive from technology and both of them were actually talking for the first time. Some of the brainstorming that we actually did, it was so fantastic.

Seeing these events and then even talking to people and then just brainstorming new ideas, it's really important.

How do you anticipate sustainability practices evolving over the coming years?

We are continuously innovating on behalf of customers and even within our organisation.

We are continuously looking at AI and Gen AI and how can we innovate and then really accelerate our sustainability goals, but also our customer's sustainability goals.

I'm really looking forward to the application of AI and specifically Gen AI to help our customers really move fast, optimise their operations, really achieve some meaningful outcomes.

Next year I'm really looking to see more and more practical examples come up.

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