 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here with Bravo Stretching, coming to you from the show floor at Moscone South of Google Cloud Next 23 from Sunny, I think, Sunny San Francisco. Have you been outside? I think? I haven't been outside in a while, so it was sunny this morning, that's for sure. So let's just say it's sunny now. We're going to have a great conversation with a couple of guests. That's about one of my favorite topics and that's sustainability. We've got Jamie Sajak here, Global Sustainability and Climate Leader for the Alphabet Google Alliance at Deloitte. Great to have you, Jamie. Great to be here. And Neil Geith joins us as well, Director and Global Head of New Products, Business Development and Industry Solutions, Google Maps Platform. Guys, great to have you. I'd love to have you do a little introduction to yourselves so the audience gets to know you a little bit, a little show and tell. Jamie, we'll start with you. Perfect. So Jamie Sajak, work at Deloitte, grew up, dad was a teacher, mom was a nurse, taught me three simple things. Work hard, be authentic, and leave things a little better than you got them. And I think that's our job in terms of sustainability. How do we take the planet we have out of global scale, leave it a little bit better than what we received? That's what we're looking to do with Deloitte and Google. And love it. Neil, tell us a little bit about your backstory. Yeah, sure. So I studied geography at university and got into the world of kind of computerized geography, geographical information system. I just loved how you could try to model the world in a computer and help answer questions. So right from the early days, I was really interested in the application of geospatial technology and sustainability and climate change. And so I spent a bunch of years in the infrastructure consulting world, looking everything from flood risk modeling to noise modeling to sustainable master planning and then joined Google and now have the privilege to lead our new product business development team. So we're really trying to build the next big kind of Google Maps platform that's to enable developers and partners to build amazing experiences on top of that. And again, help to our bit to help the world be a better, more sustainable place. I love that. Jimmy, talk a little bit about, from Deloitte's perspective, why it's partnering with Google on sustainability. How are you helping to address some of the top priorities that CXOs have? Because every time we talk about ESG and sustainability, every company has an initiative or are in the process of developing one and only want to work with companies who can help them along with that. Yep. So for us, there's a lot of companies now focusing on sustainability. What excites me, excites us about Google? Google was focused on sustainability. Back in 2007, Google became carbon neutral. In 2019, it addressed its legacy carbon footprint and now working to be carbon free by 2030. What we see in Google is an organization with the purpose and passion that we have for sustainability. And you think about Google's history. Started as an organization with an audacious goal to make the world's information free for everyone. Now they're taking that passion into sustainability and we're looking to take that with them. So how are we doing it? I think we're focusing in a couple areas. How do we take Deloitte's industry innovations and our insights working with our clients around the world? And Google's amazing technology platforms, couple those two things together. And what we're seeing in the marketplace is five years ago, people were talking about sustainability. Now they're thinking, oh my gosh, 2030's not too far away. I need to take action on sustainability. So we're helping bring the solutions to market that take action on sustainability. If you're looking at sustainable finance, we have a solution for you. If you're looking at energy transition, we have a solution for you. If you're looking to tap into the growth market of green products, we have a solution for you all built on Google platforms. Neal, talk a little bit about, from the CXO perspective, why is it so crucial that they focus on sustainability? You talked about different industries and it's a matter of now, companies need to take action, but from the CXO perspective, what are some of the benefits that they can help their businesses to achieve? Yeah, certainly. So I think now sustainability is a top three issue with the C-suite and the last two, three years, every single conversation customer meeting I've had is involved is touch sustainability. I think the challenge all the C-suite are facing is how they compare sustainability with economic growth. And I think back five years ago, there wasn't a lot of action because it was really difficult to pair the two. So what's changed since then? I really think that technology, cloud computing, geospatial technology has created this paradigm change whereby now these tools and technologies are available to help companies just change business models. Previously it was impossible to kind of run models across the whole of the world to look at deforestation and to do things at that scale. Now it's much simpler to do that. So I think I would say the advent of that technology and obviously Google's cloud platform, this was like Google Earth Engine, which is our sort of planetary geospatial scale analytics platform really allow companies to be able to take action. So I think it's easier now than ever before to at least just start somewhere. And that's why I think we're starting to see significant more action from companies. Yeah, and I think it really comes down to being able to track things, understand where they are, and really all the numbers because you have your scope one, two, and three, scope one and two are supposed to be the easier of the three to get a handle on. So how are you helping companies really understand how to take that action? Because I think one of the things when you were kind of riffing on this earlier on was around supply chain. And I think that especially in scope three becomes one of the harder ones for people to understand and really get a handle on. I know we personally at theCUBE talk to a lot of the different companies that are out there. So how are you two working together around that? Well, one of the products that we have is a solution called Clear Carbon, really focused on scope three traceability. And what we found in our research is 93% of us are looking, hey, I'd be interested in a green product, a green solution. 49% of us are very skeptical about the green claims made in the marketplace. So if you're a top tier organization wanting to take action on sustainability, you want to do it in a transparent, ethical, and truthful way. So all of a sudden traceability in scope three becomes important. So we're working with organizations unlocking the value of low carbon food products. Okay, how do I make sure that this low carbon food product came from a farm that had regenerative agricultural practices in place? Right now we're doing that with Clear Carbon. What we look to do in the future is take Clear Carbon, link it with Google Earth Engine to scale that up. So all of a sudden you can do that for many organizations across many different farms and fields. Let's kind of dig into some of the areas of collaboration. You mentioned sustainable finance. That's actually not something I've heard about before. Neil, I understand that Google is introducing some new technologies to help organizations kind of mitigate climate risks. Where is sustainable finance that's concerned? What can you share with us? Yeah, sure. So yeah, we announced just yesterday three new environmental products which I think are really important. So maybe just to share a few statistics around at least kind of two of the products which is really important. So Air Quality, a recent World Health Organization study kind of concluded that 99% of the world's population actually live in areas that do not meet the World Health Organization standards for air quality. Around 40 million Americans suffer from asthma or air quality related diseases. 67 million suffer from allergies. And the estimated impact on the economy according to the World Health Organization is around $5 trillion per year. So Air Quality is really, really important. So yesterday we launched a suite of environment APIs which complement our maps, routes and places. So the first of those is an Air Quality API which allows developers to get access to air quality data around 100 countries around the world to really empower businesses and organizations to be able to embed this in their websites, their apps and technology to provide visibility and allow consumers and businesses to make more insightful decisions around air quality. We also released the pollen API which does exactly the same thing obviously around pollen. And also a solar API which really aims to help developers understand the solar potential of obviously different houses and infrastructure. So these three products we have released yesterday and we're partnering very closely with our partners like Deloitte to really bring these solutions and get customers to really great innovative use cases around them. Jamie, can you share Deloitte's investment in sustainable finance? I understand there's some pretty significant investments and maybe some examples of how that's coming to fruition. Yeah, so for me it's building on one of the products you guys brought to market a number of years ago called Google Earth Engine, you mentioned it earlier. So for years Google Earth Engine was used by climate scientists around the world to study the effects of climate change. Last year Google made it available for our commercial clients. At the same time regions like Europe are introducing new requirements. So there's a task force on nature related financial disclosure that's going to ask financial services organizations to make disclosures on the climate and nature risks associated with their investments. You think about if you're a regional bank and you're investing in an area and all of a sudden it's hit by a wildfire or a hurricane, there could be a lot of exposure there. So then we have organizations like NatWest and the UK that want to get in front of this. How do you take Google Earth Engine, these emerging EU regulatory frameworks and apply this type of technology to understand the climate nature risks in NatWest's financial investments. And when you take it down into the agricultural sector, how do they help agricultural people understand their exposures and then their customers, the farmers? How can I get recognized for using regenerative agricultural practices? As soon as you create the transparency, then you create the value, the pathway to value for that farmer. Which I imagine can be transformative for their business. Absolutely. In many ways. Because all of a sudden it's going to create transparency, we are going to be able to see in a couple years where and who's investing in green sustainable solutions and who's maybe not. And we're finding our financial services, clients want to get on this side of the ledger and avoid that side of the ledger. What are some of the other industries where you're finding similar kind of cultural adaptation to going in the sustainability direction from a real action perspective? You want to start with that? I would say probably certainly transportation and logistics of course is one, given it's a huge source of carbon and carbon emissions. So certainly on the Google side, we've had our routing platforms for a while. Last year we released eco-friendly routes which again allows consumers and developers to be able to again understand and make trade-offs based on which route is going to be the most environmentally friendly and to help try to obviously balance the cost of that with kind of economic growth. And again and Deloitte have worked with Electrify to build a solution on top of Google Cloud Platform and other APIs to again help really deliver kind of vertical specific solutions. And for me that's really exciting. I'm an engineer by background and you look at transportation and energy 40% of our global greenhouse emissions. And if you're a transportation company right now, you're thinking, oh my gosh, how do I transition to zero emission vehicles? And so we built this solution called Electrified Fleet. It sits on Google Cloud, it leverages Google ecosystem partner technologies in terms of sensors that would be on vehicles and helps those clients like Purellator in Canada. So a national freight and logistics firm with fleets across Canada. Purellator has to reduce its scope one scope two emissions by 42% by 2030 and to get to zero by 2050. We worked with them with Electrified Fleet to help them optimize their roadmap and pathway then help figure out how to tap into all the incentives that are out there right now. And then use supply chain teams to help where are you going to source all these vehicles? So that's step one. Step three is where are you going to get the energy? And that's Electrified Grid, also on GCP. So Electrified Grid helps us figure out how are we going to do the energy and energy infrastructure transition? Because we're going to have to invest trillions on this side to get the right renewable energy to the right places. Electrified Grid's a digital twin that helps you do that. From a country wide to a street block, here's how I'm going to plug in my EV at night. And you're actually helping the customers build the applications or use the APIs. How does that, when you're working with clients, how does that work? We're working together to build, back to, from a Deloitte perspective, we'll bring our industry insights and Google platforms. And then take that to our clients and help them figure out, okay, in their context, what's the right decisions, right moves, right next step for them. Take all the complexity of brand ambition away. What's the simple next step to take in terms of moving forward on their climate agenda? Yeah, and so it's helping them almost build their own dashboard based on the data and the APIs and all of the maps. Yeah, I know exactly, I think, yeah, Google really is the core kind of foundational, I would say, technology provider with Google platform, with our Google Maps platform, and then Deloitte bring the consulting industry experience. But I think most importantly, it's that solution aspect of tying again this together and really bringing an end to end experience to customers to help them be able to do things a lot quicker and a lot faster. And I think that's another reason why we're seeing much more, again, action at the CXO and a board level because there's many more solutions and tools available to help companies get started more easily. Back five years ago, you had to invest so much yourself to be able to do that. So I think the powerful combination of those two are really helping to accelerate change, I agree. We've talked about sustainable finance, transportation, energy transition. Let's spend our final few minutes on sustainable cities and infrastructure. You talked about greenhouse gases and vehicles, but cities are a big generator, big source of greenhouse gases. What are some of the challenges that cities are facing and how can Deloitte Google help them start dialing down some of the risks and complexities? So I live in British Columbia, Canada. A couple of years ago, a city like Vancouver, we had a heat dome, 2021. All of a sudden, if normal day would be 28 Celsius, it was going up to 49 Celsius on my deck in the shade. People were literally dying from heat in the city. And when you start to look at the temperature variation, all of a sudden you find through these Google technologies, there's huge variation between the part of the city that's covered in a green canopy and the part of the city that just has black ash fault and absorbing all that heat. So now you move forward. How do we help our cities? The other thing that cities are grappling with coming out of COVID, how do I create a city that has affordable housing? I don't know about you guys. My kids are trying to figure out where to live and it's awfully expensive. So now you move forward. Google has this technology called Delve. And I described it as a digital twin of a city. It helps you optimize for what might the future look like? How do I build affordable housing? Plus, how do I build green space in the communities and make the communities more livable and how do I decarbonize these communities at the same time? Too often in our communities, we position it as am I for economic growth or am I for sustainability? This allows city planners to do both and take that old analog, let's draw a map of what the future would look like. Let's run 150 scenarios to model out what the future should look like. Awesome, anything to add, Neil, before we wrap? Because I think you talked about this in the beginning about enabling economic growth and sustainability. It's now achievable. Yeah, no, absolutely. So I think you've been very well articulated. Yeah, put that, Jamie. I think it's, again, it's this confluence of these kind of cloud-scale computing platforms with much more real-time geospatial information sensors. The combination of both of those together with generative AI to be able to model out different scenarios, bring in the financials and all this different data, it just enables you to explore hundreds, thousands, millions of different permutations and scenarios to try and make more informed decisions. And I think it's increasingly critical for cities at the master planning level because that is your chance. 90% of the impact will be as you're planning and designing because obviously once you start building and construction, you're already kind of so far down the path. So how can we provide these tools to enable decision makers to be able to balance sustainability and economic growth? And I think this year really is hitting an inflection point where now this is much more kind of widely available. So I think we're going to see a huge amount of change over the next two, three, five years, which is going to be hugely impactful for the sustainability of cities moving forward. That's exciting. The sustainability across industries. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining. Robin, me on the program talking about what Deloitte and Google are doing together from a sustainability perspective. What you're enabling organizations to achieve and the fact that the time is now and the opportunity is there is awesome. So we're going to keep our eyes on this space. Thank you again for your time. Thank you for the opportunity. Our pleasure. For our guest and for Rob's stretch, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live, day one of our coverage of Google Cloud Next. Our next guest joins us in just a minute. So stick around.