 Welcome, everyone. My name is Rishabh Gaur. I have a very interesting topic today. It's called Building Together Sustainable Future. And as the world is moving to the new normal, enabling a green recovery, I think that was the highlight. There was a title from Gartner Artrican that I felt that it's about enabling a green recovery. It will be central to everything that we do as a society. So let's look at how technology can really enable us to do this. So a little bit about me. Just give me one second. Yeah, perfect. Yeah. So a little bit about me. I work as a technical architect at Microsoft in the Indian subsidiary. I work in Out of India. I'm privileged to be part of a very small and interesting group in Microsoft called the Microsoft Technology Center. Internally, we call it MTC. So I work for the Indian MTC, and we are a very small team, four technical architects and one MTC director for the entire Indian subcontinent. And so basically, all of us have to specialize in cross-domain solutions. Like me, myself, I look after all of our IoT service offerings, the entire application development scenarios on Azure, and the local no-code offering power platform. So in my day-to-day job, we generally, as MTC, we host customers day in, day out for deep technical discussions. So basically, we have specialists in Microsoft who specialize in particular technologies. But whenever there is a requirement of a cross-domain discussion or deep technical discussion, and again, this can be around architecture. This can be around design. This can be around rapid prototyping. That's where we come in. So we show to the customers the so-called the art of the possible. In fact, I have a very interesting demo for you guys in terms of how IoT can really help us taking that next step. So I show that as well towards the end. And you can find your LinkedIn as well. It's just my last name and my first name in case you want to connect. And I know it's the last session for the day, so let's make it very interesting for everybody. So basically, what I have done is I have sort of divided my session into three different pieces. And maybe we won't take the entire 40 minutes. So maybe we can have the last 10 minutes for Q&A. Maybe if we finish in like 30, 35 minutes. So the idea is, like, part one of the session is about Microsoft Sustainability Story. Again, that will be the only part where I just want to give to you, give to other organization what exactly is happening within Microsoft. Again, the whole idea is it's not just something that I have been doing from the Indian subsidiary perspective. I'm literally working with folks in Australia, folks in Paris and folks in the Redmond office as well to devise this strategy. And I'll tell you why exactly is in a particular way. Then we'll learn about how IoT and digital twins are truly paving our way for a better future. I'll show a very interesting demo there which I have built over the last six months with the help of some very intelligent SMEs across Microsoft. And then towards the end, we'll understand what are the fundamental challenges when you think about sustainability in your organization. So that's what it is and we'll get started now. So basically, if you think about it today, we understand that it's a planet-sized challenge. It's not a one-stop solution. It's not a one-stop solution. Climate change is happening and it's, I mean, it's real. So in fact, if you think about it, let me take you back to grade eight and then what exactly is global warming? Global warming is the long-term rise in average temperature of Earth's climatic system. And in the past 50 years, this has led to an increase of one degree Celsius. In fact, the scientific consensus is very clear. A fundamental cause of this is the increasing carbon dioxide emissions which are the primary driver of the rising global temperatures. So if you think about it, as I said, the scientific consensus is very clear. The world today, it confronts an urgent carbon problem. The carbon in our atmosphere, it has sort of created a blanket of gas that traps heat and is changing the world's climate. And already, as I mentioned, the planet's temperature has risen by more than one degree Celsius just since 1960s. So if we don't carbon emissions and temperatures, they continue to climb. Science clearly tells us that the results will be catastrophic. There will be more extreme weather which will lead to severe droughts that will impact the agricultural yields and will lead to a global food shortage. Rising seas will eventually replace or displace more and more communities and entire communities itself. Scientists, they agree that the world needs to radically reduce carbon emissions to keep temperature rises below 1.5 degree Celsius before 2050. I think that's the goal. So basically, again, this one slide, so I did a lot of prep. So I got a confirmation for this talk around somewhere around December. So I did a lot of prep. And there were some numbers on the slide. Don't worry about the content there. I'll just explain it. So basically, today, the next generation, the so-called millennials of the GNC, they demand a participation economy that allows them to contribute, co-create, and shape the giving behaviors of brands they love. So basically, the idea is, I mean, over the last few weeks, I have been reading a lot about sustainability and its impact in enabling a green recovery. So key thematic that emerged is the fact that beautiful generations, they are driving a fundamental shift in how companies think about two things. One, value creation, and second, their own progress. So people, planet, and profits, they are the new guiding principles. It's people, planet, and profit. Everything that we do or everything that we think about must be driven by these three angles. It must be driven by these three angles. So as the modern generation becomes more concerned about issues like climate change, market forces, they will eventually start to select and favor more sustainable companies, sustainable organizations, and building modern business ecosystems with incentive structures that promote sustainability truly ensure long-term market success for every organization out there. So in fact, I work for an organization which has already been working on this, and Microsoft is committed to harnessing the power of technology. Again, the whole idea here is, let's build a sustainable future. And it's not a one-stop solution today. What I'll show you is something we have built from scratch. So it's something that can be built using completely just open source technologies as well. So don't have to worry about going into or having the so-called vendor lock-in. So it's all about just making sure that what, make sure that you have sustainability goal in mind and working towards it. So if you think about it as an organization, we, as Microsoft, we started to invest in building the world's leading platform for technology solutions to environmental challenges. And again, our whole idea, our goal is to use the whole of Microsoft's business power to affect change in those areas by, the four areas are carbon, water, waste, and ecosystem. So our whole idea is, can we affect change in those four areas by minimizing the negative impacts of our own operations and maximizing the positive impacts of the technology? In fact, understanding your numbers, that's one of the fundamental challenges. I'll cover it towards the end. When I talk about all the challenges, we personally face day in, day out on this journey. But yes, as I mentioned, while we are, we have long been focused on operating our businesses as efficiently as possible. Increasingly, we are taking responsibility of the whole four parameters, such as carbon, water, waste, and the land footprints across our products and facilities. Microsoft is also developing new process services which are driven by data, the so-called data-driven technology or data-driven transformation. That's something that we are focusing on. We are delivering new features and benefits to help our customers and partners. We are already doing that. And lastly, we'll use our voice on climate-related public policy matters as well. That's where the whole people piece comes into picture, what you see at the center there. So basically the idea is, we have people who are focused about this. We have a large generation, like I personally, I've just been two years in Microsoft. I have been a huge part on the sustainability journey. So that's what it is. In fact, if you think about it, Microsoft has been working on the sustainability journey for like 11 years now, 12 years honestly. But the whole idea is, we have already accomplished some incredible things for the past decade. So the whole idea is, we have certain programs called, like one program that we had was the Carbon Mutual Program. Another one was our renewable energy progress and there was a commitment to build sustainable products as well. So basically the idea is, hey, how can we take this journey forward? So in fact, what we did in last year, last year in January, that's where even my journey of sustainability began. So last year in January, we announced this commitment as a detailed plan to be carbon negative by 2030. It's completely public. If any organization, they want to work about sustainability, you can either connect with me, I can get you connected with the right resources in your locality or otherwise, I mean, I can help you as well. So there's no issue there. But the whole idea is, we built on a pledge with a series of industry-leading commitments to be water-positive, to be a zero-waste company by 2030, and to develop a planetary computer to better monitor, model, and manage the world's ecosystems and product more land than we use. So the whole idea of the first three is around carbon, is around making sure that our emissions are bare minimum. The fourth piece is something that we are working on because of our AI for Earth program. So the whole idea is today, we need to have powerful computers who can do those, who can run those deep learning models very efficiently. And that's where we are building a supercomputer. We have already invested around one billion there. And yeah, we are working on that. So what exactly is our approach to sustainability? It's completely focused on mathematics. So Microsoft did a study last year. We came to a conclusion that today, humanity has already pumped two trillion tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in the last 200 years. And the unfortunate fact is, we aren't slowing down. The world in actually today, humanity today adds 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every single year. And again, this is just a basic mathematical concept. So basically one aspect of this is relatively simple, but it's quite important. So scientists today, what they do is they account for carbon emissions by classifying them into three different scopes. And this is very, very important. If anybody wants to start their journey of sustainability, I think right from now onwards in the next like 20 minutes, just try to focus on these important pieces. The first important piece is the classification. So basically scope one emissions, these are your direct emissions, your direct emissions that your activities create. So basically you're, this could be using electricity in your building. This could be you driving your vehicle. It's all of those things which your own activities create. Scope two emissions, these are sort of indirect emissions that come from the production of the electricity or maybe let's say the heat you use. Or like for example, like the traditional energy sources that light up your home or the power of the buildings that own, power of the buildings that are owned by your business. So that's where scope two comes in. Scope three emissions are indirect emissions that come from all other activities in which you are engaged. From a business perspective, these emission sources can be pretty extensive. In fact, that they are the biggest contributor and they must be accounted for across the entire supply chain. Basically the idea is everything's happening behind the scenes, like how your devices are getting shipped, how you are procuring material, everything that you do behind the scenes that comes into scope three. One of the major contributors. So yes, today humanity is emitting 50 billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. So what we did was, we actually did a study on Microsoft's own emissions across our global offices and we came to a number of 16.1 million metric tons. So out of this 100,000 are scope one emissions, the direct emissions. But the major component here again is 12 million metric tons which is like 75% of the overall almost 75% that fall into scope three. And while we at Microsoft, we have worked hard to be carbon neutral since 2012, our recent work this particular one, it has led us to conclude that this is an area where we are far better served with humanity than pride. Again, this is something that Brad Smith himself spoke about. But the whole idea is, yes, we are doing well since 2012, we are carbon neutral. But the whole idea is like most carbon neutral companies out there, Microsoft's achieved to, has achieved carbon neutrality primarily by investing in offsets. What do I mean by that is we are not completely running on, let's say for example, I'll show you a demo of our manual office as well. So we are not the office that we have in India. Basically the idea is we are not running on, how should I say this? Basically we are not running on truly green energy. We are not like for example, we have 90% contribution of our entire premise is by solar power plants. Now it's not that those solar power plants are truly powering our building. No, that's not the case. Basically what we are doing is we are running on normal systems, but we are contributing to the solar power plant which is deployed outside our office, not within the premises, it's outside the premises. But the whole idea is we are providing an offset there. Basically that's how we primarily avoid emissions instead of actually removing carbon that has already been emitted. So the whole idea is yes, while the world will need to reach the net zero that we have already achieved in 2012, those of us like all of us at least in the tech industry we are sort of privileged, we can afford to move faster and go further and we should do so. So that's why we announced the whole goal that okay, being neutral is not enough. So by 2030 we as an organization Microsoft will be carbon negative. And by 2050 we'll literally remove all the carbon that we have already emitted either directly or by electrical consumption since our inception in 1975. We'll remove all of that carbon from the atmosphere. And again, not just goals, we actually announced some specific principles, five key elements that are there. We recognize that progress is not just about a bold goal but a detailed plan also needs to be there. So the five important pieces here are one, we need to take responsibility of our current carbon footprint. In fact, this is where we actually dive into my demo as well. So I'll show you just after this slide. So the whole idea is can we take responsibility of all our emissions? That's the most important piece. Second piece is we need to invest into new carbon addition technology. In fact, just recently, I guess everybody has seen Elon Musk announcing that he'll give grants of a particular amount before just carbon removal technologies, any improvement or any sort of work on that particular technology. Third piece is we need to empower our customers. We know that we cannot do this alone. As Microsoft, if only one organization is doing it, there's no point there. Or if only Amazon is doing it or only Google is doing it, there's no point there. It's about empowering people, it's about providing them with a platform where they can actually plug in their own pieces or at least making sure that these other guys or other industries or other organizations and other industries, they are actually motivated to work towards these goals. In fact, we've got some amazing feedback. I've worked with customers in Sweden. I worked with Roche. I worked with seven different customers all across the globe who are already on this journey and it's absolutely great. So that's there. So basically the whole idea is the last piece here is we need to use our voice on carbon related public policy issues. So we will support new public policy initiatives to accelerate carbon reduction and removal opportunities. So this is where we straight away jump into the demo. Before that, I'll just show you how exactly to think about sustainable solution. And then we go into the demo and pretty much that's about it. I didn't want to keep the content tech. I just wanted to focus on the technology here, how we have built it. And then I'll just straight away open it to questions. They can multiple questions because it's a very interesting way to approach sustainability or approach buildings in the future. So, and when I say buildings, you will understand it by just in a minute. So basically, if you think about approaching any sustainability solution, it's about four key areas, which is first is energy. That's where your carbon footprint comes in. Second is water. Third is waste. And fourth is ecosystems. So the whole idea is can I go ahead and monitor these four aspects of my particular building? These are the common scenarios we have understood from leading experts in the industry as well. So how do you think about sustainability solutions? So today, if you want to start your journey, we understand that your end goal will always be stage four, which is where you want to become carbon negative as an organization. But the whole idea is to do this, your step one is to understand your current carbon footprint. That's step one. So you know your own impact today. And again, this impact comes in those four categories, which is energy, waste, water, and ecosystems. So I told you, Microsoft announced that, okay, humanity was raising 50 billion tons of metric tons of carbon dioxide. And Microsoft globally was emitting 16.1 million metric tons of those 50 billion metric tons. So what I did was in March of last year, I actually went to a facilities team in Bangalore. This is literally a photo of our office in India. I went to them, I asked them, hey, can you, and again, the reason this demo, this entire project was possible was because our building is a state of the art facility with like a lot of senses in every single room. In fact, we have three different senses in every single room, which is our AV, their whole lighting, AV air conditioning system. The second one was our temperature sensor in every single room. And the third was an occupancy sensor in every single room. So basically what we did was, hey, I went to the facilities team, I asked them, hey, because we have these systems in place, can we connect them to understand our current carbon footprint as an individual building? So that's where we built something. And again, what we see on the screen is what we have built actually. However, from the next slide onward, all the numbers are actually hidden because it's a demo, the whole compliance issues, the whole idea is everything is hidden from the next slide onwards. But you understand the overall piece. So basically we built a digital twin using IoT sensors, connecting them to Azure Digital Prints. And again, Azure Digital Prints is just a service to connect to. Otherwise, any IoT have any cloud service and IoT can work here. Any open source service can work here as well. So basically we connected all of those to the cloud. And from there, we are bringing them to a centralized storage. I'll show you the actual architecture as well. And from there, we are actually just modulating that data to get some insights out of it. So if you look at it, again, there were numbers here which I had to hide. So basically we get for the smart building tab, we get everything about our particular building in terms of our consumption, in terms of electricity consumption, in terms of water consumption, so carbon footprint, in terms of overall waste produce. Similarly, the energy tab would give you a view about the generator we have, the solar power plant, which I said, which is not in our premises, it's outside, and all the vehicles that we have. So every, all the entire transport piece uses a lot of diesel there. India is still running on, like in India, vehicles are still running on diesel only. There's no electrical concept here as of now. Tesla just announced three, four months back, I think, October is when they announced their opening in India, but yeah, still a long way to go there. So that's what is there in the energy tab. The water management tab is about our water treatment plant that we have within our premises. So it shows how much water we are consuming, how much recycled water we are consuming as an entire facility. And similarly, the waste management plant, this is where you have a waste treatment plant, and then we have a bio gas generator for all the wet organic waste that we have. So that's where the waste management number comes in. Now, if somebody wants to understand, basically the idea is this building was inaugurated in January of 2019, so just one and a half years, and we have been collecting data. So if somebody wants to understand a trend behind a particular number here, just have to click on that particular number that will actually open a graph of how exactly is the trend has been for that particular number. Now, if you want to drill down one level deeper, you want to understand how did we arrive at this number? That's where you actually go to the underlying Power BI dashboard. Again, could be any of the dashboard, could be your own custom build software to show a dashboard as well. But again, I use Power BI because I work with Power Platform very well. But the whole idea here is, can we show drill down statistics to the facilities team so that they can actually understand what's going right, what's going wrong when it comes to sustainability goals, and they can literally modulate their own journey. Again, as I mentioned, this is just one piece which is here. All four of these tabs have individual dashboards, internal dashboards as well, which talk about themselves. For example, the energy dashboard we talk about is the energy piece. The water management dashboard we talk about that, the waste management dashboard we talk about, the entire food and beverage pieces as well because that's where a lot of organic waste is getting generated. So this is how we have created the internal piece. Now, this was the stage one of the project. We were able to finish this by, I think September, I guess, late August, early September. But that's when we realized, if we truly want to understand what exactly is happening in the building, that's one. And second, if we truly want to understand how can we leverage the power of IoT and digital twins, we can actually go one level deeper. So that's basically what we did. So this is, again, just from demo purposes. So basically, if you click on this building today, in the internal demo that I have, you actually go to the underlying flow map of one particular flow. And again, in this case, we have four different rooms which have sensors. There is actually the kitchen, open kitchen area, and this is just the conference rooms that we have. But four areas where actually people are there, when let's say you click on one of these, that's when you are taken to that particular room. In this case, I will put the ground floor because the ground floor is where our MTC, Microsoft Ground Recenter is situated. So that's where we have an experience zone, which I will show here, which you can see on the screen, which I showed here. And when you click on that, that's where you go into that particular room. And what I did was, I connected each and every sensor that's there in that particular room to a, in this case, a dynamic service home, but this is where you can connect it to cloud anywhere. And then what I did is, I wrote a very simplistic logic that, so basically, all of those devices, all of those IoT sensors are actually connected here as devices. Again, these are just random names, PySensor1, S-System1, Downstream1, S-System2, all of those names are there, MTC test device. But basically, there were these seven devices here. So they are actually actual sensors which are there in our rooms. And again, for demo purposes, what I did was, one of the sensors was actually temperature sensor. So what I did was, I raised a simple IoT alert that, okay, in case my temperature goes beyond a particular threshold, please raise an alarm. That's the first thing you have to do, raise an alarm. Second, mail or message a corresponding authority in the facility so that they can take a notification of this. So the whole idea is, as soon as this happens, as soon as this anomaly is raised, what will happen is, somebody will get a mail and alarm will be raised in the building. And the third piece is, somebody will get a notification in Teams or whatever it's of internal clackings of where you're using. So the whole idea is, because digital twins truly bridge the gap between the digital and the physical, today, the facilities team need not to be sitting in the actual office itself. The facilities need not to have to be there in the actual office itself. They can look at the dashboard, which is available to them internally to use and they can make confirmed decisions, like sitting from, let's say, a different part of the world completely. So that's what we have built for them. In terms of the overall architecture of this solution, very interesting pieces came up when we were building this. So first one is, they were a lot of sensors, which I mentioned, the building had a lot of sensors. So they were a lot of pieces that were proprietary Microsoft. So I was able to directly actually tweak with them or understand their code base. And then what I did was I connected them to an IOT hub in Azure Digital Twins. From there, just the cheapest way to bring them to a centralized storage. So even types of Azure functions were used. Again, you can use anything, you can write your own custom code, dockerize it and then use it as well. No issues there. But the whole idea is, I need to bring all of the data from a cloud service to a centralized storage. But then what happened was, a lot of systems in our building were actually developed by vendors. So I connected with multiple vendors. And these are some big names. These are some big names in the industry who have deployed these systems, these building management systems, individual systems. And when I talk to them, the major, I mean, I talk to four different vendors and the idea of the conversation always went like this that, hey, Rishabh, I already have a system which has gone into production in your office. I cannot disrupt that at all. I cannot allow you to actually even tweak that system itself because if it goes down due to something that you do, we should not be held liable. And that's where what we had a turnaround, basically the whole workaround that we did was, hey, can you give us a dump of the data every single night? So we gave them a shared location. Again, use IU SharePoint, you can use anything here. Give them a shared location. From there, I wrote a very small script to bring that data from the shared location to the centralized storage. This is where I used a few machine learning technologies. Again, we want to go deeper into the tech piece of this, but yeah, we just wanted to make sure that the right numbers are coming onto the web app and onto the dashboards that we built. So from a user perspective, from a RENF perspective, the facilities team, what I did was for them, this is what it is. They just need to log into the application using Azure AD and once they are done that, they can actually tweak into the app and they can have a view for themselves that, okay, this is what I need to do in case something goes wrong. This is what the current status of the building is right now. And again, there is a latency here because this particular dump we are getting every single night. So there is a latency there. We are working on a system of making sure at least we get this dump every 48 minutes. And again, I don't know the mathematics behind it, but yeah, it's 48 minutes for some reason. And so basically we're working on that particular piece. So this was the overall project that we built. Now, I'll just take five more minutes and then we'll open for Q&A for the last 10 minutes. So what are the challenges? Or what are the challenges I have been seeing when I'm talking to customers day in, day out about this sustainability course. So at MTC, as I mentioned, we talk to customers day in, day out. And again, it's not just Indian customers, they work across the world. And there were certain interesting learnings that I personally got. And to be very frank, the third learning out of this is something, I am open for answers. If anybody has an answer, just let me know. Connect with me or LinkedIn and just let me know what exactly should be the answer for that particular one. But yeah, the first learning is customers, they generally ask me, hey, what does those volatile stats? I mean, I mean, my volatile stats is, what was those numbers? Like, okay, I am running 10 VMs in my machine. In this case, on the side, as you can see, I have a question, like, okay, I am running 100 VMs. How do I convert that to an energy number? Are there some industry standards there? And to be very frank, there are none. There are a few here and there for certain localities, but there are no standards across the world. There are no global standards out there. So what does it mean by... In fact, if you look at the sustainability pledge that the UN have signed, which is the UN Sustainability Development Goals for the HDGs, they are also, another key understanding is, hey, how do I get to those exact numbers? So that's one of the important pieces. And the second part of this is, hey, what does 100 metric tons of carbon emission actually mean in relatable terms? So that's something we are trying to work on today. Again, no particular answers. We are trying to work with a lot of the global power vendors or energy vendors, so as to have an industry standard. So as to have a global standard, that's one very interesting piece. Microsoft is an offering called Sustainability Calculator. It's available for people to use to understand how exactly are they arriving at, like how exactly do you reach those numbers? But again, the question is, hey, what are the prerequisites of that particular calculator? Do I need to be a measure for that particular piece? Again, we don't have a clear answer there, but yeah, that's what's happening. Now the second piece. So as I mentioned, Microsoft is emitting 16.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Out of which 12 million metric tons is in scope three. Now, in every single conversation that I had with customers, one question comes up every single time. Scope one emissions are my direct emissions. Scope two emissions are emissions that I personally am emitting, basically. How do I go ahead and calculate scope three emissions? Because these are dependent on my partners, on my supply chain people, everything behind the scenes, all the outsourced activities that I'm doing. How do I calculate that? And that's literally the biggest goal. Today, as an organization, we have been working very hard on this, but yes, you're trying to find that one particular way of how to do this. There's certain pieces which might come up in the recent future, or in a very close nearby future, but right now how to calculate scope three emissions is something that's literally open for ideas. I do not have an answer for this, because every organization, I can ask my supply chain vendor that, okay, can you do this for me? Can you give me those numbers? But how much can I rely on them completely with my eyes closed? That's something that industry does not have an answer for today. And yes, there's a lot of work which is going on there, but again, it's something we do not have a valid global answer across the world. Common data platform is something that might come up here, but the problem with that is it's a very, very complex piece, and for people to actually work on CDP and give us that data or the third party vendor to give us our emission data, it's not picking up at the pace that we want it to be, but yeah, that's something that's been there. So if anybody has any answers for this particular piece, more than happy to discuss, more than happy to value, to just have a decent conversation on this particular topic, how do we go ahead and calculate scope three emissions? So with that, I'll close out. That's all I had, 30 minutes is what I took, which is, I guess, okay, 30 minutes is what I planned also. And now we have 10 minutes of Q and A. If there are any questions, more than happy to take them. Okay, there are no questions in the Q and A window, but it's okay. Thank you, Rishabh for this very interesting talk. And if anyone has any questions, please go on and write them into the chat or Q and A section. And I see one in Q and A section right now. From Pavel Zubati, what about the MS Microsoft's underwater servers? Pavel, what exactly do you want to know about them? That's something we have been working on. And yes, the results are decent. I cannot disclose what's the future of them, but we are working on those. They are there. In case you want something very detailed, we can have a candid conversation or on one someday. No issues.