 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. Virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great lineup here talking sustainability, Karim Yusuf, PhD, general manager of AI applications and blockchains. Karim, great to see you. And Wayne Balt, the vice president of corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainability officer among other things involved in the products around that. Wayne and Karim, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having us. Wayne, I'll start with you. What's driving IBM's investment in sustainability as a corporate initiative? We know IBM has been active. We've covered this many times, but there's more drivers now as IBM has more of a larger global scope and continues to do that with hybrid cloud. It's much more of a global landscape. What's driving today's investments in sustainability? You know, John, what drives IBM in this area has always been a longstanding, mature and deep-seated belief in corporate responsibility. That's the Bedrock Foundation. So you know, IBM's a 110-year-old company. We've always strived to be socially responsible. But what's not as well known is that for the last 50 years, IBM has truly regarded environmental sustainability as a strategic imperative. It's strategic because environmental problems require a strategic fix. It's a long-term imperative because you have to be persistent with environmental problems. You don't necessarily solve them overnight. And it's imperative because business cannot succeed in a world of environmental degradation. That really is the main tenet of sustainable development. You can't have successful economies with environmental degradation. You can't solve environmental problems without successful economies. So in IBM's case, as a longstanding company, we were advantaged because 50 years ago, our CEO at the time, Tom Watson, put in place the company's first policy for environmental stewardship. And we've been at it ever since. And he did that in 1971. And that was just six months after the US EPA was created. It was a year before the Stockholm Conference on the Environment. So we've been at it for that long. In essence, really, it's about recognizing that good environmental management makes good business sense. It's about corporate responsibility. And today it's the E of ESG. You know, Wayne, that's a great call out, by the way, referencing Thomas Watson, that IBM legend, people who don't may or not know the history. He was really ahead of its time. And that was a glott of the culture that you still see around today. So great to see that focus and great, great call out there. But I will ask, though, as you guys evolved in today's modern era, how has that evolved in today's focus? Because, you know, we see data centers, carbon footprint, global warming. You now have AI and analytics can measure everything. So, I mean, you can measure everything now. So as the world gets larger in the surface area of what is contributing to the sustainable equation is larger, what's the current IBM focus? So, you know, these days, we continually look at all of the ways in which IBM's day-to-day business practices intersect with any matter of the environment, whether it's materials, waste, water, or energy and climate. And IBM actually has 21 voluntary goals that drive us towards leadership. But today, John, as you know, the headline is really climate change. And so we're squarely focused like many others on that, and that's an imperative. But let me say, just before I briefly tell you our current goals, it's also important to have context as to where we have been because that helps people understand what we're doing today. And so again, climate change is a topic that the men and women of IBM have paid attention to for a long time. You know, think about it, it was back in 1992 that the US EPA created something called Energy Star. People look at that and they say, well, what's that all about? Okay, that's all about climate change because the most environmentally friendly energy you can get is the energy that you don't really need to consume. IBM was one of eight companies that helped the US EPA launch that program in 1992. Today, we're all disclosing CO2 emissions. IBM began doing that in 1994. Okay, in 2007, 13 years ago, IBM published its position on climate change calling for urgent action around the world. We supported the Paris Agreement in 2015. We reiterated that support in 2017 for the US to remain a partner. 2019, we became a founding member of Climate Leadership Council, which calls for a carbon tax and a carbon dividend. So that's all background context. Today, we're working on our third renewable electricity goal, our fifth greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal, and we set a new goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Each of those three compels IBM to near term action. That's awesome. Wayne, as Corporate Environmental Affairs and Chief Sustainable, great vision and awesome work. Kareem, Dr. Kareem, Yusef, I want to weave you in here. You're the general manager. You got to make this work because the corporate citizenship that IBM is displaying, obviously world-class, we know that's been well reported and known, but now it's a business model. People realize that it's good business to have sustainability, whether it's carbon neutral footprints and or intersecting and contributing for the world and their employees who want mission-driven companies. AI and blockchain, that's your wheelhouse. This is like, you're on the big wave. Wow, this is happening. Give us your view because you're commercializing this in real time. Yeah, look, as you've already said, and as Wayne well articulated, this is a business imperative, right? It's key to all companies corporate strategies. So the first step when you think about operationalizing this is what we've been doing is to really step back and kind of break this down into what we call five key needs or focus areas that we've understood as we work with our clients. Remember, in this context, Wayne is indeed my client as well, right? And so when you think about it, the five needs is we like to lay them out. We talk about a sustainability strategy. First of all, how are you approaching it? As you saw from Wayne, identifying your key goals and approaches, right? Against that, you begin to get into various areas and dimensions. Climate risk management is becoming increasingly important, especially in asset-heavy industries. Electrification, energy and emissions management, another key focus area where we can bring technology to bear. Resilient infrastructure and operations, sustainable supply chain. All of these kind of come together to really connect with our client's business operations and allows us to bring together the technologies in the context of AI, blockchain and the key business operations we can support to kind of begin to address specific use cases in the context of those needs. You know, I've covered it in the past and written about and also talked about on theCUBE about sustainability on the supply chain side with blockchain, whether it's your tracking, you know, transport of goods with blockchain and making sure that kind of ledger kind of philosophy works because there's waste involved, there's also disruption to businesses, security issues. But when you really move into the AI side, how does a company scale that, Karim? Because now, you know, I have to want operationalize it and then scale it. Okay, so that's transform, innovate and scale. How do I take, take me through the examples of how that works? Well, I think really key to that and this is really key to our ethos. It's enabling AI for business by integrating AI directly into business operations and decision making. So it's not really, how can I put this? We try to make it so that the client isn't fixating on trying to deploy AI, they're just leveraging AI. So as you say, let's take some practical examples. You talked about sustainable supply chains and you know, the key needs around transparency and provenance, right? So we have helped clients like Atea with their seafood network or the shrimp sustainability network where there's a big focus and understanding where are things being sourced and how they're moving through the supply chain. We also have a responsible sourcing business network that's been used for coal boats in batteries as an example from mine to manufacturing. And here our technologies are allowing us to essentially track, trace and prove the provenance. Blockchain serves as kind of that key shared ledger to pull all this information together. But we're leveraging AI to begin to quickly assess based upon the data inputs, the actual state of inventory, how to connect dots across multiple suppliers and as you onboard them and offboard them off the network. So that's how we begin to put AI in action so that the client begins to fixate on the work and the decisions they need to make, not the AI itself. Another quick example would be in the context of civil infrastructure. One of our clients, Son and Belts, a large maximal client of ours, uses maximal to really focus on the maintenance the sustainable maintenance of their bridges. Think about how much money is spent setting up to do bridge inspections, right? When you think about how much they have to invest the stopping of the traffic, the scaffolding, we have been leveraging AI to do things like visual inspection, actually fly drones, take pictures, assess those images to identify cracks and use that to route and prioritize work. Similar examples are occurring in energy and utilities focused on vegetation management where we're leveraging AI to analyze satellite imagery, weather data and bringing it together so that work can be optimally prioritized and deployed for our clients. It's interesting, one of the themes coming out of think that I'm observing is this notion of transformation is innovation and innovation is about scale, right? So it's not just innovation for innovating sake, you can transform from whether it's bridge inspections to managing any other previous, pre-existing kind of legacy condition and bring that into a modern error and then scale it with data. This is a common theme. It applies to your examples, Karim. That's super valuable. How do you tie that together with partnering? Because Wayne, you were talking about the corporate initiative, that's just IBM. We learned certainly in cybersecurity and now these other areas like sustainability, it's a team sport. You have to work on a global footprint with other industries and other leaders. How is IBM working across the industry to connect and work with other either initiatives or companies or governments? Sure, and there have been John over the years and at present, a number of diverse collaborations that we seek out and we participate in. But before I address that, I just want to amplify something Karim said because it's so important. As I look back at the environmental movement over the last 50 years, frankly, since the first Earth Day in 1970, with the benefit of hindsight, I observed there have really been three different eras. In the very beginning, global societies had to enact laws to control pollution that was occurring. That was the late 60s, 1970s into the early 1980s. And around the early 1980s, through to the first part of this century, that era of let's get control of this sort of transformed, oh, how can we prevent stuff from happening given the way we've always done business? And that era ran for a while, but now thanks to technology and data and things like blockchain and AI, we all have the opportunity to move into this era of innovation, which differs from control and which differs from traditional prevention. Innovation is about changing the way you get the same thing done. And the reason that's enabled is because of the tools that you just spoke about with Karim. So how do we socialize these opportunities? Well, to your question, we interact with a variety of diverse teams through government, different business associations, NGOs, and academia. Some examples, there's an organization named the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which IBM is a founding member of its business leadership council. It's predecessor was the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. We've been involved with that since 1998. That is a cross-section of people from all of these different constituencies who are looking for solutions to climate. Many Fortune 100, 200s in there. We're part of the Green Grid. The Green Grid is an organization of companies involved with data centers. And it's constantly looking at how do you measure energy efficiency in data centers and what our best practice is to reduce consumption of energy at data centers. We're a member of the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance. Many Fortune 100s, 200s are in that, trying to apply scale to procure more renewable electricity to actually come to our facilities. I mentioned earlier, we're part of the Climate Leadership Council calling for a carbon tax. We're part of the United Nations Environment Program's Science Policy Business Forum. That gets us involved with many ministers of environment from countries around the world. We recently joined the new MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. MIT is a premier research university. Many key leaders are part of that, looking at how academic research can supercharge this opportunity for innovation. And then the last one, I'll just wrap up, call for code. You may be familiar with IBM's involvement in call for code, okay? The current challenge under call for code in 2021, calls for solutions targeted to climate change. So that's a diverse set of different constituents, different types of people, but we try to get involved with all of them because we learn and hopefully we contribute something along the way as well. Awesome, Wayne, thank you very much. Karim, the last 30 seconds we got here, how do companies partner with IBM if they want to connect in with the mission and the citizenship that you guys are doing? How do they bring that to their company? And real quick, give us a quick overview. Well, you know, it's really quite simple. Many of these clients are already clients of ours, we're engaging with them in the marketplace today, right? Trying to make sure we understand their needs, trying to ensure that we tune what we've got to offer, both in terms of product and consulting services with our GBS brethren, you know, to meet their needs. Linking that in as well to IBM being in what we like to turn client zero. We're also applying these same technologies and capabilities to support IBM's efforts. And so as they engage in all these associations, seeing what IBM is doing, that also provides a way to really get started. It's really fixate on those five imperatives or needs that laid out, pick kind of a starting point and tie it to something that matters, that changes how you're doing something today. That's really the key as far as we're concerned. Karim, Wayne, thank you for your time on Sustainability, great initiative. Congratulations on the continued mission, going back to the early days of IBM and the Watson generation, continuing out in the modern era. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. Thank you, John. Okay, it's theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, host, thanks for watching.