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Open Comments S2: Ep. 11 - The Power of IT Sustainability, AI, and Energy for a Resilient Future, with Abhijit Sunil

• The Open Group • Season 2 • Episode 11

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AI is racing ahead, and the power bill is coming due. We sit down with Forrester Senior Analyst Abhijit Sunil to unpack how energy, climate risk, and circularity now shape every serious IT roadmap—from where to place AI workloads to how to buy, refresh, and retire hardware without blowing the grid or the budget.

We trace key signals from New York Climate Week: services firms positioning tech as a decarbonization catalyst, sustainability platforms moving beyond compliance into operational decision‑making, and climate risk analytics becoming essential for business continuity. Abhijit breaks down why fragmented regulations—CSRD changes in Europe, climate disclosures in California, and emerging rules across APAC—demand better data governance, auditability, and a clear strategy for supplier requests. We dig into the practical: mapping physical and transition risks across IT estates, modeling energy resilience and long‑term capacity, and using renewable energy deals and time‑bound incentives to stabilize costs.

The heart of the conversation is a tough trade‑off many teams face today: upgrade to more efficient systems or extend existing assets to avoid embodied carbon. We offer a simple way to decide—total carbon of ownership—balancing embodied emissions, operational efficiency, grid mix, utilization, and end‑of‑life outcomes. Expect actionable insights on liquid cooling and PUE, AI workload placement across cloud and hybrid, product carbon footprint methods, and how take‑back programs can turn waste into value. We also spotlight the human side: cross‑training architects in lifecycle assessment, giving sustainability leaders fluency in cloud and chips, and making climate risk a standard gate in architecture decisions.

If you’re steering AI adoption, optimizing data centers, or preparing for sustainability audits, you’ll leave with a sharper plan and the language to win support across finance, facilities, and procurement. 

Revisit our previous episode with Abhijit (from Season 1) here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2112772/episodes/13787229-open-comments-episode-14-unleashing-the-power-of-it-sustainability-a-dialogue-with-abhijit-sunil

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SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome back to Open Comments. With me, Ash. Today we are joined by Abhijit Sunil, Senior Analyst for Forester Research Inc., who joined us previously in the first season of Open Comments. Abhijit, for those that who may not be familiar with what you do or who haven't listened to the previous episode that we did with you, please can you give a little bit of a summary about what you do and what you've been up to recently? Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01:

My pleasure. Thank you everyone for joining. Thank you very much, Ashish, for having me again on the podcast. It's been an interesting time in sustainability, and I work in sustainability for forester research, where I cover sustainability management, software solutions and strategy for organizations, climate risk, analytics, and IT sustainability, which encompasses looking at how AI has been influencing data centers and how enterprise architects have been including sustainability metrics within various aspects of their day-to-day, including in procurement to optimization across the IT stack. All of these new trends around AI, the energy consumption, all of which has been really something to watch for and note across the industry. So I work as a senior analyst with forest research and I cover these topics. I publish reports, I do in-depth research using multiple ways in which I gather insights from the market. And as part of our work, we also do advisory and consulting engagements too.

SPEAKER_00:

Last time we spoke about the foundations of IT sustainability. Before we dive into the revisit of that previous episode, please can you tell us a little bit about how it was for you to attend the New York Climate Week and any insights you got from that event, please?

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. New York Climate Week, which is a premier event in sustainability where many organizations come together into New York's city and in neighboring towns and discuss and bring together various experts, uh, has been really interesting to observe this year as well. When we attended uh from Forrester, I had the chance to talk to some of the IT sustainability services firms, uh, some of the management consultants who are leading in this area, including with research, then sustainability management software vendors such as Watershed, and also with some of the climate risk analytics software vendors. We wrote about this in a blog at Forrester, but when I had looked at the various vendors and what their focuses had been, there's been some interesting trends. So New York Climate Week this year had been amongst the largest with more than 100,000 participants across various decision makers, policy makers, even NGOs and activists and business leaders primarily as well, who were looking at what are some of the practical aspects of sustainability investments. So from the IT services firms who were looking particularly at the various ways in which enterprise architecture can be decarbonized, we heard some really interesting aspects around how they're focused on emerging technologies like AI, not surprisingly. So IT services firms primarily position technology as a catalyst for sustainability. So they not only look at how IT is enabling sustainability, but also how the various uh aspects around energy consumption and growth in AI impacts sustainability initiatives. So IT services firms such as Cap Gemini, Accenture, MTT Data, and various others are in the forefront of looking at the IT estate of ITS clients they work with and helping them decarbonize and also putting into place various emerging technology use cases like leveraging AI for enabling sustainability. Then with management consultants, they address many aspects of these decarbonization efforts with their clients, but at the same time, they also stress about various larger uh transition, energy transition efforts and energy management efforts such as grid modernization or addressing labor shortages. And for example, through their research organizations, they address the larger investment areas that are needed in and around sustainability and climate. And then sustainability management software vectors, like Watershared, among others, like Workiva, they've all been talking a lot about the ways in which the tools and solutions in the space that they offer can be leveraged not only for compliance but also as a business driver. So somebody within one of their clients can leverage such solutions for not just automating their reporting, but at the same time also for making sure they are addressing the decarbonization levers possible, giving the right amount of data for IT leaders and other leaders like risk compliance procurement leaders to take action on sustainability and even for optimization within their organizations. So we saw some of uh the various clients they work with actually come down to New York and talk about the efforts that they're jointly doing, including at product carbon footprint calculations, which are really essential for even automakers and uh pharmaceutical companies to every industry that we can think of now. And then finally, a group of thought and thought leadership was around plan-bedwisk analytics. So, as we have been observing over the past several months, unfortunate physical risk uh events have triggered massive losses across the globe, including here in the US, in the West Coast, in Texas, with tragic events that has been fatal in many cases. And we saw a lot of organizations actually trying to address this by implementing risk analytics solutions where they are able to look into the future and double-click into what are some of the immediate risks in front of them that are posed by weather events that are real-time to long-term climate risk scenario modeling where they want to look at how the changing hazards uh associated with physical risk can actually impact their business continuity or supply chain events. So we saw a lot of activity around there too.

SPEAKER_00:

That's really interesting. Do you think as well that this type of event is something that you may, you know, uh revisit in the future or is something to keep a close eye on in terms of you know insights that you receive from the event too?

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. In fact, I had written a blog about how we expect or hopefully will see more from such an event in the future. So, where do we go from here? So we heard from some of the various service providers and others around the thought leaders around climate risk and the various tools, solutions available in the market for compliance and reporting. But my wish list for next year is that we'll have a few things, or we should have a few things that we emphasize even further on. Number one, I would say, is even more of an emphasis on climate risk. So one of my hopes is around the ability for all functions within an organization to actively understand the risks posed by climate, be it physical or transition risk. So physical risks are risks that are posed by various climate-related hazards, weather-related events, transition risks, which are highly contextual and specific, which are brought forth by policies, etc., are also very important for companies to measure and track and then plan accordingly. So these risks definitely need to be evaluated and put into a spotlight, where be it within an IT function, where an IT leader should be looking at how this will impact their supply chain and for business continuity, etc. So, as an example, whether chips will be available for some of the some of the um uh machines to automobiles to other things that they may be making, to how their supply chain looks like. So uh from an IT leader to somebody who works in procurement to somebody who works in risk itself, or even in capacity planning, and even for building new data centers. So, as an example, if somebody is planning to build AI data centers or build more capability in uh in-house on premises, then where do we build all of that? We would rather have these capabilities that we built last a long, long time than actually plan for the immediate future and then realize that we are susceptible to flooding or some hazards like that from the physical environment. So evaluating climate risk is is extremely critical and I think will be a direct impact on the top and bottom line of companies. It actually has a lot of returns on investment in the long term. The second thing that I'm hoping for is to have an even more of an emphasis on life cycle assessments and product carbon footprint calculations. Because ultimately the ability to look deeper into how products are sustainable and circular economy of the various offerings and products we have is actually going to be a really big part of decarbonizing the IT stack. So, therefore, I'm hoping that we'll have more conversations into the methodologies, how do we collect data and sector-specific guidance around product carbon footprint calculations and lifecycle assessments. And then, of course, the third thing is about AI. Now, we had already heard a lot about AI and how it impacts sustainability and however the ability to understand how AI impacts even the carbon footprint reporting processes and workflows is still maturing. We are hearing from various auditing organizations, for example, about how they are both leveraging AI, but at the same time advising clients about how they would like the clients to use AI and leverage AI in the right manner so that they don't create black holes within their auditing processes that will now necessitate more time that the auditor will need to spend to make sure that the level of assurance that the client needs is still in place. So those are all the interesting themes around AI that I think we'll hear really a lot more about. And then finally, I'll say the emphasis on renewable energy projects and what are the various ways in which we can help aid the energy transition. Now, renewable energy and clean energy, it's not a catch-all bucket that may be a silver bullet. However, there are many ways in which the energy management of an organization can be optimized and ways in which organizations can take advantage of some of the way uh some of the uh tax benefits that exist in the market now. And many of these types of investments are time-bound and need to be made sooner than later. So, therefore, I would really like to see more advisory around some of those types of um renewable energy or clean energy projects, what they all mean, what are some of the more sustainable projects, and how are we uh able to advise clients and leaders being able to make decisions based on that advisory on how to actually save costs even by having long-term agreements and the right types of investments. So these are some of the trends that that I'm watching very closely, and I'm hopeful that as we advance and go into the next year, we'll see and hear more about.

SPEAKER_00:

That's great. Now, as we dive back into the previous episode that we recorded with you as serving as a revisit, can you tell us a little bit about an update on when you talked about architects embedding carbon impact into decisions? How do you see EA evolving? Is sustainability now treated like security or compliance or still more of an afterthought? Touching on the previous episode.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, it's a very interesting time around sustainability, as I mentioned in the very beginning, because a lot of organizations have begun to view sustainability as optimization efforts, which is very encouraging to see. We have been hearing a lot from IT leaders and others about how for the advancement of AI and for all of the use cases that they would like AI to help with, they need to address various challenges, including how much energy AI consumes, where they run these workloads, can they work with a public cloud vendor, or is the pendulum swing swinging back even to be a hybrid model better so that they can leverage AI even better? And the end-user devices that they would need, like AI PCs and laptops that their employees may actually need, these are all interesting themes that leaders are thinking about. And particularly within the IT stack, this is an exciting time now where a lot of activity around emerging technologies have pushed companies to think about these optimization efforts. So we are seeing definitely a movement from IT leaders seeing sustainability as something that their chief sustainability officer told them to look at or have had some incentive within their within their goals for the year to look into, to actually being essential and a critical part of how they can enable the AI wave that many companies actually now face. So these are all really interesting aspects that has pushed the IT leader to be more aware of the sustainability impact, the energy impact of uh what the what decisions they make, etc. And this also includes circularity and the product lifecycle assessments or carbon calculations of various products they manufacture, even that I mentioned about earlier, which is why I mentioned that. We'll hope to see more discussion around that, more discussions around the methodologies that we can use for product carbon footprint calculations. But this is certainly an interesting space to watch. I am it I'm more and more involved in circularity uh now than ever before in discussing these themes with some of the largest vendors, IT vendors in the market, and also with clients, especially in industries like financial services. So that is one. On the other hand, is the landscape around various compliance and reporting frameworks. So we had seen how CSRD in Europe had come with a full force, however, then actually lose some of its teeth with the omnibus package. But some of the leaders I talked to are actually relieved by some of these pushbacks. And at the same time, there are many who said that they were disappointed that these uh regulations will not have the rigor that they were hoping to have. So, for leaders who were relieved by this, you know, even though they were getting prepared for CSRD reporting, they had mentioned that they would rather take the extra time that they have on their uh in their hands now to actually be better prepared to look deeper at the decarbonization levers possible, etc. And we heard from a lot of the solutions and the services that were being offered in the space about how they were betting on CSRD. So they are naturally looking closely at how the regulations are evolving so that they can actually help their clients more. But regulations are getting more fragmented. We are seeing regulations in California, we are seeing regulations in other parts of the world, and therefore more so than before. Contrary to some of the themes that we would have ideally hoped for, which would have been that we'll see one unified reporting structure across the world where, or in various regions at least, where we will have very transparent ways in which we know what to calculate, the methodologies to use, etc. So, contrary to that, now we are seeing more fragmentation of various uh reporting and um compliance-related uh laws around sustainability. That also means that every every leader, be it within IT, in the technology sector or otherwise, will now need to be aware of various themes that are that are part of the what they need to be aware of to be uh compliant. As an example, extended producer responsibility in the US, where a lot of the decisions around packaging and materials that leaders might decide to use will play a role. The regulations in California, where leaders will actually have to include climate risk-related calculations and teams in that reporting, whereas in Europe, uh they will have to look at the ways in which they can comply with CSRD in the form where it exists even now, and across the world, including in South Asia, uh, Australia, Singapore, and other areas where they will really need to be aware of these different uh different regulatory needs that will impact their business. So, as an IT leader, I would see a few trends to summarize what I said. One is that we are moving more towards understanding how energy resilience and right strategy of data centers, etc., is very important. So, therefore, I need to really look into the long-term uh risk planning, long-term energy planning, and how I work together with some of the vendors to make sure that I'm not really looking at infinite energy uh increase into the future as my AI workloads and this phase kind of continues to grow. Then secondly, I would be looking deeper into circular economy and how I can be while sustaining my corporate growth around emerging technologies, also make sure that I'm not impacting the company in adverse ways by seeking infinite resources as well. And then thirdly, I'll be looking at the ways in which uh I would be impacted by fragmented regulations across the globe. For example, in the US too, with multiple regulations around circular economy to various states, and globally, if I have a global footprint, how are my suppliers going to get impacted by some of these regulations and what data will they be eventually seeking from me so that they can be compliant? These are all themes that uh leaders cannot ignore anymore.

SPEAKER_00:

And referring back to data centers, so data centers, cloud, and user devices, where do you see the biggest carbon hotspots today? And are organizations getting sharper at identifying their biggest IT contributors? And I know you just touched on that briefly in the previous answer just now.

SPEAKER_01:

Very good question, um, Ashish, about how whether companies are actually getting sharper at measuring some of this. This is an interesting interesting theme. Uh, definitely AI is again the central protagonist here with in all of the areas you mentioned about in data centers, cloud, software, end user devices. One central theme that rings loud and clear across the globe is around the energy consumption of um of AI and the and and emerging technologies generally. Uh but what we had observed uh and the International Energy Agency had published on this was that the theater center energy consumption as a final electricity demand for the entire world had remained more or less plateaued over uh the past one decade, like from 2010 onwards to the beginning of this decade. But then now with AI, the energy consumption is rapidly rising as a share of the final electricity and demand of the world. And in many regions, there are hot spots where energy demand within that grid is that as a share that goes into data centers is a very large percentage of the entire electricity available in that grid that that others, including for heating homes, are really need out of the out of the grid. So this is definitely a big hotspot of discussion. Then the other theme is around circularity. I think that the organizations, the vendors who will get circularity right, will have a rapid advantage in the market, primarily because we are looking at, like I mentioned previously, a landscape where IT leaders are more cognizant about the ways in which they can upgrade, optimize more. IT cannot be an infinite source for uh seeking more budget or for creating more waste or the single place where we will see uh rapid advancements and or so something that enables AI use cases, but at the same time also creates much more waste in all types of resources, not only physical waste and e-waste, but also in budgets. So what we are hearing a lot from various IT leaders, the tech sector across the board is uh a focus on circularity. In fact, at Forester we had written about how circular economy is becoming the new NEM Zero in terms of how organizations are using it for commitments. That means that there are more organizations now who are talking about circularity commitments, such as the percentage of renewable um uh energy to the percentage of recycled materials in their products, more so than ever before. So we will see more offerings there, and I think that that's one other area, a hotspot within the entire IT landscape and sustainability that will continue to grow and the product lifecycle assessments and how we can better our understanding of various methodologies to uh to calculate product cover footprints is a significant part of this as well.

SPEAKER_00:

Perfect. Um moving on to balancing efficiency versus reuse decisions, there's always this trade-off upgrade to something more efficient or extend existing hardware to avoid embodied carbon. Where are companies landing today and what frameworks help with that decision as part of the sustainability initiative?

SPEAKER_01:

Trend about whether we can amortize carbon footprint on our legacy infrastructure for a little more little bit while longer, or should we actually go into investing on more efficient infrastructure has actually been skewed a little bit because of the imperative changes IT leaders need to make for AI. So AI has actually pushed many leaders to make decisions based on the needs of the organization, and that is that is one reason why to offset or to balance that we are seeing a lot more investments or a lot more chapter and topic on circularity and recycle recyclability, etc. So, one way in which I had explained this to uh some of my audience recently had been around how leaders can actually look at the entire um value chain of IT infrastructure, right from manufacturing to end of life. So there are two main buckets in which we can look at the emissions or sustainability aspects of any decision making like that, and including the data center infrastructure or with end user devices. One is about embodied carbon and the other is operational emissions, and then in within embodied carbon are the emissions that come from manufacturing supply chain, both upstream and downstream, and also the uh the end-of-life uh aspects of how do we treat devices and because as soon as we make the decisions on manufacturing a certain device or infrastructure in certain ways, we're also inevitably making the decision on how or where it can be decommissioned and how much of that can actually get back into the into the economy. So, as an example, if we are using materials that can once again be recycled, we have made a decision right there about how much of that can be put back into the economy. But at the same time, if the company offers tick back programs, we know where it can be taken back into as well. So these are really interesting decisions that happened right at the design phase of these products, and then optimizing for supply chain, including in the materials use for packaging. We've heard from various IT vendors and product manufacturers about how they're optimizing for some of that, including companies like Lenovo. And then finally, the operational emissions, and how do we make that more efficient? And that's where decisions around the electricity consumption, how to even leverage AI in itself for energy modeling and making the operational uh emissions and energy consumption better, more optimized, all of that come in. So, because AI and other emerging technologies have forced companies to actually to invest into newer infrastructure in many cases, balancing this whole equation about the embodied carbon and operational emissions is something that many service providers, even product of uh consumer electronics companies and others have started to actually work with their clients on. So we are we I think see more of this hopefully happen, especially as um the data centers consume more power, chips consume more power, they dissipate more heat, and that uh has to be taken away as well. So we need to balance the PUE within a data center, and how do we then work back with some of the vendors that we have been procuring infrastructure from and take back programs or others so that we can actually ensure more security and less work with less complexity in the end-of-life aspects as well?

SPEAKER_00:

And before we wrap, last time you mentioned lifelong learning. And on that note, would you say IT and sustainability professionals building the cross-disciplinary skills that they need today? Where do you think they are with that? And what advice do you have for individuals wanting to grow in that space today? Because I think lifelong learning is something, you know, it's it not only helps us grow, but I really feel like it's also it transcends to a wider team as well. I think it's so important for us to not only grow with each other, but also alongside each other as well. So, where do you think you know lifelong learning can fit into that realm of IT and sustainability?

SPEAKER_01:

It's a very interesting question, Ashish. In fact, I say that growth is a key term within. IT and sustainability. So I I mean growth in every aspect, including the ability to understand the sustainability world better for an IT leader and for the sus for the IT world better for the sustainability leader. And in our conversation today, we touched upon many key words that are sometimes mutually exclusive from each other. Climate risk versus services to software. We touched upon all of these different terms. Now if we looked at somebody who is growing in the software world, what does that have that person have to do with sustainability? Well, in fact, many of the sustainability management software solutions were were set up, found, and actually brought to the market by software leaders who knew what they were doing. And many of the decisions around energy management and including renewable energy procurement, etc., really need a solid understanding of policies too. So there are multiple areas within sustainability that impact an IT leader, including the policies, climate risk, the way in which we can we should be working with procurement as an example for take back programs, the way in which we should be working with various uh vendors who supply us with chips to data center equipment. These are all central themes that IT leaders should understand. So not only should we be aware of the various metrics that we traditionally would look at, but we should also look at metrics around efficiency and optimization that'll actually have a massive impact in the very near future. And other than that, if we are completely distracted by some of the emerging trends such as AI, and what do we really need to do for next week for ensuring that we can run something, then if we are completely or completely avoiding the decisions around energy and making sure that we have a plan for long-term sustainability, then what will happen is that we currently can scramble to find. Already we are seeing a lot of companies invest into AI more than sometimes they're able to. And we may see these investments actually not span out well if we are not thinking about how to make these sustainable as well. And in this context, when I mention sustainable, it's not about being green or it's not just about anything related to environmental uh altruistic activities. However, it is actually about resilience into the future, making sure that supply chain works well, making sure that we can continue to power our data centers going into the future and not make the data center PUV skewed so badly that we'll have to scramble to make other decisions later. That we understand what public cloud providers and co-location providers are offering us, that we understand what vendors such as Lenovo Dell, Cisco, among others, Ericsson, are all offering in the market. We we definitely need to have a better understanding of all of that, which I think is one reason why various gatherings, conferences like New York Climate Week saw so much attendance this year, you know, where lots of various personas actually came together from within the organization to discuss these challenges that they're seeing. So IT leaders I think have a stronger role to play now than ever before. And therefore, in terms of the lifelong learning that IT leaders need to have, yes, the importance of sustainability into that is only growing, in fact.

SPEAKER_00:

That's great. Thank you so much, Abijit, for joining us today on this revisit episode focusing on IT and sustainability. I hope that our listeners have enjoyed this episode as much as I have and really, you know, taken a lot of advice that you've spoken about, but also key nuggets of information as well. And we look forward to you know hearing from you in the future and to all of our listeners out there in our open comments community. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we hope to bring more episodes just like this one to you very soon. Thank you so much. Stay safe and happy listening.

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