How AT&T Stays Connected For Sustainability, featuring Shannon Thomas Carroll

Shannon Thomas Carroll, AVP of Global Environmental Sustainability at AT&T, joins the show to outline some of the numerous sustainability initiatives underway at the telecommunications giant.  Obviously, AT&T has a massive infrastructure footprint and a huge fleet of vehicles, but as Shannon explains, the company's efforts to enhance sustainability and resiliency stretch far beyond its own operations. For example, AT&T is partnering with FEMA and Argonne National Laboratory to help communities prepare for and respond to natural disasters. Through its Connected Climate Initiative, AT&T is collaborating with other organizations on a mission to eliminate a gigaton of CO2 emissions by 2035. Just like AT&T's expansive network. Shannon covers a lot of ground in this interview. Get ready to learn a lot about how AT&T is tackling sustainability.

Key highlights

Overview of AT&T's climate and sustainability goals - (2:54)
What is the biggiest piece of AT&T's carbon footprint? - (5:27)
Key steps to making early progress on Scope 1-3 goals -  (7:02)
Examples of AT&T helping large organizations increase their sustainability - (10:51)
How AT&T manages its infrastructure with an eye on sustainability - (12:24)
AT&T's role in disaster preparedness and resiliency - (16:01)
Progess report on AT&T's own sustainability goals - (18:28)
Data-driven partnership on reducing landfill waste - (20:32)
Lessons learend that can be shared across industries - (23:42)
The biggest sustainability challenge on Shannon's mind - (28:41)


More resources

Learn more about AT&T's sustainability efforts
AT&T's Connected Climate Initiative
AT&T, FEMA and Argonne National Laboratory collaborate on ClimRR

Sign up for the SmartBrief on Sustainability newsletter

Transcript

(Note: This transcript was created using artificial intelligence. It has not been edited verbatim.)

Sean McMahon  00:09

Hello everyone and welcome to the Sustainability SmartPod. I'm your host Sean McMahon. The rest of the Sustainability SmartPod gang will be back next week, but I'm parachuting in today to bring you a very special conversation I recently had with Shannon Thomas Carroll, the AVP of Global Environmental Sustainability at AT&T. You might recall we had Roman Smith on the show recently to tell us about Oscar, which is AT&T's artificial intelligence enabled recycling tool. But now it's time to hear more about AT&T's overall sustainability strategy. 

Obviously, the telecommunications giant has a massive infrastructure footprint and a huge fleet of vehicles. But as Shannon will explain, AT&T 's efforts to enhance sustainability and resiliency stretch beyond its own operations. For example, AT&T is partnering with FEMA and Argonne National Laboratory to help communities prepare for and respond to climate change. And through its Connected Climate Initiative. AT&T is collaborating with other organizations to eliminate a gigaton, yes, a gigaton of co2 emissions by 2035. In fact, just this week, cognisant announced that it was joining that initiative. So just like AT&T's network, Shannon and I cover a lot of ground in this interview. You see what I did there. There's no way I get away with a poem like that if the rest of my codes were here. But anyway, I hope you enjoy our conversation and hearing more about how AT&T is tackling sustainability. 

Real quick. If you haven't had a chance to check out last week's episode of this show featuring John mental from Deloitte. Be sure to give it a listen to learn more about some of the solutions that smart companies are using to manage the massive amounts of data related to sustainability. 

Looking ahead, we've got some great episodes coming up on this show. Next week, Karthik Ramanna, from the University of Oxford, will join us to do a deep dive on the concept of environmental liability, aka e liability. Mike Hower from Hower impact will also stop by to share his insights on how companies can more effectively communicate their sustainability initiatives. And next month, Denise Naguib from Marriott will join the show to discuss the latest sustainability trends in the hospitality sector. So yeah, there's a lot of great stuff on the way for this show. But right now, get ready to learn more about AT&T’s sustainability strategy. 

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. My guest is Shannon Thomas Carroll from AT&T. Shannon. How are you doing today?

Shannon Thomas Carroll  02:46

I am doing great. I've had some coffee, I'm ready to go.

Sean McMahon  02:50

Pie. Excellent, excellent. Nothing like low caffeine to spice up the podcast. All right. So AT&T obviously not a small company somewhat large. And so I want to start right from the top the big picture, you know, what are AT&T's overall climate and sustainability goals?

Shannon Thomas Carroll  03:07

Yeah, appreciate the question. Yeah, you may have heard of us, right, as a company. So, you know, we look at climate change in a very holistic way. You know, I think we're at the point now, where there's very few environmental sustainability issues that don't connect in some way to climate change. Our biggest goal is really to be carbon neutral by 2035. You know, that keeps very much in line with the science that says to do it by 2050. You know, we looked at how quickly we can do it, as we kind of did our research and calculations and, and our projections, we thought we could do it early. So we set that goal for 2035 goals are only as good as their credibility, right. So we underlying that goal is our science based target. Right? So we have a science based target, in line with the 1.5 degrees as well to support that carbon neutral by 2035. Those are the ones that kind of think about every single day, there's a couple of other kind of big hitters for us as well. One of them is we're on climate resiliency, right? So we have a pretty significant network infrastructure in the ground that is susceptible to severe weather events. So being climate resilience, being having a climate resilient network, one that can take severe weather events and continue to be operational. It's really important, not just for us, right, but the customers that we serve. When you think about severe weather events, the first thing people do is other than protect themselves, their own personal safety. They pick up their phone and they want to let people know Hey, I'm okay where they want to check on their loved ones to see if they're okay. So we take that that resiliency position very, very seriously as well. A couple other things is to kind of round it out to talk about carbon neutral for us. It's important you got to you got to take care of the emissions in your own backyard so to speak, but we don't want to go beyond that. We actually have a commitment to reduce our customer emissions, our business customer emissions by one giga ton between now and 2020 35 as well. That is a significant goal to reduce got that much emissions, but we're very lucky, we're in a position in the value chain that allows us to help our business customers reduce their own emissions because others have carbon neutral netzero growth as well. So we want to support them. And then waste is never lost on us, right? That's a big one. Keeping waste out of landfills, is something we think about on a daily basis. And we have goals around that as well.

Sean McMahon  05:22

Okay, I want to circle back to what you said about the infrastructure and the resiliency piece a little bit later. But right now, what is the biggest piece of your carbon footprint?

Shannon Thomas Carroll  05:30

Well, when we look at our carbon neutral goal that covers our operational footprint, our scope one and scope two, the biggest component of that, no one's surprised would be is our scope to just purchase electricity for those who aren't familiar scope to so you know, it takes a lot of electricity running network, there's things that we do every single day that I'm sure folks can imagine, like energy efficiency, right, making sure we're the most energy efficient network possible is, is again, there's entire teams dedicated to making that happen. The benefit of that right is, and I think we should never shy away from this, there's a business benefit to, right, if you use less fuel, that's less cost, the company really likes and appreciates that if we can drive down that fuel uses as well and reduce our emissions. And that's great, right in terms of global emissions and our carbon neutral goal, a big part of that, for us beyond energy efficiency is going to be renewable energy, I'm very proud to say that AT&T's number six on the EPA green power purchaser list, that's an important list because you only get credit for the renewable energy that you actually generate. And we've been on this journey around renewable energy for about five years, and to have very little renewable energy. Five years later, being number six on that list is great. And I feel really good about that. As a company, we'll continue to look for renewable energy as we go forward. The second biggest component is really our fleet operations, we have a significant fleet that has to go out and serve our customers maintain the network. And we're in the transition right now, right of transitioning our fleet to low emission vehicles. And so there's gonna be a lot of work and emphasis on that as well.

Sean McMahon  07:03

Okay, so it sounds like you're making some progress already. Tackling scope, one, skip two and things like that. So tell me a little bit more about that. Like, what were some of the key steps you took to make that early progress? You know, before we even kind of talked about the long term goals,

Shannon Thomas Carroll  07:14

the early progress, so we report out every single year, not only our own sustainability summary, but report out of multiple frameworks. And we also because we have a science based target, we have to report on that annually as well. So very happy to report you know, we're ahead of target on that our goal is reduced our scope one scope two by 65%. By 2030, we're 41.2% of the way there. So actually a little bit ahead of schedule, in terms of how we do that is really one thing we just kind of talked about a little bit, which is finding renewable energy deals that make sense for the company, that again, is going to be a big part of it. So we've been able to sign multiple deals, a lot of those, both wind and solar deals are now operational. And so that renewable energy is being generated, right. And so every every megawatt of renewable energy that's generated allows us to reduce our own emissions by one megawatt as well. So that's, that's a really important one for us. You know, as we talk about energy efficiency, it's really about taking what we do well, which is connectivity, right, and then taking advantage of all the technology that's out there. So we do that internally. And then we also try to partner with our customers to do that externally. What I mean by that is most of us are now very familiar with the internet of things right? And keep it simple, right? It's all about putting connected sensors on different devices. Think of an H back unit, heating and air conditioning unit. Those can be energy intensive, especially if you're powering the entire building. And you may have multiple H back units. So having sensors on something like that allows AT&T First and foremost, as we look at our internal emission reduction efforts, it allows us to make sure they're running optimally in real time, right. So as if something is not running the way it should, you know, we have IoT sensors, our connectivity, we have a dashboard that we look at the 1000s of devices. And if something's not running, right, we can go make a correction right there. Because if it's not running optimally, that means it's using more energy nine times out of 10. If it's using more energy, the byproduct of that is going to be more emissions. You know, we've went all in right on that kind of technology and combining with our connectivity. And then as I referenced the biggest time goal earlier, it's the same concept, right? It's working with customers on what we call smart climate solutions, which a lot of it is IoT connected sensors and a wide array of things. It could be water efficiency, it could be energy efficiency. So it's just taking advantage of the thing that we do best connectivity, and the best technology out there and maximizing efficiency and operations. The other thing for us which is helped us significantly achieve or be on track to achieve both our carbon neutral ScienceBase target is the fleet transition, and that's a big one for us. So as we're in To retire vehicles that use a little more fuel and replace them where we can with whether it's a hybrid or electric vehicle, that's extraordinarily helpful as well. And even times that there's not an Eevee, or a truly low emission vehicle available think of bucket truck, right? We're still working. That's, that's a market that still needs to develop his skinny, more efficient vehicles, right? Even if not easy. So and because everything we do is at scale. Once we start making these improvements, they actually have a really significant impact.

Sean McMahon  10:31

So are you telling me that Tesla hasn't rolled out an EV bucket truck yet? Not that I'm aware of?

Shannon Thomas Carroll  10:36

Not that I'm aware?

Sean McMahon  10:38

Come on Elon, get on that. So yeah, I love all the examples you give about how IoT is helping leverage, AT&T has connectivity to help people reduce their emissions. So I mean, I think about that around the house, right? A lot of just home appliances have that. But do you have any examples where like, kind of maybe corporate customers have been able to kind of take that and really powered up and use some of your offerings to reach their own goals that they then have to turn around and report? Yeah, we have

Shannon Thomas Carroll  11:03

a few examples, I'd highly recommend just because they're very proud. We have a lot of examples, a lot of case studies that we make publicly available. I think transparency is the key to everything when it comes to sustainability reporting. So the one or two examples I'll give you, there's actually many, many more examples on our website. att.com/csr. So when example we did a case study on and it's really, we talked about the missions, and I think we all get that intuitively. But this one's really cool, because we're working with farmers to manage water resources and consumption,

Sean McMahon  11:34

I gotta jump in. And that's a hot topic right now. And there's a deal being done in the Southwest for the Colorado River. So.

Shannon Thomas Carroll  11:40

So yeah, water is an issue, right. So if we can help farmers use less water, right, and still do what they have to do to be successful, that's a great thing and think about the sensor in the ground, right? Essentially, that's able to actually see what the soil moisture is, for example, I think, combined that with what the 10 day forecast is going to be, is there going to be rains are not going to be rain, because if it's a little bit dry the soil, but there's gonna be rain in two days, you don't have to run your irrigation. So those are the type of things or even if it's not going to rain for a while, but the soil is retained its moisture. These are real life examples, right of resource efficiency, whether it's energy or water. And, you know, we're very fortunate that we get to play significant role in helping our customers achieve their their own environmental goals and needs.

Sean McMahon  12:25

Okay, so then shifting a little bit back to what you talked about with the infrastructure. Obviously, an organization like AT&T has a massive amount of infrastructure, right to power the network and keep everything online. So how does sustainability tie into how you manage and maintain that infrastructure?

Shannon Thomas Carroll  12:39

So when you think about sustainability in this context of the larger umbrella, and this will be climate change, right? So there's always two sides of the coin, like there's the mitigation side is how do you reduce your emissions? And we've talked a lot about that. And the other side of that is how do you prepare for the physical impacts of climate change that are happening today and will continue to happen in the future. And so for us, you know, as we started on this journey, you know, this is going back all the way to 2016 ish. As we put out of a full fledge environmental sustainability and climate change program together, we realized we had a lot of expertise at ATC, but we were not including the climate scientists, environmental scientists. So the first thing we did is like, Hey, can we go get some really good climate data, and then figure out what we can do with that data? We went out to the public domain at that time, there's a lot of public data available. It was at least at that time, something like, here's a data point that covers 100 kilometers, or here's a data point that covers a region, asking a network engineer to move a piece of equipment or fortify a piece of equipment, because you have one data point for 100 kilometers as a nonstarter. So we realized that we had to get better climate data in terms of the resolution, more actionable, what we call neighborhood level data. So we started working with Argonne National Labs. They do a lot of the climate modeling for the US government. They have a North America specific climate model, their best projection. So yeah, that's really important that we are an international company, but most of our footprint is domestically in the United States. So we worked with them for a couple of years to get that actionable data. And what I mean by that, so just to give the comparison, from the 100 Kilometer perspective of sea level rise, we have now down to a few meters, right for for ailing flooding, is down to a few meters. Sorry,

Sean McMahon  14:27

did you say a few meters? Right,

Shannon Thomas Carroll  14:29

it can be right in certain areas that the data is that good on coastal flooding, excuse me on inland flooding, it's 200 meters, right? So which is actually really, really good when you have a data point that's within two football fields. Because what that does then is it lets our network engineers know, like, hey, if we have some infrastructure in the ground today, that maybe didn't flood historically, but the projections are pretty clear that it's going to flood in the future. You don't have to actually tear everything out and move it right. You can take you know different strategies, you know resiliency strategies, adaptation strategies. An example of that is, if you have backup power on a on a cell tower on ground level, where your projections are showing three feet of flooding, you can put a platform there, right, relatively cost effective, move that backup pattern up on that platform, and you really solve the issue, it could be on a central office, where even if it's not, you know, more dramatic, like a six feet of flooding, there's gonna be 18 inches of flooding. But that central office has a lot of equipment on the ground level. And you can't move a central office. So what do you do you put a floodgate there. So these are the type of actionable things that we've been working on with our network teams on how to fortify our network to make them more resilient for extreme weather. And the other thing that's maybe even more powerful than that is we now use it for what we call a climate risk score, when we're doing the planning, the network design and planning. So the future network that's being designed to plan now is taking into account what our climate risk scores are. So we can make sure that we you know, take the appropriate steps as we have put the new infrastructure into the ground.

Sean McMahon  16:01

Okay, a little bit earlier, you're talking about disaster preparedness and resiliency. So, so what does a TNT doing there? I mean, obviously, seems like, there's more, it seems like there's natural disasters, but every other week these days, so So what role doesAT&Tplay there and kind of helping prepare and, and also respond after the fact when something hits?

Shannon Thomas Carroll  16:18

Yeah, the preparation side of it is really what we talked about, right? And, and we actually realized that it doesn't do us any good to be resilient, right? from extreme weather events, like on our own, we need our entire value chain, we need our neighborhoods, our communities all being resilient as well. So I'll just touch base on a point on that, which is we've actually made all of our climate data publicly available, you know, the raw data itself, because we want, whether it's industries, individuals, NGOs, we want folks to have access to this actual climate data as well, because it does benefitAT&Tfor everybody to be climate resilient. And we've also recently made an announcement, we're doing a collaboration, we've done a collaboration with Argonne National Labs and FEMA, to build what we call the climate tool, the climate risk and resilience portal. And that's out there for anybody to check out as well. But the idea there is now in the public domain, and in a very sophisticated format, you can go out there and look at climate maps, look, a lot of information, what's the precipitation going to be listed heat going to be, we're going to put wildfire in there, I'm going to put additional flooding in there. So anybody right now can go to that tool with your emergency manager or just an interested citizen and look at the different climate data and how it's going to impact different parts of the United States. In terms of disaster recovery, that is more like once the severe weather event hits, we have a world class disaster recovery program. Unfortunately, we have we have a lot of experience recovering from natural disasters. So there's been a lot lots of lessons learned. So you know, for us, it's really about understanding where we're most susceptible, where our customers are, you know, making sure that we have backup generators, mobile generators, that we're fortifying equipment. So we have a very robust program on that as well. And that is our responsibility, right? It's our responsibility to our customers to a, make sure the network stays up, when there's severe weather events, but be if anything happens, to make sure we can bring in those backup generators and things of that nature to make sure the network gets back up as quickly as possible.

Sean McMahon  18:19

Okay, this is great. I mean, I gotta say, I love this conversation here. And about how not onlyAT&Tis helping customers and corporations out there, but also taking a hard look at your own performance. So what's the progress update on on, say, your scope one, scope two and things like that? I mean, everyone sets a goal, and they talk about these distinct goals, you know, 2030 2035 2050, but how far along the path are you?

Shannon Thomas Carroll  18:40

Yeah. So again, I think the important thing to point out is, it's one thing to set a goal, and then what do you do, I can say, with all confidence that AT&T does not set a goal that we don't fully to achieve. That's just not the way that we operate. So to do that, you know, not only is important to set the goal, but as I think I mentioned earlier, we report every single year, our progress towards goals, we actually report out through multiple formats that people in this area are going to be familiar with. But there's tcfd or SASB, or GRI or CDP are the alphabet soup, that is sustainability reporting. But they all play an important role in what they do. We also have our own sustainability summary annual that we put out every single year. But just to give you a couple of data points that I wish I could say had off the top of my head, but I am looking at some data points here. So for his I can be really impressive. I'll just rattle them off. But I think I mentioned you know, for our ScienceBase goal, our goal is to reduce our emissions by 65%. By 2030. We reduce our emissions 41.2%. So we're ahead of target on that. Really proud of that, in terms of our scope one and scope two progress towards our carbon neutral goal that's largely in line and same, pretty much the same numbers as our ScienceBase target, as you can imagine, right? Just over 40% progress towards that particular goal as well. And then our gigaton goal, you know, that's a big one. And we have till 2035. And we're, we actually just started reporting on this two years ago. So we're approximately 15% of attainment. So we have some ways to go. However, we're right on track. Right. So that's a relatively new goal. So you know, when I say 40%, in other areas, or 50%, the idea there is though the gigaton goal is a relatively new goal, and we're actually right on track to where we need to be, and probably the area that we've experienced the most success. And some of this right is we're talking about earlier, like how do you use your connectivity? How do you use or how do we use our connectivity and technology to drive results. Here's an example our waste goal is to reduce our waste by 30%. By I believe it's 2025. I'll recheck that day for you. But we're actually already at 27.9%. So we're they had a schedule on that. And a lot of the reason for that is because we're putting sensors on, you know, the bins, the waistband, the big the giant containers that are outside of a building. So before, you know, say five years ago, we'd have our wastewater come by and just pick it up regularly, right on a particular schedule. Now, they only come by to pick it up, when it's, you know, when it's actually full. And the reason why that's important, it allows us to get better data, right on how much waste is actually going to landfill. So you can actually measure that data. And so doing all these estimates that we used to do, and then obviously, there's lots of practical things you can do to help that waste generation. For example, at our at our headquarters here in Dallas with AT&T, we have a technology we use called Oscar and it's an AI technology that essentially allows our employees to walk up to the to the cafeteria areas, to the trash bins, the waist bands, they show a little camera there, exactly what they're going to throw away, and it tells them to put it in recycle compost or landfill. So those are like some tangible things that we're doing to meet those goals.

Sean McMahon  22:02

With regard to Oscar, I did have a conversation with your colleague, Roman Smith about that. And that was pretty cool. So listeners of the show might be familiar with that. If not, you can go back and check that out on a previous episode. I want to get back to you said about you know, the the waste pickup. So if I understand you correctly, you've got sensors on your I guess dumpsters. And instead of having a weekly pickup or whatever scheduled from your, you know, waste management, whoever it is, they only show up or you can you call them or whatever, when it's full. And so first of all, I'm understanding that correctly.

Shannon Thomas Carroll  22:31

Yeah. So this is something that we recently launched over the last couple of years. We it's not yet everywhere, right? But it's in enough places that it's having a meaningful impact. And so like anything that starts out as a pilot, right, and you try it at a certain set of locations, and you see if it proves out, and this is one that very much proved out. And again, the idea here is if somebody's come in, you know, just just use numbers, as an example, if your waist providers coming by once every two weeks, and they're empty, and you're assuming that's a full band, right. So as you're making your waist calculations, gathering your data you accommodate for that, the cow sensor on there actually says when the beam is full, and now they've come every three weeks, that actually gives you more tangible, better data, as you're reporting out against, you know, not only your baseline, but your goal. So it really is a game changer.

Sean McMahon  23:21

Yeah, I gotta think it also, as far as the waste management collection goes, they're not wasting fuel on sending a truck for a half empty dumpster. So that's incredible. I mean, I can just imagine that kind of even spanning out to broadly across corporations, but also at the residential level. So anyway, cool. I'm gonna kind of dig into that technology a little more. All right. So we've talked a lot about what AT&T has been doing. Obviously, every company has different challenges, depending on the sector they're in or what kind of infrastructure they have, and things like that. But one of the goals of the show is to kind of have folks like you on and kind of talk about what you're doing and what's working and what's not still going to be shared. Because despite all these differences within organizations, there's a lot of common challenges. So let's talk about that. When it comes to these tactics that you're deploying, you know, to meet your goals. I want to talk about what's working and what's not. But first, we'll start with what's working, what have been some of the key things you've been able to roll out that really kind of supercharged your efforts that you think might be applicable to other businesses.

Shannon Thomas Carroll  24:16

Sure, as you can imagine, Sean, it's it's all green lights, right? It's it's all roses, is everything successful? There's no challenges at all. I say that because as you asked that question, you know, what's successful? And also what are the challenges? They kind of go hand in hand? And then we do an example why that? I think the thing that we've been most successful in is our internal stakeholders. Right? That was also one of our greatest challenges. Because as you look at a corporation as large as AT&T and all the various business units, whether that's fleet whether that's finance, whether that's supply chain, whether that's network, and there's all different flavors within each of those groups as well. their day to day job is not sustainability. Hard jobs, embrace sustainability into their day to day jobs and make sure that they have an understanding of why that's important actually why it's meaningful, impactful for the business, and makes a difference. So as you can imagine, when you go out on this education journey, not everybody is familiar with climate change, not everybody is familiar with the various environmental sustainability topics. And they're not always they don't always intuitively understand what the connection is to the business. Right. So that is a challenge and a heavy lift. But I point to all of our success really, as a company, is because of how we've been able to educate not only our officers, but our field folks as well on what we're doing, how it impacts them, how it impacts, you know, the company, how it helps them achieve their own goals, right, that they're trying to work on as a company as well. Because at the end, we have an energy team that lives within the network group, their whole goal, right is to be as efficient as possible with energy to drive costs out of the business, where we can work with them, and offer on occasion, different technologies or different solutions that they may not have considered, you know, the first go round, and they're looking at this, you know, everybody wins with that, right? So I attribute almost all of our success to the fact that we've been really successful. With stakeholder in this internally in the business, it also helps to have the best environmental sustainability team around which I like to say that we have, because you can't really quantify passion all the time. And when you have a team, like we do on the environmental sustainability team, that not only has passion for this, but understands the business, right? And why is actually important to the business. And you can combine those two things. You know, that's just a recipe for success. So, you know, a lot of people know the business, a lot of people are passionate about environmental issues. But finding people that are highly capable in both those areas can be really tricky and takes time. But that's another area where we've been very successful. So I offer those as a couple of examples.

Sean McMahon  27:00

Well, that sounds like some great advice on you know, getting buy in from internal stakeholders is something that folks in your position or their organizations can do. Are there any things out there that you've tried that maybe were only a half success are really kind of missed the mark,

Shannon Thomas Carroll  27:12

I think the best example I can give is what's or it's almost always a recipe to not succeed is trying to do it alone. Right. And we've we've learned our lesson a little bit early on, what I mean by that is, you know, when you're on your journey, even if you're a company as large as ATT, and you have a lot of resources, right, the good, the good part about that is we can vet pilots, we can vet programs to make sure they're going to be as successful as possible. But when you're just beginning your journey, the temptation is to try to figure it all out, because nobody knows your business, like you know, your business. And so I think that's what I would caution folks against the most, which is trying to do it alone or feeling like you have to do it alone. There are so many good industry groups out there, there's, this is an area where collaboration is key. We all compete in different things at different times. But you know, when it comes to environmental sustainability, climate change, like collaboration is what makes all this happen. So reaching out to your industry reaching out to industry groups, you know, reaching out to organizations that do this day in and day out, and not necessarily consultants, although consultants are great. There's lots of groups, for example, interesting, renewable energy, there's a clean energy buyers Alliance, right? If you're interested in doing more on EVs, there's a there's Stiva, right, which is the Evie equivalent of that. So there are industry groups that'll that'll help you start that journey. So just don't do it alone. Because it is almost never successful if you do

Sean McMahon  28:39

already have. Yeah, that definitely sounds like some good advice. And so that one of the questions I like to ask folks for this show is what one thing occupies the most room in your brain when you're going about your daily job. I mean, for example, Joe Blitzstein at American Airlines, she was like shot, it's jet fuel. Like that's the thing we got to reduce the most Liliana Esposito from Wendy's food supply. Right. So those are you know, I would say obvious, but yeah, they make sense for those folks in those positions. What is it for you and 18 t, what's the one thing that Shannon Carroll spends most time thinking about?

Shannon Thomas Carroll  29:13

So there's a lot of shared space in my brain on different things, you know, but kind of day to day that the thing that I think about a lot is really the energy. Right? So when you look at the amount of energy that we use, and our network continues to grow data, you know, people want more data. So you have to think about how are we going to provide more data using less energy? There's a lot of things that have to go right from a market perspective to allow you to do that as well. So just long term thinking about, you know, the best most viable energy solutions, you know, whether it's, we've done a large a lot of large scale renewable energy deals, often called virtual power purchase agreements, but looking beyond that to community solar, so I think about energy a lot and all forms or fashion houses The related to that is, is the missions, right? The missions that we're trying to reduce not only as a company, but for our customers, right? You know, we're just scratching the surface on this, you know, we have a suite of smart climate change solutions that we're making really good progress on. But we all know internally, and I think our customers note as well, like there's a bigger role to play there. It's really hard to think about a future where connectivity doesn't play a part where IoT doesn't play a part, you know, pretty much monitored and recorded on everything in real time. So that's something I spent a lot of time thinking about as well.

Sean McMahon  30:32

All right, well, hey, Shannon, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate all your insights and learning more about what AT&T is up to and the sustainability space. So thank you for your time today. Thanks, Sean. All right, everyone. Well, that's our show for today. Thank you all for listening. And if you haven't already, please subscribe or follow this show on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And as always, please be sure to share it with your friends and colleagues. Have a great day.