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com, insideanalysis dot com. And now here's your host, Eric Kavanaugh.
All Right, ladies and gentlemen, Hello and welcome back once again to the
only coast to coast radio show all about the information economy. It's time for
Inside Analysis. You're truly Eric Kavanaugh here and a great lineup of guests for
you. Today. We'll be talking to Al Besmeyer. He's from a company
called via Metiici. They do master data management and data everdence and basically help
reconcile information systems, which is pretty important stuff these days. And Daz Cootie
is here with us as well from sustain three sixty and they're doing some excellent
work in guess what it is sustainability and tracking suppliers and being responsible about these
things and so we're going to talk today about practical sustainability, like how can
we do good things to help mother Earth. I think most people want to
help mother Earth. I remember the old commercial of the Indian on the side
of the road. This is like in the mid nineteen seventies and they showed
a Native America to the side of the road. He looked down their garbage
all over the side of the road, and the poor guy's crying. And
let me tell you, everyone felt bad. Okay, everyone who saw that
commercial felt bad. We're like, oh man, we got to do better
than that. And just garbage litter. It's just bad news, you know.
So we've come a long way, I think, in a whole bunch
of different ways. Quite frankly, we don't litter as much these days.
We try to recycle. I remember the old mantra reduce, reuse, recycle
good stuff. Of course, emissions are big on radar these days, and
we are concerned about what's going on with CO two. And I do want
to throw out one of my theories and get the expert opinion to these gentlemen
as we talk about this stuff, because the focus here again is practical sustainability.
So what can we do practically that can help us be better stewards of
Earth is the bottom line. And the Clean Water Act, clean Air actings
of this nature have gone a long way, folks. I mean, I
got to tell you, I'm fifty six years old, and I remember when
Lake Erie, you know, the mistake on the lake, as they joked,
it caught fire because there was so much oil and other terrible stuff.
I mean, they used to just dump everything in these rivers in these lakes.
It was just dreadful. And we've really improved on that front quite a
bit. But there are other things that come into play. At the mouth
of the Mississippi. For example, there is a dead zone which is largely
because of toxins coming from petrochemicals including nitrogen and phosphorus and other things from the
Mississippi going all the way down through the United States and then going out at
the mouth of the Mississippi zone down there. What can we do about that?
I Mean, I've had various ideas over the years. I would love
to see capital projects focus on water delivery things of that nature. Every year
the Mississippi overflows, we could set up aqueducts to deliver water across the country.
There are lots of different things we can do, and especially if caps
are melting up in Canada, we can find some way to leverage that and
be strategic about managing these resources. On of course, our federal government spends
a lot of money and did in the two thousand and eight financial crisis bailing
out the big banks. Well was that smart? I don't know. Some
people say it wasn't. I would love to see these capital improvement projects,
but I do want to throw out this theory I had about understanding the impact
of CO two because, of course, the general belief is that there's too
much CO two and that it's causing storms to get more severe. And this
is very possible. If you think about all the cars that are burning,
all the factories running, a lot of CO two is being produced. Well,
what's interesting is we do have a test case. We do have a
very clear line of demarcation when CO two levels dropped at least from human production,
and that was the COVID lockdowns. Think about we locked down all over
the world, especially here in the States. I can tell you it really
April was the peak. But April and May even into June there was a
serious lowering of CO two emissions because people just weren't driving around, and I
noticed some things that were very interesting. We actually had to go for a
medical treatment for my wife across the state, so we drove and like it
was like March, so it was in the heat of all this stuff.
It was really intense. We were in New York City when it was all
going down. No one was leaving. They were banging the pots at sunset
to thank all the medical workers. It was intense stuff. But what I
noticed for several months after that is a lot of the animals came out.
There are many more birds of prey flying around. There are all sorts of
animals coming out, and it's like they're like, all right, those humans
finally stayed inside, Let's go back and do our thing. They just came
out everywhere. So I thought that was pretty cool. But then I thought
to myself, you know, we should see some change in the atmosphere with
that dramatic a drop. The drop is estimated like eight nine percent, I
read today seventeen percent during April of twenty twenty. Well, think about it.
The Earth is on an annual cycle for weather, So if you look
one year later, what do you see around the world and guess what,
there were some changes. Texas rows for days, Houston freaked out, they
lost power, they lost water, all kind of terrible stuff happened because they
just weren't used to that kind of thing. And we've seen some strange weather
patterns too, which stands to reason. So things changed, But did they
change strategically in the way we want them to change? And I think that's
an open question going forward as we talk about CO two levels and what we
can do about it. And I did some research as well, and you
know CO two levels used to be much higher a long, long time ago,
a quarter of a billion years ago. CO two levels for estimated to
be about point five percent their point oh four percent now, so that historic
lows in terms of the evolution of Earth. What does that mean. I
don't know exactly. It was hotter back then. I'm guessing there were dinosaurs
and lots of lizards and huge plants and all kind of stuff going on.
So things have changed remarkably. But I get back to practical sustainability. So
the gentleman today can really help us understand how to do practical things in supply
chain but also in our daily habits and in our data and using our data.
So with that, let me bring in our two guests. First,
Baz Couti from Sustaining three to sixty. Welcome to inside Analysis. Tell us
a bit about yourself and what you're working on and what you think about my
crazy theory, no Erica, thank you very much for the opportunity here to
present sustain three to sixty. Been in tech about thirty eight years, kind
of split into two halves. One was working for corporates in industrial space,
so it was Gmson, Schneider and so on, and built a lot of
products which were operational focused, so reducing energy costs and energy efficiency, especially
in data centers and telcos and things like that. And then in two fifteen
I become an entrepreneur with my first startup, which is in data centers,
and we focused the use of AI and advanced techniques and using data within data
centers to reduce the environmental impact or the energy costs within data centers. And
I saw you know, up to eight to twenty five sometimes forty two percent
improvements in energy efficiency within data center. That was a great, great journey.
And then what happened is sort of another opportunity where if we can look
at products and projects like construction projects, but more at design and so how
do we use data during design phases to understand the environmental impact of our materials,
products, suppliers, supply chains and so on. And so our formed
sustained three sixty just over a couple of years ago, and then we incubated
and board the product to market stem last year and the product effectively allows customers,
manufacturers and construction companies where we're bringing their design documents and design data and
then we profile that data from an environmental impact perspective and then recommend alternatives to
reduce that. So that's for purposes sustainably. There we're seeing on average thirty
eight percent and in one case with project we did was about sixty four percent
improvement environmental impacts. So design can have my view, design and operational efficiency
put together can have a really material impact on the carbon footprint. Yeah,
and you are basically building out or you have built out a matrix or a
repository of information about suppliers all over the world. Right, and of course
you mentioned before the show that industries have their own documentation on suppliers. Of
course, clients have their own and you've been able to reconcile a lot of
this disparate data to get a strategic view of all those suppliers worldwide. Is
that right? Call us about that for a minute, and just suppliers.
It's also looking at material that since the nineties the world has been put in.
Environmental engineers and scientists around the world as built out databases which can take
a resin, for example, and for that resin, you can immediately know
the environmental impact for it, and so we can model what's called a life
cycle assessment for that resin. And so the databases out there have this information.
What's not being done is actually optimating that external data with internal data and
matching the two together. And that's what we've done, and hence the relationship
with ours organization, because it's all about master data management and standardization. Yeah,
that's a good segree to bring our in. So al Bismeyer from vam
METICI you have an MDM solution master data management, and so that allows organizations
to reconcile all of these dispirit information systems to get that strategic view. And
it sounds like this partnership between your company and sustained three sixties is really quite
complimentary. Can you tell us about that? It's very complimentary, Thanks Eric.
Basically, like Beaz, I've been in the industry for quite a long
time, not quite as long as him. I've only been in for about
thirty years. But I met Baz years and years ago as at Microsoft,
and he was at Emerson and he was doing the environmental you know, as
he mentioned the data center stuff, and our company specializes in master data management
and product information management and space out of Germany, and Germany is way ahead
and Europe in general our way ahead of the US in many respects that it
looks at environmental impacts and impacts on things that are going on with the and
so with the accession of California, I'll put that at a caveat, but
if you look at you know where Europe is and where Germany is specifically,
and none of our customers have come and said, hey, we really have
a number of issues as it pertains to our product information and the impact that
we're having within the environment. And so I reached out to Baz and said,
you know, I think there's an opportunity for us to collaborate and work
with our customers on this because your knowledge and what you bring to the table,
in concert with the data that we're working with within these organizations, we
can actually provide benefit and its real world benefit where they can do an analysis
and have an impact within the organizations and minimize their liability and also address what's
going on environmentally. And so we see this as a huge opportunity for both
of our organizations, but also more importantly for the companies that we work with,
and you know, the environment in general. It's going to have a
big impact. I would say, well, and I mean just from a
logistics perspective, and I guess I'll throw this out there that I love seeing
this effort to provide value on multiple levels because I think in the abstract,
if you just tell people to reduce their CO two emissions, it's kind of
hard to wrap your head around that and like, what am I going to
do and how is that going to really help? But when you start layering
in business value cost savings, reducing expenses thanks to this nature, now business
people go oh okay, well that's a conversation I will gladly have. And
so if I can help the environment by lowering my costs, that's good,
but also understanding where the products and services are coming from, right, so
being able to do the math understanding if I buy products from this country over
here, you know, what is the impact of bringing it all the way
over to Detroit to build something versus some product maybe in South America or somewhere
else. That's Those are fairly complex things to sort out. But once you
have a mechanism in place to do that, it's very valuable. Right now,
it is actually, and there's also another side to the equation. I
think actually what you just said is spot on. I also think though that
in what we're seeing, and we've done a few webinars and discussions with our
customers about this. If you look at the consumer consumers want to buy environmentally
friendly products. A lot of the challenges that they don't know who they environmentally
provide. The environmental product producers are other than people that self proclaim that they're
environmentally good. And so if you have a third party validation or you're actual
to actually assess the things that are within the product, then it doesn't become
as much of an abstract. So, as you mentioned, you know,
CO two is one thing, but you start looking at chemicals as another thing,
or you start looking at air quality as a thing, or you start
looking at other components in terms of reusability and life cycle. That becomes much
more tangible for a consumer. So you have two aspects. You have.
One is the internal you know, being compliant, being compliant either to your
people that are part of your supply chain in terms of your customers business the
business type of scenario. And then you also have working with the consumer and
our being able to provide a product which has a lower environmental impact, which
is validated, and then the consumer feels good about what they're saying. And
we've seen people that say, you know, consumers are willing to pay seventy
percent of consumers are willing to pay you know, a premium for products that
are environmentally compliant because intrinically they want to have less of an impact on the
environment and then want the products that they're consuming to be you know, a
little impact products, which we're seeing a lot of people get behind in certain
industry specific you know, kind of the fashion industry is a big pressure there
with the construction building supply industry is starting to look at that too, and
so there's different verticals that are our industries that are kind of getting behind us
as we see. Yeah, and bas I'll throw this back over to you.
It to that end, having an information resource like you folks have collaborative,
collaboratively built, that's a big deal because what gets measured gets managed and
you can provide some detail around that. I think you even said you've got
some foundational model or something that's woven into it that's making recommendations for folks.
Can you talk about that real quick? Absolutely? So, once you've got
kind of this fabric built out across different data sources, not big data,
it's just disparent data. And a lot of that data is also unstructured,
so it's in PDFs. And what I mean by that is this in safety
sheets, it's in bill ladings, it's in the environment product declaration sheets.
So a lot of the data which is in the RP systems, which are
attachments to a transaction which has been done, but the data is there,
So how do we sort of pull that data together. Once you've done that
and that that data layer is in place, you've now got and you bring
the external data in as well, so you're now matching external data where standards
have been put in place around environmental metrics by whether it's generic or across industry
verticals. You bring in external data and you're fusing these two things together.
That then allows you to what we've built is what's called a micro foundational model.
So it's a large language model with about sixty seven billion tokens in it.
It's not too small, and it's the world's first, collaboratively world's first
a foundational model which allows you to focus on sustainability. And now you've got
that, you've got prompt engineering where you can start typing in I've got material
X, Y and Z in my products, in my supplies, find me
the best alternatives. I think A recommends on this on behalf or I've got
material X, Y and Z. Tell me whether this material has four our
chemicals and it has got packagings in it. And so also think these advanced
techniques in the eye and these data engineering techniques to actually solve real well problems
very very quickly and like coll AI for good. And so that's hopefully I
gives you a kind of practical example of use. Yeah, that is absolutely
fantastic, and we can kind of dig more in the next segment about what
that means, but using one of these foundational models as the method of communication
between the human and the data, which, as you suggest, is wildly
disparate. That's a really seriously big deal and you really kind of couldn't have
done it before this layer. I mean, we've had elastics and other things,
but nothing like what you see with these foundational models, of Folks,
don't touch out that. I'll be right back. You're listening to Inside Analysis
now, welcome back to Inside Analysis. Here's your host, Eric Tabanaugh,
and take to all right, folks, back here on Inside Analysis, talking
with a couple experts in sustainability and also data. Data fuels decision making.
That's what you want. And the solutions we have these days, folks,
are really quite impressive, and the one I just heard about in the past
segment is one of the more impressive ones I've come across and does actually help
me prove out a prediction I've made that these foundational models really are going to
change everything. They are not be all and all solutions. You use them
in a particular workflow. They do need to be fine tuned and monitored and
curated for sure. We've talked in the past about foundational models. How when
they get to the fringe of certain and subjects, that's when they start manufacturing
ideas and making stuff up errors. Some people call them hallucinations. It's not
really hallucination. It's just it made something up in generated text based upon a
prompt and its training. And if it doesn't have training in a particular domain,
that's where it starts to get a little bit loosey goosey. But if
you do have a tight focus on something, that's very good. And I
should point out that these models tend to be consensus engines more than anything else.
So when you've trained a whole bunch of data, we train a model
on a whole bunch of data, whatever you've trained it on. If there's
enough, it's going to find the average and it's going to give you a
decent explanatory answer. It's when you haven't fully trained it on a particular domain
of information that's when you kind of run in some trouble. But these focused
models, I think are going to be very powerful because they are focused on
a particular domain of expertise or of information. And now we were just talking
in the last segment with Baz about this foundational model for sourcing for product information.
And you know, you and I have been around for a while in
this industry. Old fashioned search not so good on topics like that. I
mean, Google obviously has done a great job on Google Search, but even
their Google Search appliances. I talked to someone at a conference in April who
gave me the inside scoops. She was like, Yeah, we never really
quite got it to where we hoped to get it, and it just didn't
quite work out. And I think that's actually where chatbots came from, because
search on websites was just a disaster. It just wasn't working very well,
and so you had the chatbots. The early ones they weren't also not so
great. But now with these foundational models and there's something of a configuration engine
you're going to talk about too, we're really getting somewhere and that is a
very big door that we're opening to new possibilities. But I'll tell us about
this configuration thing on the foundational model the bas mentioned. Yeah, so we're
working with that and this is a huge thing. So Vamaniche actually as a
configurator, and what allows companies to do is modify the actual products. That's
that they're creating based on the active accepts that they want to pull together for
a product. So you take a bill of material, remash it essentially,
and you can minimize the scope of what you're creating and a lot side of
the line, Well, what this means is if you take it in concert
with the foundational model that Vaza is talking about, is conceptually you could actually
take a product and you could configure it, and then you could run and
see which product, based on its configuration as the lowest environmental impact, and
you can actually look at the cost that's associated with it, and you could
also if there are substitute materials for essentially in concert with the configuration. So
now you have you're going from what could you have essentially equivalent product maybe with
some fewer things potentially that immediate meet the business requirement that you have, and
you can look at the difference in terms of its impact, and you can
also look at the difference that it has in terms of the cost for your
organization and all these types of things. And that is very much revolutionary because
now you don't you're not sitting down and building this out for every single thing.
You can do it very dynamically for all, a lot of new products
that you're creating, and you know, it's it's a I think significantly,
but in terms of not only what you do from the creation of a product,
but it's impact on the environment and how it's been utilized within you know,
the product ecosystem that's out there and that applies a lot of different products.
Yeah, that's that's really cool. And also I'll just point out that
when you grease the tracks to exploration and discovery, people will do more of
it. I think there was an opportunity cost people didn't really look into it
because it was really hard to look into before. I mean, if you
don't have a directory that you can search and you just have to do things
manually, and that's you know, that's a tremendous amount of work and is
it really going to be worth your effort? You know, unless people get
some reward pretty quickly from the effort they put into a task, they're not
going to want to put that much effort into the task. So the fact
that you've opened this door and made it possible, I have to think that
the people who are using this are like, Wow, this is pretty cool.
Is that about right out? Oh, it's super cool and I even
I fact, just take the configuration piece out. Let's just talk about the
foundational piece. The speed is amazing. I mean, guys and I would
like cause we get together and we look at how much how many records were
you know, actually you're running through from an LMM perspective, and you just
can't believe how quickly you're getting a return. I mean, it is unbelievable.
It's if you look at the speed and also the aspect that the concern
with large language models is that the day three goes outside of your organization,
the security aspect and the privacy aspects of it. And what we've done collaboratively
is that we've built these models. These MIC has been called the micro foundation
because they're focused on a domain. The focused on sustainability. And so if
you build a sustainability assistant for you, then that needs to run on your
data within your organization, within your cloud, within your VPC, or within
your data center, and then the privacy is protected and data protection is in
place and the only sending out information you need if you need to go to
a large language model and you control what data goes out. The actual foundational
model we've created the micro model graded is actually running within your infrastructure. It's
not running outside of your infrastructure, and it's learned your data and it's factorized
that data so that we can make that search super super contextual to the problem.
Yeah, he came back there. I saw it freeze for a second,
but that he came back. So is there. I mean there's a
RAG model approach that companies are using retrieval augmented generation. Is that in play
here? In other words, when you say the model is running inside your
environment, I'm guessing you've got a vector database and you're actually feeding the embeddings
of your corporate data into this vector database and that it's part of the RAG
model. Correct. Absolutely. So what we're doing in both data sets from
an internal perspective is taking the structured data from your RPS, but the unstructured
data as well in terms of PDFs, and then putting that. One of
the key difference areas that we use a knowledge graph database to build those relations
ships in. So what you're doing is the strength of two nodes, is
the carbon pathways between consumers and producers of carbon or environmental impacts are built in
your knowledge graph. And then that is then presented too, and a search
engine which effectively goes against the sustainable a foundation model to answer your query around
what's the lowest cub and to cost ratio for something. It's very interesting.
So is it a hybrid graph vector database or you have a graph structure and
then a vector database as well, so it's a it's a graph database and
then then it's been vectorized and that's how it's been done. Ok. Wow,
that's pretty fascinated. You guys build your own or are you? Are
you oeming something or weem with a leading provider. Graph databases aren't they very
cool? Yeah? When you I'm a big fan of knowledge graphs because they
do help understand the relationships between things. It's not like a relational database,
which has its own purposes obviously, but graph database is an al a throat
over to you. Graph databases are very good at understanding relationships, right,
nodes and edges, and the nodes or entities the edges are are adjectives basically
facets or characteristics of the nodes, and as such they're very good at being
able to understand what goes with what and how all that can be put together.
Is that about right now. Yeah, well, and that's what we
utilize as well. I mean it is key. I mean, if you
want to look at relationship a supplier to broaduct to consumer to you know,
any you know, item or element that's being utilized, graph is wonderful for
that. You can drill down and you can get into the whole three sixty
view of all the interdependencies and various solutions that are there, which I think
is is where you know the industry is going to go and overall over time.
But it's very powerful. Yeah, well that's I mean, this is
very exciting stuff. So bads, can you give us any thoughts on how
many people are using this or where are you in terms of your overall objective
like what are you doing to get the word out to get more people involved
in this as so as self focus as manufacturing construction sectors and some examples where
we work with when the leading composite companies in the world, so composite fabri
glass companies in the world, which is an alternative to cement. People don't
know that, and so they use our software from all their large projects worldwide
to show their customers that they're how sustainable composites are to steel, cement,
aluminium that's very cool, and so it's a replacement strategy where people haven't considered
that a composite can have the same strength and longevity, will have a material
sustainability of reduction compared to what called carbon bonds, which are the steel,
the glass, the aluminium and the cement out there. And so this is
the world's largest Faber glass manufacturing company and they use our product well every major
project to show clients that you're going down stair building right now. We just
did a project around the largest glass roof in the world right now and it's
going to use a huge amount of glass, and it's still going to use
some of that amount of glass and steal. But they did an alternative design,
which they did structural engineers did. They used our software to show the
cradle to grave as I call it, which which is called which is what's
called circularity, and so cradle to grave view against those alternatives and showed a
thirty i think a thirty six percent reduction in environmental impact and a lot of
that impact was recyclability because composits can be recycled, crushed and reused, whilst
with cement it's very very hard. All it can do is crush it and
effectively and reuse it again. But effectively you can't effectively use it in any
other way going forward. And it's also very toxic once you've actually crushed it
in water it. So these factors are taken into account as we use our
clients use our software. That's one tangible example of people using our software.
Yeah, and you mentioned that glass and steel and aluminium like these typically to
manufacture those, to create them, you're saying, just generates a tremendous amount
of CO two, Is that right, as opponent to this composite, which
is has a much lower footprint. Is that right? Exactly? So if
you look at those four industries and they are the highest outside petroleum, that's
some of the highest carbon emitting products out there in the world. They what
do they do. They take raw material and they put it through a furnace,
okay, and that furnace is heated at a very very high temperature and
uses typically fossil fuels to fuel the furnace. Okay. And so as a
result of that, this huge amount of car and used in the manufacturing of
those particular materials. Whilst composite doesn't uses some degree of energy, but not
to the magnitude of aluminium plant for it. That's very interesting. What are
some of the materials that go into this composite that can you speak to that
at all, like, because, yeah, some of them. So if
you look at the raw material would be a fiberglass. A second material would
be a resin, which binds everything together. In this case, the client,
when we started working with them, we showed a clear change in two
things. Firstly, traditional manufacturing was resins with the fiberglass, and we showed
them that if they used a bio based resin that the reduction was a significant
It was like a two x reduction in the environmental impact. Second thing was
that resin current resin, petrol based resin was being sourced from Asia, and
so we model the supply chain for that resin and as a result of that,
the reduction by moving to a European manufacturer of a bio based resint resulted
in a significant reduction in combon footprint. Those kind of the materials go in.
But this is the alternative. Even in a more sustainable product like a
composite, you've still got opportunities to reduce from the petrol based residence to bio
based residence and improve your supply chain. Yeah, that's cool stuff. And
like I say, when people are aware of the opportunities, they will look
into it if it's easy to do. And that's one of the keys,
right, is that you have facilitated the discovery, the exploration, the understanding
and the modeling. I mean, what you're talking about is price modeling.
You're talking about manufacture processes and understanding how long this takes, how long that
takes, what's the overall cost, what benefits in terms of durability for example,
and reusability. And you talk about toxicity, how some of these old
ways of doing things do create toxic materials. And so I think this is
very interesting that you're kind of opening the kimono, if you will, to
show people that there are other ways of doing things and guess what, they
can save you money, they can save you time, but also you can
create more durable products and at the same time you're helping out the environment.
You know, when you can check all those boxes, that's when people start
to really pay attention and to listen. And you've put some meat and the
bones. Basically you've you've helped justify what is being suggested here, so it's
not just a sacrifice that someone's making. I think that's one of the challenges
right with environmentalism in general, is not even people want to sacrifice stuff.
And folks don't touch on Delbi right back, you're listening to Inside Analysis.
Welcome back to Inside Analysis. You's your host and Eric Tabanac all right,
folks, back on Inside Analysis, talking to Bazakuti from Sustaining three to sixty
and al Bismeyer from VA Medici and we're talking all about practical sustainability and I'm
learning a lot in the show. It's very exciting because materials management is such
a huge space and it's such a big and important space, and certainly in
construction, but in product design and manufacturing kind of knowing the material science behind
things and knowing what's possible. And you know, I'll throw out this historical
point. I remember when I was in middle school reading and Encyclopedia Britannic in
our house. I was looking up polymers and it was a potential path in
my career. I decided not to go down, but I was very fascinated
by it, the chemical side of things. And the engineering side and what
you can do with polymers is very fascinating stuff and we're kind of learning about
that today. And Al, I'd like to throw it back over to you.
You know, as I mentioned, when it's easy to do the right
thing, and you know you're doing the right thing, that's going to grease
the tracks as opposed to someone just trying to guilty into changing your behavior.
I mean, there's a certain psychology around this stuff, right, So it
seems to me you guys are on the right track for giving the information necessary
and building the information systems to enable this stuff. Right. Yeah, it
is well and I think there's several different things though that are kind of going
on. It's almost like a vortex thing going on here. I think if
you look at ESU has been around for a while, some of the compliance
issues have been around for a while in terms of groups that have been requesting
this, and then you have the consumer intent that's interested in being environmental compliant.
But if you look at like the last six months, I would say
the sustainability issue is really heated up and it's really gotten a lot of focus.
And so the European Commission has come out with the Digital Product Passport,
which really says, hey, you know, you need to actually be compliant
by two thousand twenty seven. And the battery technology groups and they have a
Battery Product Battery Declaration, a Digital Product gassport for battery vppm acronym city,
I gotta get these terms of my basically, so they got VPP coming up
and basically so batteries and fashion are kind of leading the charge there, and
it's for compliance as it pertains to carbon and then looking at full life cycle
management of those product sets. But then if you actually take back and look
at California, California obviously had TOP ninety five, which goes back years,
but it looks at a thousand chemicals that are required, and more and more
companies are leaning in for compliance. So with that you have in the building
and construction industry, you're looking at electronic product declarations, which actually looks at
all the materials that are required. And that's into twenty twenty five compliance getting
going in there. And then even with ESG, ESG has come out and
I said, hey, you know, fifty thousand companies have to be compliance
for securities in exchange. But moving into the next two years, there's more
of a proach there. So you have the stick of all these compliance and
governing bodies that are saying, hey, you're going to have to do this.
It's coming down the pike. It's going to be within the next four
or five years. You have Gardner, which is said sustainabilities number two in
terms of their priorities, and they've been pushing that at some of their recent
conferences, and the Wall Street journals coming out with you know, Forever pemical
compliance or DVP compliance, and in the last few months with the front page
articles on these types of things, and so there's a heightened awareness that's going
on. And what I see even within our customers and you ask bads about
customers, but we're looking at a lot In Europe, it's predominantly building supply.
And then in the States here we have a chemical company that's working with
us, and so it's it's compliance on different components of sustainability, and the
full life cycle is one of the things that's being looked at in terms of
how do I do reusability, how do I look at the chemicals that are
associated with it, how do I look at the carbon that's affiliated with it?
So lots of different things that are going on. Some of them are
compliance based, some of them are you know, hey, this is the
right thing to do. And the third thing that I'll mention, which I
mentioned earlier, is a lot of these companies are seeing that consumers they want
to do it. You know, they want you know, if I'm going
to buy a washing machine, I want to have one that's going to work
for a longer period of time. If I'm going to buy you know,
electronic device, I want to make sure that it doesn't have as much of
an impact in terms of, you know, if I throw the battery lay
or which one has a lower impact. More compliance these types of things,
and so there's a push to make sure that that build of material or the
product that's being put out there is environmentally compliant. And it's almost like there's
been a wake up call recently because the inquiries we're getting for this is growing
significantly. I just to say what I'll say on compliance is was in a
if you look at the definition of emissions, it was after the Paris Agreement
in twenty fifteen, and they came out with what we call Scope one,
two and three, and Scope one is a direct emissions are of your plant
in terms of product using energy and so on, and Scope two is effectively
the purchase of that energy to the plant from wherever the utility is. And
Scope three is effectively the supply chain and the use of your products. He's
kind of the big message here and why we at my age create sustained three
sixty is since twenty fifteen, every CSR report out there, a corporate sustainability
report out there which is ESG focused around a standard called GRI, focused on
scope one and two, and they represent thirty percent of emission. So since
two THEOUM and fifteen, what are we focused on thirty percent of emissions?
Seventy percent of emissions are in your supply chain and you you see your products.
Why have we avoided that? We've avoided that because it's a data problem.
I'll mention one more thing, Eric, because I just kind of popped
in my head. But in addition to all these standards and regulatory things,
another thing I've seen in the last two years is the number of senior vps
of sustainability that these companies that put in So like a lot of my big
multinational companies, they all have a vice president or a senior vice president of
sustainability that's looking at everything that their organization is doing from a sustainability perspective.
And that comes back to obviously with data, we're data on everything with master
data, so they're looking at, well, where am I, how am
I sustainable as an organization? How how are my product sustainable? You know,
they're kind of looking at a lot of different aspects in terms of sustainability
within their organizations and compliance and differentiation in the marketplace relat their product sets.
Mm hmm. Yeah, that's good stuff. And you know, we've got
about three minutes left in this segment. As I'm thinking about these foundational models
which you can now use to understand your products and what composes them and what
alternatives you have. You know what, Also, these models are going to
be really good for understanding regulations. So you train the model on the regulation
and then guess what, your users can just ask questions. And this to
me is one of the best use cases for these new tools. Even though
you have to check it, Yes, you have to check it, but
guess what, even if you ask the high powered lawyer, you'd still have
to check it. They're not always right either, So we shouldn't hold ourselves
to one hundred percent accuracy level, but you know, somewhere in the nineties,
I think, but that's incredibly useful. Bads. I'll throw it over
to you for the end user to say, oh, okay, how does
this regulation affect me with these different products? What do I need to do?
Enter? And it comes and gives you a bunch of information that is
so much easier than trying to read this complex legal ease and regulations, and
people are scratching their has what the heck does this mean? That's a big
deal, right, beurs, that's a huge deal. And the foundational model
focused on sustainability actually has read the top sustainable standards out there, so in
their nation's STDs, the GRI standards out there, Task Force to Climate Disclosures,
it's thread down CP. So it's also already read all there and then
brought that so it's in context of the material you're looking at in the industry
you're in, so you're know how to spend time and energy learning and reading
a whole lot of PDFs that there and then applies it to the report.
So when you're producing a report, it says, okay, which standard now
applies to that report, so it aids compliance and so the order to and
the order to can be improved. So it's actually spot on that one of
the key components within this foundational model is the learning of those standards. And
the problem with these standards is that there's interdependencies with them, right, and
they're continuously changing, right, and so to keep up to speed on them
and also understand all the dependencies between the United Nations SDGs and the GRI reporting
standards, is a matrix you have to follow and how do you sort of
manually do that is labor intensive and a spreadsheet. Well, now you've got
a matrix already built for you, and is the updates is going to provide
that information to you. Yeah, And I think there's also a lot of
work being done right now around reasoning. So if you look at the foundational
models large language models, they're really just text generators that are predictive engines,
predicting which text they think you are going to want based upon their training and
your prompts. And that's all finding good. I see people throwing complex math
problems at them and word problems and then going aha, look I couldn't figure
it. Out. I'm like, well, you're kind of misusing the tool
in that sense, so you do have to understand when to use these things
and when not to use them. But I will say there is work being
done on that reasoning side of the equation, and they could just layer that
stuff in. Well. Podcast bonus segment is coming up next, folks.
Stand by you're listening to Inside Analysis. All right, folks, time for
the podcast bonus segment. Here on a fantastic show about practical sustainability. What
are things you could do that'll help your business, that'll help your clients,
that'll help the environment. We want to kill multiple birds with every stone.
Maybe that's not the best metaphor since we're talking about helping the environment, but
you know, birds are people too to a certain extent. I love birds.
By the way, we have like six seven eight different kind of birds
of chirp around our house every day. I've got the app Merlin you can
like listen and see which birds are chirping. These are wonderful times for people
who love information. But as I'd like you to focus the last few minutes
here on the collaboration between Sustained three sixty and via Medici, which I guess
is around these uh, these digital passports. Can you talk about that?
Absolutely? Yeah. So you know, one of the things which you know,
you know, we need is data and we need good quality data.
And what Vaccine provides us is that it connects to e ERP systems which has
all this data. So it's SAP or or whatever. Decades and decades of
data sets are in them. And so if we can get master data,
market connections and also product information management from eatin, we don't have to go
directly to those rps. So it's kind of a bridge to get and so
that's what as you know, solution provides us. But once we've got there,
what we then do is think about is an is an engine sitting right
next to your our e r P through a broker from AMT, which effectively
allows us to generate environmental views of environmental lens to those products. And so
when we send that back and once we've sent it back to keep him as
our's product line, we then provide a digital fingerprint. So we basically provide
the ability to put a blockchain in there and so you know exactly the date,
the time, and the data we use to calculate the sustainable metrics.
Oh wow, yeah, that's I mean, you know, Ali throw it
over to you. One of the funnier quotes I've heard on the show over
the years. Someone said, yeah, and it We always think one more
layer of abstraction will solve all our problems, but a lot of times it
does, right. And so you've got this layer of abstraction where it's kind
of like with data breaks in their delta lake right where you're tracking changes within
this layer, and that way you can roll back to a point in time
and understand what was happening. Pretty cool stuff. I mean before when you
couldn't do that, not so good. Now you can do that stuff.
It sounds similar to what Beaz is talking about. Can you go into some
detail on how that works. No, it's actually really good and it's actually
where things are going. So if you look at and I mentioned the Digital
Product Passport kind of standard that's been put out there by the European Commission,
they're looking at the full life cycle of products essentially, so you have everything
that went into that product, that's bill of material when it was actually produced
and made available. And one of the things that they've been talking about is
using RFID to actually do this, which actually is just a step that's not
necessary. So what you can actually do is you can pick a QR code
into token and actually have the full blow of material maintained is to what goes
into the making of that product upon its release, and then you can pick
that up off the QR code and you have full information about that product and
then replacement and reusability all built into the solution. So we're really seeing the
collaboration and the fulfillment to digital product passport is something that is very beneficial in
our building supply. Customers are very much behind this. They're actually giddy about,
you know, what we're doing in this space because of its you know,
it's usability as much as anything. It's like the whole audit trail and
what are some of our customers are looking at in different industries more CpG and
fashion and this type of thing is the ability to actually have this validation for
their consumer. Because one of the things we didn't get into is v meditry
also does We did not only do MBM, but we do product information management.
So we're actually taking information and we're making that information available down into either
a retail environment or e commerce application or a marketplace or whatever. So a
consumer can look at product data and what's going on, and sometimes that's B
to B and sometimes that's B two C. But if you have all that
information, it's maintained, scan your QR code, you can see, Okay,
this is what's within the product set, and then you have a full
detail and a validation throughout the third party that this is what made up this
product. Essentially. Yeah, the B to B to say on the so
when you as a consualistic experience, so I was saying, is you're on
an e commerce site fuel by their epin product which has now got embedded sustainable
information. That QR code has a blockchain associated with it, so it's a
secure QR code as I call alumnia. And so as soon as you scan
the chain of customer, chain of evidence on that sustainability information is guaranteed.
So you're the customer, got trust with the consumer that this has got the
right level of integrity and evidence behind it. Yeah, and I'm just guessing
here that the ideal endpoint is the QR code on the product where the consumer
can just scan it with their phone and see all this information. Is that
is that already there or that's the vision of where it's going. No,
we built That's cool. That's just amazing because now again a consumer can get
access to information, very detailed information. I mean, I'm old enough to
remember when they started putting all the the details on the cereal boxes. It's
got riboflavid and vitamin D, invitamin B twelve and like all this stuff.
That was just an estimate, I mean obviously, But you can go so
much deeper now and it can be dynamic, meaning something changes on the back
end. Something will change when I scan this code and take a look at
it. And like I say, when you know better, you do better.
So people want to do good things, People want to do things that
are good for the environment, and you folks are enabling them to do that,
which I think is just absolutely fantastic. Well, folks, look these
gentlemen up online. We've been talking to Baz Kouti, that's b a z
k h u Ti from sustain three sixty and al Bismeyer al I could expect
American League. Bissmeye R looked them up on LinkedIn, another great resource for
information about people and companies and good things. Happening in the world. And
wow, what a great show today. Thanks to both of you telemen for
all your hard work and for improving the beautiful environment around us. This does
include our show. Send me an email if you want to be on this
on this radio show sometime. Info at Inside analysis dot com. We'll talk
to you next time. Folks. Take care you've been listening to Inside Analysis.
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I'm Chris Garagio. House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries is taking part in a
virtual conference call today to discuss President Biden's twenty twenty four candidacy. Five House
Democrats have publicly called on Biden to drop out of the race following his shaky
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