Digital Leadership and Sustainability: Rik Irons-Mclean's Journey from Scotland to Microsoft CTO in ANZ

Mark Smith: 0:32
Welcome to the Co-Pilot Show, where I interview Microsoft staff innovating with AI. I hope you will find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Sydney in New South Wales, Australia. He works at Microsoft as a digital leader and strategist. He has published books, written a number of magazines and journal articles and peer-reviewed white papers. He's currently studying an executive program on chief data and AI in the University of Singapore. You can find links to his bio, social media, et cetera, in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Rik.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 1:16
Thank you very much, Mark. Pleasure to be here.

Mark Smith: 1:22
Good to have you on the show. I met you last year I think it was when we were doing some work together and I was intrigued by your knowledge and that's time in the area of sustainability. But before we start unpacking what you're doing in the area of AI as well, tell us a bit about food, family and fun.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 1:44
What do they mean to you? Food for me is anything I can get hold of that gives me a little bit of pleasure. The family is quite similar in terms of they give me a lot of pleasure, but it sounds funny when I say anything I can get hold of, but they really bring that joy to me outside of work and fun for me. It may sound crazy but I really like to do things like ultramarathons, endurance events which kind of punish my body a little bit, but it really frees up my mind and takes it away from, you know, work and other challenges or stresses in life.

Mark Smith: 2:09
Ultramarathon. So what is it? Is it 40 kilometers a stand or 42K as a standard marathon?

Rik Irons-Mclean : 2:16
42 is the standard, yeah, yeah, and they say anything above that is seen as being an ultra. So I've done things up to 100 kilometers, three marathons in three days wow, coast to coast across scotland in the uk and those those types of events. So a lot of good fun, endurance wise. But believe me, though, I I consider myself, mark, to be a completer versus a competer. Yes, so it's about getting around and enjoying the event.

Mark Smith: 2:39
Yeah, that's phenomenal, and so it's only running. Right. It's a triathlon, that's a cycle, and swim as well, right?

Rik Irons-Mclean : 2:48
So I do have completed an Ironman triathlon and in things like the Coast to Coast Scotland that involved kayaking, running, biking, both kind of on the road and also up the mountains. So, yes, it's a combination of different activities.

Mark Smith: 3:01
So what do you do prep-wise for that? Are you out running most days, then?

Rik Irons-Mclean : 3:05
When I get the opportunity to yes, I get out, I'm running, jump on the bike. Whenever I can spend time with my son mountain biking Nice. So it's just whenever you can kind of dip in and out of the exercise, typically around work and family.

Mark Smith: 3:18
And so is your origin, scotland.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 3:21
I was born in Scotland. Yes, born in Scotland. Moved to England, though, when I was four, hence my accent not being very Scottish.

Mark Smith: 3:28
I was going to say why didn't I pick this up before? But that makes sense.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 3:31
Yeah, definitely don't have that Scottish accent anymore. So it's fun when I go back and speak to my Scottish relatives still, who have very strong accents. But no, I grew up in England, moved pretty much from Nottingham in the middle down to the south coast, and then I thought, oh, I'll take a little bit of a leap and then went really south and moved to Australia in 2021. So it's coming up three years now, right in the middle of lockdown which was fun out to the colonies.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 4:03
Yeah, did you lose your taste for whiskey or you still got a taste, but you know the Scottish origins never had a taste for whiskey. It was one of those things where you know, when you don't have much money growing up, somehow my parents could still afford alcohol. Yeah, typically whiskey for my dad, and if you had, like you know, a toothache or you felt really poorly, they gave you a little tiny bit of whiskey.

Mark Smith: 4:18
Yeah, and I think that probably put me off for life so my drinks are in a different direction to that mark so I hated whiskey until I went to scotland and I went to isla, got into, you know, the very peaty whiskeys and stuff there, and now I don't mind it.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 4:32
So yeah, I'm much more of a sweeter bubbly type person, so champagne is it's a bit of those, and in the uk side is a big drink. So yeah, yeah, I kind of grew up on that through my being honest teenage years yeah, to start with and then through my much more formative adult years as well yeah, interesting.

Mark Smith: 4:51
I was reading the. I don't know who was the author. It was not him, but what's?

Rik Irons-Mclean : 4:56

his name.

Mark Smith: 4:57
Heck, I do this. I'm going to say a name and then it drops on mine. Who was the famous guy that the Second World War? The leader of the United Kingdom, winston Churchill. Winston Churchill, that's the guy. So he the amount of champagne that he would have sent when he went into battle. He would have cases of the stuff sent to him like when he was the First World War. He was in a couple of other wars and the amount of champagne that he would have delivered to him as part of his need to sustain life and liberty was incredible.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 5:29
Yeah, it's a good tipple and a good quality champagne makes a difference.

Mark Smith: 5:33
Yeah, I totally agree. My wife and I plan to go to champagne at some point in the future, but we love a dom perignon particularly, and my first taste of that was in australia fine virgin australia. I used to go platinum three times a year. I was flying that much for a microsoft partner and they sent me my first bottle of vintage Dom Perignon. It was very nice, it's nice.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 5:57
yeah, we tend to have the champagne for very special occasions. You know, from a sustainability perspective, we really like to focus locally. So there are lots of good I'm not going to say champagne, but there are lots of good sparkling wines Proseccos- and so on in Australia. So we like to sample locally and, you know, from a much more sustainable perspective. But getting a good champagne is a treat for us.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 6:20
Yeah, I had a sparkling Shiraz I know this is a sidestep A Shiraz down in Adelaide and that was amazing, absolutely amazing there are some amazing vineyards all around Adelaide and where I live I'm on the central coast, just north of Sydney, so the Hunter Valley is just above us, yeah, yeah, and there's some really good sustainable wineries up there as well. So, all the way through from their production line to how they produce the grape, the supply chain, yeah, lots of less things like sulphates and so on in the wines themselves, and they make a really good, solid sparkling wine. So, yeah, keeping it local is a bit of a passion for us, as you'd probably expect.

Mark Smith: 6:58
Fantastic, fantastic. So tell me your career into Microsoft. How'd that come about? Yeah, how's that journey been for you?

Rik Irons-Mclean : 7:04
Yeah, it's a really interesting and varied one and, like most things in life Mark probably not the kind of direction or trajectory I was expecting. So, prior to coming to Microsoft, I was at Cisco so another tech company for 13 years. Throughout that time I held a number of global roles really focused on how we take new technologies on markets and really start to build those up so they become a reality. So I spent time as the global tech sales lead on things like Smart Grid. I was the IoT new development platforms lead. We were working on some brand new technologies. I was the oil and gas principal globally and then my final role, I was the chief architect or CTO for all industries. So really looking at that application of new technologies, but to solve business challenges, because that's really what we're trying to do at the end of the day with technology. It's not sell a widget or a piece of software. It's solving outcome or technology or a business challenge.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 7:58
So, one of my colleagues left Cisco, went to Microsoft and sent me a message saying Rick, you'd absolutely love it here. The culture is fantastic. And I was there thinking I'm on this great trajectory. Cisco is a great place to work. I'm not moving. Eventually I had a call that came out and said you know, you just have to have this conversation. I thought what's the worst thing that's going to happen. So I was actually away glamping.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 8:22
I got up at 7.30 in the morning and spoke to a couple of people from the UK team that said look, this is really what we're trying to do. We're all focused on how we can leverage technologies to really change business. And I started talking to them and I got this new concept of culture. For me, this culture at Microsoft is very different. It really is diverse, it's inclusive, it's focusing on customer challenges and I thought I've got to take this step. So I jumped across from Cisco, left some amazing people and capabilities behind, moved to Microsoft and I moved into the role as the strategy director for manufacturing, energy and resources in the UK, really focused again on new technologies, but from a software perspective versus a lot of hardware at Cisco, solving business challenges in those industries. Now, one of the things that we were really focusing on that attracted me to Microsoft was this pivot to industry. So it's not about talking about technology, it's what are those industry-based outcomes? My background, as I probably mentioned working in things like smart grid, oil and gas, heavy industries. I started doing a lot of work with our worldwide energy industry team and as a result of that, they said oh, Rick, it'd be great if you could join us. And I was like, yes, please. But they said what we're trying to do is not just look at energy, but sustainability is this massive topic that's coming up. And I was invited myself another great guy, alex robot to incubate the worldwide sustainability industry team at microsoft. So I was like I'm all in for this.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 9:47
So I moved to australia right at the start of that and we spent the last few years building up this team to make sure that we could have it scaled. We had kind of the knowledge across the organization. We're providing relevance to industry and to customers. But one of the things to me, I was doing a lot of stuff internally and my passion is working with customers and it's working to drive new outcomes, new innovation.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 10:11
So I kind of always had at the back of my mind. I want to get back out there doing that sort of CTO role that I did before. I've been working with the local ANZ subsidiary, working with the leadership team there. Unfortunately for me, this role came up and I had to take that role. So I've now moved in as the Chief Technology Officer for Enterprise Commercial for Australia and New Zealand, nice, and that gives me this opportunity again with customers, with industry, with innovation, but also sustainability is still a part of it. So that's my journey and that's what I'm doing now, just into week two, mark, wow, I'm really exploring what's going on, but loving it already.

Mark Smith: 10:48
Because I have some questions on that, being that I'm familiar with that market. Before we go there, tell us a bit about sustainability From what you've seen, and correct me if I'm wrong. I understand the EU has pulled back with their deadlines around some of their sustainability initiatives. We now have, of course, the reporting side of sustainability is what a lot of businesses are focused on. What are you seeing? What's your perspective on it in the years you've worked on it and the strategy work you've done with Microsoft, and where's it going? What's next? I know that's broad.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 11:25
It's broad, but really interesting and also timely. So I won't talk specifically about the EU or other areas and things around regulation, but I think some of the things that I'm really seeing all up is I don't think people really understood the challenge of sustainability and how broad it is and perhaps how difficult it is to achieve unless we come together collectively. So I've seen a lot of organizations actually pull back on their sustainability commitments that they may have set a few years ago, which for me, is a bit of a dangerous precedent, because this is the time where we really need to build, be building this up. We are seeing a lot more regulation, though, all around the world which is driving organizations through compliance regulation and other things. I think for me, when it comes to sustainability, we have this tendency to dive straight into the E or environmental pillar of ESG, but it is so so much more. So I try to think about this. I guess an older business concept called the multiple bottom line. So really looking at that perspective of people, planet and profit although I kind of substitute a profit for productivity yes

Rik Irons-Mclean : 12:27
I don't know if you've ever read the bill gates book how to avoid a climate disaster, but he talks a lot about how we need to be both sustainable and productive. If we're not like that for our businesses, businesses will go out of business and that means that the things that support the critical ways we live we have to grow things, we have to power things, move things, we have to make things. Without businesses, you cannot do that at scale. So for me, it's really important that we can be both sustainable and productive or profitable. It's not just that altruistic activity and focusing on the E-pillar.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 12:58
So I typically work with customers and industry, probably in a few areas. We do need to do the right thing for the society and the planet. That's absolutely critical. But we also then need to meet those regulator and compliance targets. You mentioned the EU. We have this real opportunity to help organizations operate in an efficient and a sustainable way, because if you're operating efficiently, you're reducing energy, you're reducing water, you're minimizing the materials you use or waste. But I also think we have this opportunity for businesses to look at new business opportunities, because sustainability can be good for businesses and if you look at some of the statistics out there we've seen perhaps 10 to 20% more profitability for businesses than their non-sustainable peers. So for me, I think it's really important that we take this balanced view. Without productive businesses operating in a sustainable way, we won't move forward at pace.

Mark Smith: 13:53
Yeah, so a lot of people listening to this will have heard about sustainability. They would heard about the E pillar, as you say, environmental. Well, let's talk just a second about S and G, the social and the governance side of things. How do you explain that to people? And how is Microsoft? I suppose because we've seen the reporting dashboards and things like that Once again, I feel lean more to the E side of the house how has the conversation been had around the E's and the G pillars?

Rik Irons-Mclean : 14:24
Yeah, so an interesting area for us to explore and for most organizations. And I think, just going back to what you said, one of the things that when we first started talking to customers at Microsoft around what we could do to help with them, we focused so heavily on that E pillar and customers were saying what about S, what about G? It's something we've really been working quite hard on, but if we think about the social pillar, we need to look at the people aspect. So, looking at things like education, skilling, diversity, inclusion massive for Microsoft yeah, things that have been going on for years, like health and safety, you don't normally think about that as being part of sustainability, but it is a clear part of sustainability. And then we have other areas like supply chain transparency, human rights and so on. So these are things that we do inside of organizations on an ongoing basis, but perhaps we don't focus on them as much from a sustainability perspective.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 15:14
The governance area I see a lot less focus from a governance perspective and I guess some of this is a little bit harder to define.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 15:21
There's a lot of difference between how different organizations might look at it, but really, look at things like ethical standards, tax transparency, board diversity again, big focus for Microsoft and being transparent on things like executive pay, really understanding things like shareholder rights. When I think about the governance piece, I almost think that we're moving into an era of having, almost like you have to have a transparency license to operate. So it's not just around what do we do, but really how are we doing that. So a lot of things like reporting frameworks and so on did focus heavily on the ePillar to start with, but if you look at things like CSRD and so on that are coming out from the European Union will have an impact for other areas of the world where you have European business operations. There is big focus in there as we move towards the S and G pillars as well, and I think customers are really and industry are really looking to say how do we cover all three of those, not just really focusing on the east side.

Mark Smith: 16:16
Yeah, interesting. I remember I think it was Brad Smith there was a conference that I had. I think I was in Toronto, maybe it was 2012 or 2016. Timeframe was two conferences I did over those periods and he talked about Microsoft moving to. I think it was a carbon negative stance, not just for this period of time, but right back to the start of Microsoft and I can't remember when was the date that was set for. But how are Microsoft doing in respect to the commitments they've made, if you like, in market?

Rik Irons-Mclean : 16:50
So the dates that you're looking at. So the carbon neutral is by 2030. And that's something that we collectively all need to drive towards before we start missing broader targets. We also want to be carbon negative by 2050, which means not only on an annual basis are we neutral in terms of our carbon emissions, but we're also will have removed any carbon that we've actually created as an organization from the environment. So people talk about these as being kind of moonshot ambitions.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 17:17
There's other things around water, waste, renewable energy, what we do on ecosystems and biodiversity as well but the carbon one is obviously very prevalent and is there at the top of most people's mind. It's one of those things. It's visible, it's reasonably easy to report or record against. So, yes, we're still really focusing on that In terms of where we are, which is a great question, and I think being transparent is really important around what an organization does. It goes back to that third pillar that I mentioned on the ESG side. So we recently released our 2023 Environmental Sustainability Report and in that cover the ePillar primarily there are some highlights and there are still some opportunities for Microsoft to improve. So, things like on the renewable energy side, we've made commitments that by 2025, all of our data centers will be running on 100% renewable energy. We're definitely on track to meet that. We have projects all over the world. I think we're nearly at 20 gigawatts of renewable energy sources for're definitely on track to meet that. We have projects all over the world. I think we're nearly at 20 gigawatts of renewable energy sources for our data centers.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 18:24
In terms of being water positive, we want to be water positive by 2030. So that means that we've actually are putting back more water into the environment than we actually take for our own operations. So we have lots of water contracts around the world and I think it's something like 60 plus million cubic meters of volumetric water that we've now put back into the environment via our projects. So that will continue. We're doing well there. In terms of waste, we have a number of different goals around recyclability from our data centers and including things like creating net new circularity centers as well. That will continue, but we're doing really well on this, eliminating things like single-use plastics and so on. And then the last area is around ecosystems. So how do we protect more land than we use for our operations, and that's going well as well. So that's really around that kind of biodiversity piece, so there are areas that we're all doing well, we're on track, and that's all explained in our latest report, and I'll provide a link mark for any of the listeners out there.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 19:23
The one you started off with, though, is carbon, and that has been a little bit of a challenge for us and is an opportunity for us to continue to progress, continue to innovate. So our emissions overall actually increased by about 29% from the 2020 baseline that we measured. Now in carbon, we obviously have scope one, scope two and scope three emissions, and most people talk about scope three emissions as being that biggest challenge. It's exactly the same for Microsoft, so we saw a decrease in our scope one and scope two emissions. Most of that's coming about from things like our clean energy procurement, renewable energy certificates, and so on.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 20:06
In terms of the scope three, we had that increase by around 30%. If you look at the overall numbers, scope three emissions account for about 96% of our overall emissions, so it is definitely the most significant decarbonisation challenge, but we wanted to be very transparent in our reporting to say this is what's happened, this is what we're working on, and we are not changing our goals of 2030 or 2050. We're still committed to those sustainability goals and we'll continue to leverage things like some of our long-term investments in carbon-free energy that's going to come into power, our data centers, and we'll continue to advocate for things like clean energy solutions to mitigate some of those impacts.

Mark Smith: 20:49
Yeah, and it's hard right with those in that three category because a lot of it is further than or beyond your it's out there. It's not something you control directly like you have in the other areas. I assume that AI might have had an impact, being the energy consumption etc.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 21:08
It's a really, really interesting question, and I don't normally say it's a really, really, really interesting question because I think we don't yet know. So AI itself is still in its infancy, and the reality is that we're not yet running AI workloads at scale anywhere in the world. So most of the projects that we're seeing are smaller projects, they're exploring. You know, how do we understand this technology, how do we use it for efficiency of our workforce and so on? So I think the transparent answer is we don't yet know. Now, what I would say is some of that impact, or a lot of that impact, to our scope.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 21:45
Three was around things like building new data centers.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 21:49
In fact, that's where a lot of this would have come from, because, as we continue to innovate, not just in AI, but in other areas not just in AI, but in other areas we need to be able to build out those data centers to run the workloads that then allow our customers or industry to take advantage of the technologies to support their business requirements.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 22:05
So we will have seen an increase in carbon from the construction of those data centers, the supply chain and so on that is actually used to build those up. So I think that's the transparent answer in terms of what we're seeing. There are some things that we do know, though. So AI's emissions, the footprint that you'll see is obviously going to be focused on the carbon intensity of the electricity and some of that embodied carbon that I mentioned. So if we actually look at things like making sure we've got renewable energy into the data centers, then that's going to have a mitigated impact of how much carbon is produced by AI as we continue to go and grow. So that's kind of one of those areas, and I think, if I remember correctly, I think less than 1% of the global data center electricity and water use is currently due to AI operations.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 22:58
So, it's around that 1% figure.

Mark Smith: 23:01
Obviously, there are other things around this in terms of the build, the construction and so on that goes along that, but we really don't know what this will look like until we start to see some of this stuff at scale and of course, there is a potential for it to change very quickly because as we move into AI more, I've been reading a book recently on superintelligence written by an Oxford professor, I think back in 2014-ish and the speed that we could get to energy creation at a much lower impact on the environment and cost, even with a prediction of energy driving to zero cost in time because of the advent of AI, who knows how quickly that increase could be reversed with the innovations that are coming out.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 23:46
Yeah, absolutely, and I think I probably look at this in two ways. The first one is what are the sorts of things we can do to mitigate any potential impact that might come from AI or other technologies in the future, because we have things like quantum and others that we don't yet know what an impact might be. So it's around how we do that design upfront to think sustainably. So if we look at our data centers, these are obviously designed, they're optimized to support things like AI workloads and all of the data centers that we'll create. Now. They consume zero water for cooling, so that's one thing. We're automatically starting to mitigate the use of water, which would be quite heavy and intense in the past. So that's one thing. We also want to make sure that we are using, as I said, renewable or low carbon energy sources to power those, which again mitigates that carbon. There are things we can also do to minimize resource use in AI operations as it actually operates. So we've partnered with the Green Software Foundation to look at how we can advance carbon-aware software practices and a number of things we've worked on with customers around. Innovation might be how do we run specific workloads at the most optimal time to minimize carbon around the world, so we could say things like 24-7,. Your workloads are working on renewable energy sources from the best sources and we can use technologies to shift them across different data centres. So there are things we can definitely do there. Nice, we also have this opportunity, I think, to advocate for AI policy to support sustainability and having a big voice like Microsoft. That's one of the areas that we will continue to work on.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 25:20
Now, the second part of your question was really around what can AI do to support sustainability and again, this is one of those earlier areas, but we're seeing projects and real things already happening. I would kind of like to say that there's been this explosion of AI over the last couple of years, primarily driven by gen AI or generative AI. So I would split this out a little bit and say we've been working on traditional or narrow AI. It's not new for me personally for at least nine or 10 years. So projects like supply chain optimization, species wildlife protection, safety optimization, ai and machine learning has been used. For that.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 25:59
You typically have to have a data science background to really understand the industry, but it has been there for some time. When we look at Gen AI, which you mentioned, for me it's new, it adds additional capabilities and obviously we're able to do things like generate new content. But a lot of the stuff around GenNI is around augmenting that human experience. So from a sustainability perspective, that could be minimizing the amount of time for building sustainability reporting, and we've seen a number of projects where you can actually query these massive amount of data sets that are out there through natural language, which is a complete game changer so you can interrogate all this data without this data science background or industry domain expertise to try and get things back out that would support sustainability. So I think that's really important.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 26:47
Now we have created a white paper recently and again I'll share that link which is around how we accelerate sustainability outcomes for customers or industry or the world. So it's called Accelerating AI with Sustainability and it's a playbook that covers off probably three main areas where we think AI can support sustainability, and I'll make sure I get these three correct. So the first of those is around how we can measure, predict and start to optimize complex systems. So some examples of that might be how can we model supply chains and perhaps predict things like physical weather impacts onto that supply chain. So that's probably one area. We've also seen things like modeling and predicting environmental or biodiversity things like predicting wildfire spreading maybe one of those and then we've worked with some of the transmission operators in the power utility grid looking at things like how we can model the performance of a next-generation dynamic power grid where it's two-way we're taking lots of different sources coming in from anywhere, but making sure it's solid, it's dynamic, and we can do things like predict the best places to connect renewable energy sources into the grid. So these are ways to use the technology for outcomes that have sustainability impact.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 28:04
The second area racking my brains is around how we can accelerate the development of sustainability solutions themselves. So we are seeing AI being used already in things like the creation of low-carbon materials, looking at things like renewable energy production and storage and, from an agriculture perspective, climate-resilient crops. Obviously, things like hunger, water foundational. We can survive without energy. We can't survive without food and water. So we've seen projects in that. We've seen other projects tracking things like the spread of disease and over the last few years there's a couple of great UK projects. You've just come back from the UK, so we've used AI with some of our customers to create things like the world's first ecological digital twins and the AI components are doing things like species recognition, species protection, tracking, pollution spread in waterways.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 28:58
So these solutions are great, not only in terms of how they can drive sustainability impact, but if we think about the companies that are creating these, going back to that productive or profitability side, they're also able to use that to improve their own operations, but use this as a competitive advantage or a new operating model when they're bidding for work. So SSE is a great example, the largest renewable energy organization in the UK. They built this ecological digital twin that allows you to see what the impact of their wind turbines will be into the environments that they're deploying and operating in. They've then added onto this the capability with a HoloLens. So you've got this industrial metaverse now and people in the communities before these things are built can look into it and actually see what's happening before things are physically built. So it almost becomes a complete business model for organizations like that. So that goes back to that balance of make sure we're doing things in a sustainable way, but also there are new business models that organizations can adopt yeah and then the final bit.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 30:03
I know I'm talking long on this one, but it's really important. We have to consider the workforce. So you know, we did a a report, probably around 18 months to two years ago with the boston consultancy group bG, and we were looking at the challenges for both digital and sustainability in the workforce and that no knowledge gaps. We have gaps around sustainability and we have gaps around digital when we think about AI, huge digital. So we need to be able to start to figure out how we can support the workforce from both of those lenses. So how do we augment that workforce? We can look at things like targeted training. We can streamline the work they do.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 30:42
If you think about sustainability reporting, it's a people-intensive activity. It could take you potentially three months plus to pull out your report. How can we use AI as part of that to be able to go in query documents, pull back the information you want, prepare the reports and then you've got something there in a matter of perhaps days versus months. So there's that ability to augment the workforce. Yeah, I think there's also this opportunity to really help with things like research as well. So we have things like our ai for good lab. We have some of our stuff for Good Lab. We have some of our stuff that we're doing around the Microsoft Climate Research Initiative and so on. There are ways that we can also augment our researchers to look specifically around sustainability-based future initiatives. So I think that third area is getting our workforce right to be able to adopt things like AI. To then apply it to use cases like sustainability is a foundational thing that we really need to focus on.

Mark Smith: 31:41
How much you're involved in influencing government and why I say this is that it's Singapore, I think, is one of the first governments that have come out with the programs to address the gap in knowledge around AI and they've targeted a certain age demograph in their constituent. And I thought you know I made a comment on LinkedIn, I think it was yesterday, which was imagine government set a goal to increase the digital literacy and or AI literacy by 30% of their entire constituent base. What impact would that have on business entire constituent base. What impact would that have on business, on health systems, on the environment, if everybody's skill knowledge level came up by 30% and I'm talking about whether it be a hairdresser, whether it be more labor-intensive roles, even those and we talk about inclusion and diversity, those different minds, but all of them coming up you know that 30% what would the impact be on a country with that literacy level increased?

Rik Irons-Mclean : 32:47
So I'll go back to the response I gave earlier, which is I don't think we know yet.

Mark Smith: 32:52
Yeah.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 32:52
But the reality is, if you take away the word AI and if you talk about the things that you've just described, which you know underpin a lot of the sustainable development goals from the United Nations, you've got access to things like, you know, education, water, work, all those types of things. It's obviously going to have a transformative approach. I think the key thing for organizations like Microsoft, though, is that we are a global organization. We have a strong voice, and we need to use that strong voice to advocate for in a really positive way, but also perhaps for the misuse. We've got to be that leading voice to really say we need to do this in the right way. So we will work in our efforts to do things like strengthen the governance of AI, looking at things like responsible AI, before that actually gets out to some of those stakeholders and people that you mentioned. So we've got to make sure there's trust and people are going to use this in the right way. Otherwise, it's no longer sustainable. It's counter to that sustainability initiative, but it's really important for us then to do things like build skilling plans. So we've made commitments with governments around the world.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 34:11
Australia is no different way. We've made commitments around tens of thousands of jobs, sorry, of skilling programs. We will skill people in digital to actually have an impact in AI, and the skills initiative actually forms part of that. What that will actually look like, though, mark, in the real world, in five years' time, in 10 years' time, when this becomes really solid, people are running these workloads at scale. I don't know what that will look like, but it will have an impact on making things like education accessible to people wherever you are. It will help people really understand industries where there's complexity, removing that complexity for them and perhaps remove some of those barriers to work that we've got today, because you don't need to be a data scientist, you don't need to be an industry specialist. You might be able to use AI creatively in a different way. So I think AI can be used to remove some of those barriers you mentioned to then really help people grow and, you know, really approach society, jobs and so on in a different way.

Mark Smith: 35:12
Yeah, so good. Before I let you go, any final words.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 35:20
I don't know about final words.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 35:21
I probably say some some top things I'd love for people to um focus in on when we think about sustainability. Um, I've mentioned this a couple of times. I think it's really important for organizations and people inside of those organizations to be transparent. I've mentioned our report. This has got to be transparent. I've mentioned our report. This has got to be a collective effort. I want everyone to be transparent, all of our peers, the industries that we serve and work with, to be as transparent as possible.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 35:44
Otherwise, we'll never move in the right direction.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 35:46
Please, please, please, always go beyond the E, otherwise we'll be stuck focusing on the environment and forget our people, forget how we do it in the best way.

Rik Irons-Mclean : 35:56
One of the big things we haven't talked so much about today has been data versus AI. In order for us to really make a sustainable transformation, whether it is around reporting or taking action, we need to get our data estates in order, because otherwise we're looking at what we're doing and we're not quite sure. So it's that old adage of you know you get garbage into what you're doing, you get garbage out. So I'd love to get the data estates of organizations in order, make a lot of open data out there so people can use it for, you know, innovation and so on. But we can then make do not solve the challenges, but they can enable new approaches AI is one of those, and they can accelerate sustainability initiatives. And then the last thing we all have to play our part, and I know that sounds basic, obvious not just as individuals, but organizations collectively have to play their part, because we will never solve this such a complex problem without everyone coming together and trying to move things forward as quickly as possible.

Mark Smith: 37:01
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. Is there a guest you would like to see on the show from Microsoft? Please message me on LinkedIn and I'll see what I can do. Final question for you how will you create with Copilot today, ka kite?