Industrial companies should brace for increasing pressure from investors and local governments to be more transparent about their greenhouse gas footprint, an IBM executive told Baton Rouge business leaders Friday.
Rishi Vaish, chief technology officer and vice president for IBM’S artificial intelligence applications, noted that companies must report three kinds of emissions to the federal government: scope 1, or direct emissions from production; scope 2, or emissions from their energy sources; and scope 3, emissions from their supply chain.
“I think there’s going to be more and more pressure from regulators to field a report on these statistics,” he told the crowd at TEC Next, an industrial technology conference held in downtown Baton Rouge. “If you work with your consumers, if you work with your customers and get this data into a blockchain, it becomes much easier to have this conversation on auditability of your greenhouse gas footprint.”
The two-day conference concluded Friday in the Manship Theater at the Shaw Center for the Arts. It brought together officials from companies such as ExxonMobil, Honeywell and Data Gumbo to talk about subjects such as global emergency preparedness, reducing supply chain expenses and autonomous operation.
Vaish discussed the impact of evolving, data-driven technologies — such as blockchain and artificial intelligence — on supply chains, worker safety, compliance and more.
He spoke at length about blockchain, a secure database technology that encrypts data so it can’t be tampered with once it’s stored. It is frequently used to secure cryptocurrency transactions.
Vaish said industrial companies — which rely upon reams of statistics to make long-term decisions about equipment purchases and personnel — should take their data about their greenhouse gas emissions and put it into an “auditable” database, such as blockchain, so governments, investors and even the public can review them.
He said the challenge with most of his clients isn’t convincing them to share the data — it’s figuring out what to do with thousands of pages of reports.
“The transparency helps everyone in that supply chain do better. It saves money for the hub in the wheel. It saves money for all of the spokes,” he said. “The biggest thing to do is we only have the companies put in the data that they are comfortable with sharing. So it doesn’t have to be all the data about their production at a facility. They can choose the kind of data that they want in there.”
Rishi said IBM is working with companies to retain the institutional knowledge of experienced workers who are bound to retire soon. He said U.S. Census data shows the number of workers near the retirement age is “huge.”
IBM has developed mobile apps that can scan a machine and automatically detect what inspections are needed to extend the life of the machine, Vaish said. Sometimes, it takes workers years to learn those complicated processes.
“As I look forward, I think this gap between existing workers and new workers is going to grow,” he said. “I would encourage you to go back and look at some of the stats in your own businesses and try to prevent this (knowledge loss) from happening because it causes huge slowdowns of work today.”
