He is on ACAA LOMLA sponsored by Teamsters Local nineteen thirty two, protecting the future of working Families Teamsters nineteen thirty two dot org. The information economy has a rod. The world is teeming with innovation as new business models reinvent every industry industry. Inside Analysis is your source of information and insight about how to make the most of this exciting new era. Learn more at inside analysis dot 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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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 debate performance. Virginia Senator Mark Warner is said to be organizing a similar effort in the US Senate. Both President Biden and former President Trump should take cognitive tests. That's what California Democrat Adam Schiff told NBC's Meet the Press. They
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