Scope3 begins tracking the carbon footprint of AI

Brian O'Kelly, known as the successful entrepreneur who sold his AppNexus advertising platform to AT&T for $1.6 billion, recently started a new venture called Scope3, which aims to track the carbon footprint in digital advertising. However, his new inspiration came to him after an MIT lecture on supply chain management in which one slide about the carbon footprint of a banana literally ‘blew his mind.’ That moment spurred his idea to use technology to better track carbon emissions in a digital world.

Previously, O'Kelly led a metals trading platform that focused on reducing carbon emissions by optimising trading and transportation. However, after digging deeper into the process, he realised that the main carbon emissions in the metals industry were associated with the mining and smelting of raw materials, making the later stages of optimisation less meaningful. O'Kelly eventually made the decision to leave the real world of metals trading and return to the ‘ephemeral’ digital world of advertising, where he saw great opportunities to impact carbon footprints.

Scope3 uses technology to track carbon footprints in digital advertising, allowing advertisers to not only get better performance from their adverts, but also reduce their environmental impact. According to O'Kelly, up to 25 per cent of digital advertising spend is wasted on middlemen and fraudulent schemes. By reducing the amount of useless advertising, companies can reduce data centre energy consumption, which in turn will reduce carbon emissions.

However, fate intervened: Brian was forced to undergo unexpected heart surgery, which gave him time to reflect. During this period, he began to look deeper into the possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and its intersections with the digital world. He realised that AI was already heavily embedded in advertising: it was being used to create ad campaigns, generate content for web pages, and search engines were beginning to be powered by AI.

O'Kelly began to realise that Scope3's future was not limited to digital advertising. He thought about how his platform could track the carbon footprint created by AI and concluded that the two technologies - AI and digital advertising - were closely linked. He consulted with investors and this led to a new $25 million funding round for the company. The funds will be used to expand the company into AI and to develop new methods of tracking the carbon footprint that AI leaves behind when it operates.

Scope3 is still collecting data and developing models to estimate AI's carbon footprint, but O'Kelly is confident that the economic and environmental costs associated with AI will be comparable to the impact of digital advertising. In the future, Scope3 plans to provide its clients with solutions that will not only improve the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns, but also reduce the carbon footprint resulting from the use of AI for content generation and advertising.

This makes Scope3 one of the first companies that will provide solutions to track and reduce carbon footprint not only in digital advertising but also in AI, allowing it to stay at the forefront of technological and environmental innovation.