Insight 43 - Magazine - Page 13
Kerry Doble, Chief Sustainability Officer,
Lintbells talked about how she had
taken the pet supplement company on
its sustainability journey. This involved
achieving B Corps certification setting the
highest quality environmental and social
standards.
Kerry said: “We have talked about green
businesses – I have never looked at
ourselves and thought, we are a green
business. We are a business that is trying
to do some good. And in order to do that
it was really important to me that we
looked at the operational effectiveness
and the efficiency of our business and
understand how we can make changes
in order to do better. Not all of those
changes were mind blowing. We never
went after B Corp to get a stamp to show
to the world how good we are. We went
after it because we believed in what it
stood for.”
Chris Hulatt, Co-Founder, Octopus
Group, said that green issues were not
at the forefront of the business when it
started with the first renewables coming
"We have talked about
green businesses – I have
never looked at ourselves
and thought, we are a
green business. We are a
business that is trying to
do some good."
Kerry Doble
Chief Sustainability Officer,
Lintbells
in around 2011. At that time solar panels
were starting to take off. Now Octopus
Energy have helped build solar and
wind farms not just in the UK but much
further afield. He said that renewable
expertise is a real UK success story with
businesses such as RES, the world’s largest
independent renewable energy company,
spreading that Hertfordshire expertise
across the world.
He said: “To me the opportunity in
renewables is both large scale, such as
off-shore wind where the UK is a market
leader, and community scale renewables,
where I think the future is.”
Asked where we could do better Chris said
it was about joining up opportunities for
training, such as the thousands of heat
pump engineers that will be required in
the future and supporting businesses
thinking hard about what they might look
like in a few years’ time.
Shifting onto a sustainable footing makes
good business sense too. Ian Pigott said
that each and every one of the businesses
on his farm were all trying to find ways to
make their operations more sustainable
because they realise it is what incentivises
their teams and their customers as well.
Closing the session Matt Deegan asked
each of the panellists what advice they
would give to businesses embarking
on their sustainability journey. ‘Start
somewhere!’ said Kerry. What a good place
to end.
WEBINAR 3: ARE WE AI READY?
This was the exam question put to our
panel of digital experts in the final
Hertfordshire Futures online policy
debates looking at key issues affecting
the growth of the economy.
In this last debate chaired by podcast
presenter Matt Deegan, our panel of
national and regional leaders covered a
range of topics relating to the risks and
opportunities of AI adoption, innovation
and addressing digital exclusion.
Ed Thomas, Research Director, Global Data
Plc set out the wider context saying that
2025 was the year that AI had to deliver on
its promises. He said: “There have been
a number of waves of AI hype if you take
this technology back to the 1950s when
scientists started to ask the question
whether machines could think. Since then
there have been peaks and troughs in
interest in AI.
“Around 2010 there was a resurgence of
interest, largely around voice AI, so there
was a lot of chat about chatbots and
virtual assistants. Shortly after then was
the arrival of Alexa and Google Assistant.
In each of those waves you had the
promise of what AI could deliver and the
reality of what it does – and often there
has been quite a big gap between the two.”
The audience then heard live examples of
how AI has been successfully incorporated
into business operations both within a
retail giant and a very successful and
growing air quality and energy monitoring
company.
Stewart Vincent led on creating an AI
store for Aldi which he said removed the
barriers around check-outs, particularly for
parents navigating queues at the tills with
children in tow. It also opened up a wider
opportunity for employers to encourage
staff to use and implement this new
technology, upskilling employees to both
support the store and the customers. As
well as investment in people and training,
the other big business benefit was data.
This provided a lot more information on
customers and how they shopped.
Julia McNally, Director, Wellstat Limited,
is a wireless entrepreneur, founder of
Hertfordshire business Iknaia and creator
of Airscan air quality monitoring. Iknaia
was acquired by Wellstat , a US-based
leader in energy management and air
quality solutions, on 1 January 2025.
Julia explained that incorporating AI had
been an amazing achievement for them
as it meant that they could bring a lot
more insight back to customers and local
authorities. AI can help them to predict
pollution events, by bringing in multiple
data sets and analysing pollution
alongside traffic events, this can help
traffic planners and environmental
managers to plan for better roads
layouts, and new housing developments.
She said that as the business had scaled
and is now on a global platform they
have been able to automate certain
functions that had previously been
carried out manually, enabling them to
divert that resource to other areas such
as analysis.
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