IBM Announces AI-Driven Software for Environmental Intelligence

IBM has unveiled a new suite of environmental intelligence software that uses AI to enable organizations to prepare for and respond to weather and climate risks. By doing this, these companies can avoid business disruption, assess their impact on the environment, and reduce the complexity of regulatory compliance.

IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite

The IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite helps companies streamline and automate the management of environmental risks and operationalize underlying processes like carbon accounting. This helps the companies meet environmental goals. 

The suite uses already existing weather data from IBM, advanced geospatial analytics, and new innovations from IBM research. It is the first of its kind to combine AI, weather data, climate risk analytics, and carbon accounting capabilities in such a manner. With the suite, organizations can spend less resources curating complex data and more on analyzing it for insights.

There are four main goals of the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite: monitoring for disruptive environmental conditions like severe weather, wildfires, flooding and air quality while sending alerts; predicting the potential impacts of climate change and weather across the business through climate risk analytics; to gain insights into potential operational disruptions and prioritize mitigation and response efforts; to measure and report on environmental initiatives and operationalize carbon accounting.

IBM Environmental Suite delivers environmental insights through APIs, dashboards, maps and alerts. It could be used to help retailers prepare for weather-related shipping and inventory disruptions, or help organizations determine the environmental risks of future warehouse locations. 

Kareem Yusuf, Ph.D., is General Manager of IBM API Applications. 

“The future of business and the environment are deeply intertwined. Not only are companies coping with the effects of extreme weather disruptions on their operations, they’re also being held increasingly accountable by shareholders and regulators for how their operations impact the planet,” said Yusuf. “IBM is bringing together the power of AI and hybrid cloud to provide businesses with environmental intelligence designed to help them improve environmental performance and reporting, create more efficient business operations to reduce resource consumption, and plan for resiliency in the face of climate disruptions.”

AI-Driven Innovations From IBM Research

The IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite leverages the AI-driven innovations from IBM research to enable climate and data scientists to analyze massive environmental datasets more easily. It also uses a new climate risk modeling framework to generate data on future wildfire and flooding risks, as well as technologies from IBM research that apply natural language processing (NLP) and automation designed to help companies estimate carbon emissions and identify ways to reduce them across operations.

By being able to be integrated with IBM’s broader software portfolio, the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite provides additional efficiencies across business operations. 

Organizations can also use IBM Global Business Services to help design, implement and accelerate the transformation into an environmental business. Some of these strategies can include reimagining operations, supply chains, emissions management, and climate risk reporting.