Harnessing AI for resilience, efficiency, and sustainability

As the new AI economy unfolds, we are seeing leading organizations around the world harness the potential of AI to accelerate business resilience, efficiency, and sustainability. For example, business leaders are using AI to enable smarter resource use, optimize systems for efficiency, and foster innovations in carbon-free energy and conservation—advancing both productivity and prosperity.

In a recent playbook, Accelerating sustainability with AI: Innovations for a better future, we outlined our five plays to advance sustainability, providing insight into our work at Microsoft and how business leaders around the world are creating a new path forward.

The reason to choose AI for this work? It has three unique abilities that can help organizations overcome key bottlenecks. AI can: (1) measure, predict, and optimize complex systems, (2) accelerate the development of sustainability solutions, and (3), empower the sustainability workforce. These capabilities make AI a critical enabler of progress.

How can business leaders harness AI to accelerate resilience, efficiency, and sustainability in their organization?

I recently met with Lindsay Myers, Vice President, Commercial Cross Solutions at Microsoft, who leads our Commercial Sustainability business, to talk more about this guidance and how business leaders can harness AI to accelerate resilience, efficiency, and sustainability in their organizations.

Toby: Hi Lindsay, before we dive into the playbook, can you share your thoughts on how organizations are adopting AI to address these interconnected goals of resilience, efficiency, and sustainability?

Lindsay: It’s important to highlight how interconnected these goals are in many organizations today. We often see initiatives started by sustainability teams result in significant cost savings for organizations. This might be efficiency gains for existing operations, or entirely new approaches like digital twins that enable rapid iteration before initial prototypes are built. When companies choose an approach like digital twins, it can reduce the materials needed for physical models—saving time and costs—while improving resilience through agility.

Explore customer and partner examples of AI innovation

Toby: Can you give me some examples of customers and partners who are doing this work today?

Lindsay: AI is making a real difference in helping organizations prepare for climate risks, innovate for maximum efficiency, and solve complex challenges. For example, in Germany, where urban flooding is a major concern, cities are searching for innovative ways to mitigate the impacts of heavy rainfall and its impact on communities and infrastructure. Esri, a global leader in geographic information system (GIS) software is helping cities unlock the power of digital twins driven by geospatial data and AI. This solution helped the City of Stuttgart cut its reality mapping time from five months to 24 hours, enabling local government and public safety staff to understand potential impacts and make decisions faster.

Stadtwerke München (SWM), the municipal utilities company serving Munich, has made it its mission to drive every aspect of the city’s energy, heating, and mobility transition forward. To accomplish this, it needed maximum-efficiency processes, such as predictive infrastructure maintenance and optimized operations planning. It has turned to Microsoft Azure and Azure IoT to efficiently provide power to its public transport fleet of 100% electrified vehicles.

Unlock new possibilities with data and AI

Toby: Those are inspiring examples; they give a real sense of AI’s potential. The playbook outlines 5 plays, or ways that organizations can unlock this potential. Could you describe some of these?

Lindsay: Let’s talk first about the first two plays and how they work together.

Investing in AI solutions to measure, predict, and optimize complex systems can drive both innovation and efficiency, helping companies focus on the most strategic priorities for business resilience.

For example, Mitiga Solutions, a global leader in climate risk intelligence and a Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund investment leverages AI, high-performance computing, and advanced climate models to predict the impact of physical climate hazards on any asset, anywhere in the world, from now until the end of the century. This helps infrastructure, commercial real estate, insurers, and companies across industries comply with climate disclosure regulations while proactively strengthening their resilience.

 With AI-powered solutions, businesses can swiftly tackle complex challenges across their own supply chains and for their customers. This not only positions companies as leaders in sustainability but can also unlock new market opportunities and enhance their competitive advantage.

It’s crucial to build a strong digital and data infrastructure to maximize AI’s potential—your AI is only as good as the data it relies on. That’s why having high-quality, representative data and the right processing infrastructure is essential. It enables teams to make informed decisions and provides accurate input for AI applications.

For many of our customers and partners, these two plays are closely linked. The foundational work involves bringing all the necessary data together in one place, like in Microsoft Fabric. What’s amazing about Fabric is it lets you reason over both internal and external data, which is incredibly helpful for things like regulatory reporting.

Once your data is set up properly, your team can use solutions such as Microsoft Copilot to ask questions of their data, generate reports, and learn from industry best practices. Copilot streamlines these tasks, reducing manual work and enabling practitioners to focus their time on new strategic initiatives.

Minimize resource use in AI design and operations

Toby: When I talk to organizations looking to adopt AI, customers and partners often want to learn more about what Microsoft is doing to reduce the environmental impact of AI. Could we talk a bit about that?

Lindsay: Absolutely. Let’s talk about play 3 and how that relates to our work at Microsoft.

AI has its own energy and water demands, so it’s crucial to minimize resource use and move toward powering AI systems with carbon-free energy. In addition, since AI infrastructure is often concentrated in specific regions, it is essential to support the local communities where datacenters are located. At Microsoft, we’re innovating across three critical areas to continue to advance the sustainability of cloud and AI services:

1. Optimizing datacenter energy, water, and waste efficiency while protecting ecosystems.
2. Advancing low-carbon materials and creating global markets to promote industry-wide sustainability.
3. Enhancing the energy efficiency of AI and cloud services.

Many of our customers and partners want to know not only what we’re doing, but also what they can do to manage resource use. Our Well-Architected Framework sustainability guidance provides a great starting point, as well as small language models that perform specific tasks using fewer resources than larger models.

Build workforce capacity to use AI for sustainability

Toby: The pace of innovation in this domain is incredible. Is there anything more you’d like to add in terms of how your team helps leaders move their ideas from concept to implementation?

Lindsay: The way forward on this journey is through people working together, and this is an area where we can help customers and partners make progress. Let’s talk about the final play first:

For companies to be able to put AI’s three game-changing capabilities to work, they must have skills to use AI effectively. Microsoft has training programs focused on building AI fluency, supporting nonprofits, businesses, and governments in advancing workforce AI technical skills and promoting safe and responsible AI development.

Microsoft’s AI learning hub can empower customers on their AI transformation journey, and customers can also use Copilot to connect with their data in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability and sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. With these tools, employees can quickly gain insights, understand gaps, and identify what’s needed to move initiatives forward.

Toby: Thank you, Lindsay!

Transform business using generative AI

For business leaders wanting to put these plays in action and guide their organizations through effective AI adoption, we’ve published the 2025 AI Decision Brief: Insights from Microsoft and AI leaders on navigating the generative AI platform shift. This report is packed with perspectives from top Microsoft leaders and insights from AI innovators, along with stories of companies across industries that have transformed their businesses using generative AI.

The post Harnessing AI for resilience, efficiency, and sustainability appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Source: Microsoft Industry Blog