An End to End Approach to Sustainability

Melody Brue:
Welcome to the End-to-End Approach to Sustainability Keynote Spotlight. I’m Melody Brue, VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, and I am happy to introduce you to Cassandra Garber, vice president, Corporate Sustainability and ESG at Dell. Hi, Cassandra. How are you?

Cassandra Garber:
I’m doing great. How are you?

Melody Brue:
I’m good. And we’re so happy to have you at Summit. Today we’re going to be discussing Dell’s comprehensive strategy and latest initiatives in sustainability and ESG. Also, you’re going to be giving some advice for businesses looking to incorporate these principles into their operations, right?

Cassandra Garber:
Yes. Yeah, that’s the plan.

Melody Brue:
Good.

Cassandra Garber:
Let’s see where it goes.

Melody Brue:
I’m so happy to be talking about this. This is actually one of my favorite things to talk about. I think it’s so important. I really applaud Dell for being so vocal about this because lately companies, I think, even if they’re doing it, they’re just not talking about it enough. I really love that Dell just comes out and talks about it and does it. So let’s talk about it. First, let’s just start out with some of your recent announcements. What’s new in sustainability and ESG?

Cassandra Garber:
Yeah. So what’s new in this space? There’s plenty that’s going on. I’d say, there’s a few things happening bigger picture in this space that drive why Dell is doing what we are doing in this space. So the big things happening in the world, I don’t know if you’ve heard of AI.

Melody Brue:
Yeah.

Cassandra Garber:
It took us two minutes. The first thing we talk about. So AI obviously and the tremendous impact, so we can talk more about what that is, but that’s significant. Environmental and social impacts of AI are making that a very relevant conversation from a sustainability perspective right now. So there’s that. At the same time, there are new and increasing regulations on environmental and social topics in the EU and the US in particular, but also internationally there’s other regulations and standards and things that are coming up that are pretty substantial. When you combine those together, you have customer demand on environmental and social data, reporting, products, information, just transparency in general, partnerships, you name it. Customer demand on these topics is just really going up because of those other two things that I mentioned in particular, as well as our customers want to make their own commitments, differentiate on these things, all of that stuff as well.

All of that stuff together is why at Dell, our new thing is we’ve really tried to articulate, and that’s why we call it end-to-end, we’ve tried to articulate how we are differentiating in this space. And the way we’re differentiated is because we provide end-to-end sustainability. And that’s fascinating and it’s a very interesting conversation right now because we have always in the past packaged up, “Here are our offerings to you customer, here are the things that we can bring to you from a environmental and a social perspective.” And now customers are saying, “But I want to know what you’re doing behind the scenes. In addition to what you’re offering to me, I want to know what you’ve got going on.” And we call that the backend. “In addition to what we want to see from you, or what we want to buy from you, or what we want to partner with you on is the front end.”

And then we like to also talk about a third bucket, which is our collective impact together. Customers are also asking, “Okay, if you’re doing that on your backend and you’re bringing that to me in your front end, we want to partner with you and do something together for collective impact.” So that’s in a nutshell what we mean when we say end-to-end. It’s the big thing we’re focused on right now is full portfolio of sustainability, the same way our company has a full portfolio of IT solutions.

Melody Brue:
Give an example of that, what you would call, I think, an end-to-end approach isn’t necessarily new, but give in your definition an example of what that would look like for a customer.

Cassandra Garber:
The conversations I’m having with customers right now are so fun because what it looks like for us is an actual… We have a slide, it’s a portfolio on a page and it feels like a menu, which is really interesting, because a customer might come and say, “Hey, we want to talk sustainable data centers in the age of AI.” That’s how a lot of conversations are happening right now. That’s how they’re starting.

So we get together, we put this portfolio in front of them and we start down front end what is a sustainable data center and how can we help you? Whether that’s determine what a sustainable data center might look like for you. We get efficient tools. We’ve got all kinds of things. We’ve got APEX as a service. We’ve got take back services. We’ve got all kinds of things we can do from a sustainable data center perspective. So what’s interesting is, we’ll start in that conversation, but when they see the end-to-end portfolio on a page, they’ll say, “Hold on. Time out. Before we dive deeper in the sustainable data center, tell me about how you are managing these regulations. Because we too are trying to figure out how do we operationalize sustainability within our company? How do we make it part of everything that we do? And how do we prepare for regulations?” Because what we’re all looking to do as part of these regulations is disclose environmental and social progress and activities in a way that is auditable, like financial disclosures. That is not a small task.

What happens in this portfolio conversation is, we start talking sustainable data centers. By the end, we have covered off on supply chain partnerships, we’ve covered off on operating models for how you might stand up a structure within your company, we’ve covered off on a potential partnership to drive digital inclusion in communities that we both share where there are underserved populations that we both want to help address because it’s relevant to us. The cool part is that the conversation becomes very end-to-end instead of focused on one issue, because none of this tends to be just one issue. They’re all almost entirely systemic issues.

Melody Brue:
Right. And they all touch each other.

Cassandra Garber:
Exactly. Yeah.

Melody Brue:
AI, as you mentioned, will have a major impact on sustainability. So let’s talk about that and what your approach is there.

Cassandra Garber:
Yeah. The way we’ve been thinking about AI and sustainability is, none of the issues that are coming up now that we’re all talking about with AI are new. None of this is new. The demand for power, not a new issue. The greenhouse gas emissions that will be created associated with all these large language models and the power consumption with them. E-waste, that is only going to grow bigger because everyone will want the latest and greatest AI PCs, AI servers, you name it, AI everything. There will be more e-waste, not a new issue. Digital inclusion or the digital divide, those who have not had in the past from a digital society perspective will continue to not have if we don’t empower them with AI skills to safely use them and have access to AI.

So none of these things are new, but the risk and the opportunity is bigger. That’s the big change. So while greenhouse gas emissions are not a new thing, they are expected and projected to go up substantially anywhere from eight to 20 times what we had been looking at before. So they’re quite significantly larger issues from that standpoint. Similarly with e-waste, we know there’s just going to be so much of it, but the opportunities are there, too. So what’s really challenging and fantastic about AI is that, while it’s going to bring a heavier environmental impact, we can actually use AI to address some of the impacts as well. So we’re looking at within tools that we offer to our customers, how we’re using AI from a data management perspective within sustainable data centers. So when we have that data center conversation, we can talk about AI ops, we call it. So we have tools that can actually help manage energy usage be more efficient in the data center. So it can do those kinds of things. Risk there, opportunity also there.

And then way on the other side over from a social perspective and a digital divide, as I mentioned, there will be communities who will be left behind if we don’t address that. We’re using AI right now to… We have a digital assistant whose name is Tomas. There’s actually a few avatars, but Tomas. We launched Tomas recently at Dell Tech World. He’s an AI generated digital assistant who helps students learn interview skills and learn these soft skills so they can actually feel confident going out in the job market. And if you play around with this tool, it’s just fantastic. Interviewers also learn from the experience about how to be a good interviewer, how to interview, and how to have the confidence to go out and get these jobs. There’s just so much risk and so many of these issues, but there’s also tremendous opportunity to use AI to address these really big societal issues.

Melody Brue:
There’s so much. And like you said, there’s so much risk, so much opportunity. How do you prioritize? And what’s top of mind for you for this? I think you could say what’s really big picture? But let’s narrow in what’s top of mind for you this year?

Cassandra Garber:
Yeah. We’ve had to really prioritize because there’s so much happening. For us, we have been very clear about what are our priorities in the short-term. I mean, long-term, we have 2030 goals and we have 2050 goals as well from a net zero perspective. So long-term, that actually remains unchanged. From a short-term perspective, it’s not going to sound any different than what I just said. I mean, our short-term priorities are regulatory preparedness. For those companies who are impacted by the EUCSRD, by the SCC, and climate rulings and things like that, that has to be top of mind. Of course, to be compliant from a regulatory perspective.

What’s really interesting is, as you’re preparing for the regulations, it crosses over. A lot of the same bodies of work are necessary to meet customer demand right now. So our customer critical few are not surprisingly the same things we’ve been talking about. Our customer critical few are AI and sustainability. Let’s work through this together. Let’s figure this out together. It’s sustainable data centers, product carbon footprints, circular design, human rights, ethics, privacy, security. So we have, of course, built trust into everything that we do. Those kinds of things are not new, but they remain our top priorities. We have to prioritize the issues that we’re going to focus on. Those are the big ones for us that we are really innovating against right now and seeking an outside impact. And then, of course, delivering on our 2030 and beyond goals, that remains at a high priority for us as a company. Those three buckets are more than enough these days, I’ll say.

Melody Brue:
Yeah, that’s a lot. You did mention the AI PC. I’m curious just hear what you’re hearing from customers on product life cycle.

Cassandra Garber:
Yeah. Well, it’s really interesting. I’d say almost as much as we’re having the AI conversation, we are having the circularity conversation, where we’re talking about sustainable materials, and we’re talking about take back and recycling services and all those kinds of things. Everybody’s super excited about the AI PC, and it’s phenomenal. There’s so many really cool things with the ones that we’ve announced and launched. But quickly after, it is a conversation about when we’re ready, some are ready now, some are not quite ready. How are we going to manage to take back? How are we going to manage the e-waste associated with that?

The work that we’ve been doing in all of the above, not just the take back service, but from the sustainable materials that we’ve been using to how we are designing for repairability and thinking about that and to the services… And I can’t help but throw out there, too, we launched an environmental impact report as well, so we actually could start providing some clarity and some reporting on the impact associated with recycling and things like that. Just that kind of data in general and reporting is so important. That’s what we’re hearing from customers right now. We’re super excited about the AI PC. Let’s also talk about the process to get it and what happens to all the old stuff.

Melody Brue:
So you’re having a lot of conversations with customers. Let’s talk about the ones who you’re not having conversations with, or maybe somebody who’s not yet a customer. What advice do you give them?

Cassandra Garber:
Yeah. In the world we’re in right now, I would say, the first thing that companies want to do is listen. Have those stakeholder conversations to understand, and that’s internal and external conversations, what are the issues? What are the risks to your company? So that you make sure to understand, yes, in the world of AI, but frankly just being a corporation in the environment that we’re in today, what are those risks and opportunities to your company? And you need to understand, listen to what those are, and then document them. And I would say document them through a double materiality process. Double materiality is the new thing where materiality has had financial materiality and then there’s been a sustainability materiality. Those worlds are colliding, as I said, because of the regulations. A double materiality process helps a company understand the impacts that these environment on social issues are going to have on them and the impacts that they will then have on society.

It’s a process that you can go through to then document that, put that in one place and you can prioritize. So just to the point of we’ve gotten pretty clear on what are our priority areas that are most material to our business. Every company should be figuring that out. And then you can then implement that in your company. So we put together, we lovingly refer to it as the ESG OMG, but that stands for operating model and governance. It’s fun to say that because it is pretty complex when you’re in a matrixed environment.

But that’s the third thing I would tell everyone to do; get your structure right. Because in order to implement any kind of change, in order to be agile right now as this space is just moving so quickly, in order to be strategic and in order to have an impact on a shared set of things, you have to have the foundational structure in place to do that. Once you know what you need or you know what your stakeholders are looking for, you’ve documented that through double materiality, you’ve put the structure in place to actually run it. I think then you’ve done the foundational kinds of things that you can actually have a real meaningful impact, both for your business and society much more broadly. And for anyone who’s looking for help, contact your Dell representative. They’re happy to help you figure that out.

Melody Brue:
That’s great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you all for tuning in to End-To-End Approach to Sustainability with Cassandra Garber. Cassandra, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us. Again, I so appreciate all the work that Dell is doing. We really appreciate you joining us for the 65 Summit. Thank you to everybody for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.