Host Sanjay Podder is joined by Eric Gertsman, Director of Tech Sustainability at Salesforce. They talk about shaping the future of green IT, with Eric sharing his journey from entrepreneur to sustainability leader, his work decarbonizing data centers, and the importance of accurate carbon accounting through Salesforce’s Net Zero Cloud. They explore the AI Energy Score, a new tool developed in collaboration with Hugging Face to benchmark AI model efficiency, and discuss managing water as a critical resource in sustainable operations. Together they highlight how aligning sustainability with core business objectives can drive both environmental impact and business success.

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Sanjay Podder: Hello and welcome to CXO Bytes, a podcast brought to you by the Green Software Foundation and dedicated to supporting chiefs of information, technology, sustainability, and AI as they aim to shape a sustainable future through green software. We will uncover the strategies and a big green move that's helped drive results for business and for the planet.

I am your host, Sanjay Podder.

Welcome to another episode of CXO Bytes, where we bring you unique insights into the world of sustainable software development from the view of the C-Suite. I am your host, Sanjay Poddar. Today's guest brings a rare blend of entrepreneurial spirit, tech savvy, and sustainability leadership. Eric Gertsman is the Director of Technology Sustainability at Salesforce where he's helping shape the future of green IT, from data center planning and infrastructure strategy to carbon accountability. Before Salesforce, Eric co-founded a company that built solar powered artisan travel trailers. Talking about walking the talk. He's also been a passionate advocate for ethical capitalism and the role of business as a platform for change. Eric, welcome to the show. Kindly introduce yourself.

Eric Gertsman: Thanks, Sanjay. I appreciate you having me on. Excited to be here. Yes. I'm the Director of Tech Sustainability at Salesforce. As the title indicates, right, I focus on Salesforce's cloud infrastructure, which is a bedrock of the company and it's one of the first companies to embrace this infrastructure as a service model.

So it's a very interesting view that the company's had over the years on infrastructure. I focus on decarbonizing our co-location and hyperscale data centers in this wildly changing industry, right? Most recently with the rise of AI. But every decade presents wild new challenges.

I also pay attention to our water footprint, our waste footprint, in a number of other areas. So I'm excited to talk to you today.

Sanjay Podder: Wonderful. Some great topics we will get insights from you on. So looking forward to this conversation, Eric. So, Eric, let's start with your journey. You have worn many hats, marketing, consulting, startup founder, and now sustainability leader at one of the world's biggest tech companies. What inspired your transition into Green Tech and how did you, you know, select this role and your current work at Salesforce?

Eric Gertsman: Well, I think the one word answer would be 'meaning.' I'm not the type of person that checks in and checks out, very well for a paycheck. I really need to focus on things that are positively contributing to humanity. So, way back, almost two decades ago, I thought long and hard about what my career was gonna look like and realized that I wanted to focus on changing the world really from the inside out, incrementally moving organizations towards more sustainable, more efficient, more responsible activities. And you know, obviously over the last 20 years, while that may sound sexy, right, it happens in smaller, seemingly mundane chunks where, you know, it's one spreadsheet at a time or one case study or a meaningful meeting or a data source or something that, you know, you make incremental change and could have pretty wide effects.

But yeah, I mean, it, you know, it, I could certainly talk about, for younger people how to do it, but really just to keep pushing and keep learning, whether you're in a company you wanna do intrapreneurship, to do more on the sustainability side and broaden your scope, to have a bigger impact.

You know, whether you're in school and you wanna like look at the right classes and projects and case competitions or whatever, you know, keep pushing hard 'cause there's plenty out there to find. And all of that set me up for a path, over the last six years at Salesforce, to have really good impact.

And I will say my time here actually has not just been sustainability. In fact, a lot of it has been around data center planning, infrastructure strategy, FinOps. Which has given me a much richer picture of what the company is and what it really means to do sustainability work. So, I'd welcome other people to, you know, bring cross-functional capabilities to the field.

Sanjay Podder: No, I think you bring up a very good point on the cross-functional, you know, capabilities because to green the tech, you need to understand the underlying tech very well, right? Because in some sense, the greening of tech is building a tech which is much more efficient, bringing in some of the best practices.

So I think all the past experience you had really enables you to now deliver on the promise of green tech, but that's fantastic. I'm sure a lot of our young people are interested to do a career here, so these are great points.

So Eric, last year, I remember Salesforce released a Business Guide to Carbon Accounting, which breaks down how companies can measure and reduce their greenhouse gas emission. Why is carbon accounting so central to corporate sustainability today? And how are you implementing these principles inside Salesforce's own infrastructure operations?

Eric Gertsman: Yep. Great. Great question and thanks for pointing out that resource. It's a good resource, your listeners can go to our website, download it, and I think you'll be providing links, I think, about some of the stuff we're talking about here, so it's a good one. Yeah, I mean, carbon accounting and the way I see it, right, we've all heard the old ad adage you can't manage what you can't measure.

I think that's never truer than it is in sustainability. Proper tracking is the precursor to pretty much everything. All programs aimed at identifying opportunities, implementing action and determining results requires that, and it's vital, right, for any sustainability organization. 

It's often new stuff. It has been, there's new ways. It's a little bit of art, a little bit of science. We obviously at Salesforce confirm things with third party verification, but sometimes bring in our own sources and our own methodologies and make sure everything is strong and well devised.

I also wanna take an opportunity, I think, 'cause a part of, for me, carbon accounting is not just the sort of the back looking after the fact accounting. I think a lot of it is the forward looking target setting, which I think is, a big part of, I think what this, world of, you know, data and data tracking and, sustainability really is.

And so, you know, at Salesforce, one of our biggest north stars is science-based targets. And for those of you who aren't familiar with that term, they're long-term corporate goals, that are aligned to keeping the globe warming at no more than 1.5 degrees centigrade. Which, of course, is an enormous goal and quite frankly, maybe impossible today.

But leading companies truly do have to think about our future and we need to be ambitious. We need to push for where we need to be. As you mentioned, our founder and CEO Marc Benioff has always said, I think you mentioned that it's a platform for change. Business is a platform for change.

And it's been embedded in our culture in a variety of different ways. Because, you know, as the world shifts and as politics, winds shift around, you know, it's about corporate leadership, I think, that's gonna really pave the way. And so by setting these goals, I think is one real important way for us to stay laser focused on what we need to do as a society from the business perspective.

And there are a lot of different ways how to do this right, to set different scopes and using different metrics. Yeah, and there's ways to engage, right? The Science-Based Target Institute is one organization that can help, but there's many pathways to doing this. We set an aggressive 2040 goal with interim 2030 goals, focused on scope one and two total decarbonization, and then scope three intensity reduction. And so it looks a little different for everyone, but I think that's super important, because as the company has multiple priorities, right, we don't want sustainability to be a nice to have, but a need to have, and that other priorities won't swamp it or dissolve it at the first chance because, you know, they're not as, you know, they don't have as hard and fast of the targets and objectives as other groups.

Sanjay Podder: Yeah. And you know, when we started the Green Software Foundation, one of the mission was to see how we can reduce emission from the IT sector in line with the Paris Agreement. And things like carbon accounting is so critical there because, as you rightly mentioned, you can only reduce what you can measure, right?

And bringing the emission from IT central to the way organizations are trying to address their net zero goals, right, meet their net zero goals, I guess, what you are, really doing in Salesforce is a very good example of what successful organizations do. You know, we have seen studies that point to the fact that successful organizations in their industry, they integrate sustainability in their tech strategy. And that also ends up with better shareholder value. So, it's a win-win for all. And, I think what you are doing are great examples for people to learn from. Eric, I think it was just a couple of months back, I saw the announcement of AI energy score and as you know, this year in the Green Software Foundation, one of our big focus is sustainable AI, green AI, how do you reduce the environmental impact of AI? So I really liked what you announced, and I wanted to go a little deeper with you on the AI energy score. What was your thinking behind it and, you know, how did you come together with Hugging face and many such organizations to create something very tangible for people to rank the emissions from AI? What is your vision going forward? So if you can just educate us a little bit on the AI Energy Score and point us to the right set of resources to learn more.

Eric Gertsman: Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's actually an interesting time for AI. Obviously, everyone points to the fact that we're gonna be seeing a lot of energy increases and that very well may be the case. We're seeing a lot of demand. It remains to be seen whether we're gonna see a doubling, a tripling, who knows what we're gonna see in the industry, from an increase there.

But I'm thankful that many of us are paying attention much more today than we did 20, 30 years ago at the rise of sort of the internet. I mean, people are laser focused on the fact that this will have an impact and we have to get in front of it early as opposed to later when, you know, a lot of things are gonna be baked and, much more difficult. 

So we did collaborate with Hugging Face, Cohere, Carnegie Mellon University to develop the AI Energy Score. And that's a standardized framework for measuring and comparing AI model energy efficiency, which scores a bunch of different inference tasks, right? Like text generation, image generation, summarization, and gives them a one to five star rating, right?

With five being the most efficient. And we're focusing on the inference, energy side here because it obviously presents a very complex challenge with a wide array of variables, hardware configurations, model optimizations, deployment scenarios, usage patterns. And so we're aiming at addressing these by establishing like standardized benchmarks, which will ultimately, I think, help developers and all users identify, choose more sustainable models, and eventually create this sort of like energy label paradigm, right, for their model scoring. Right now we have, I think we're evaluating 166 models, including a few of Salesforce's own models. But the idea is that with more transparency and more ranking, I think you can get folks to understand sort of where they stack up and how they can refocus in on, sustainability given the visible nature of it.

Salesforce's aim, just to be, to spend one more second on it, is to create these smaller language models that are optimized for our use cases, right? Accurate, reliable tasks without using just so much energy on these enormous models that just aren't relevant to our use case.

So I think we're gonna start to see that kind of trend more and more going forward.

Sanjay Podder: Yeah. And I think that's a great strategy because smaller the model less is the energy it uses, right? So you don't necessarily need to go to the largest of the model for all your tasks. So that's a great strategy, and I think the AI Energy Scores will be a very, you know, good benchmark for further research on this topic to see, you know, which are the, what are the great strategies, which are the good models to deploy in an organization.

So, you have definitely raised the bar here. That's great. Eric, you have been thinking beyond emission. You have also been thinking about impact to other resources in the environment like water. Tell me more about what you are doing in that space. How do you think one can manage that impact? Your plan for Salesforce?

Eric Gertsman: Yeah, thanks. I think water is a big deal. And it's something that's become, I think, a major factor for us to start considering in the sustainability realm, globally, but certainly at Salesforce, I've got a lot of thoughts on it. I mean, I think as a species in general, we've just been treating it as an unending resource forever, and it's clearly not, and even in sustainability circles we're not really paying as much attention to water and haven't, because carbon has been such a momentous issue on you know, climate change and sometimes obviously there's perceived or real trade-off between energy and carbon, right? With some cooling systems like evaporative cooling that actually are more efficient from a carbon perspective if they use more water.

And so sometimes there's tension there and that's why I think it's sort of not been always fully appreciated. I think the equation, especially between the trade off I was talking about, but just the focus on water really starts to change when we start talking about water-stressed regions in particular.

And you could look at the resources online. WRI, maybe put that in our resource link list here. But every geographic area in the world has a number, which is how much withdrawals they're getting per the full aquifer in that area. And if it's a high percentage year over year, even though there's some recharge, it still presents a tremendous amount of risk.

And so, these are areas where if you have a data center, you know, resource there, you have to be very mindful. Why, again, keeping it the a hundred thousand foot level is like 2-3 billion people live in these water constrained areas, right? I think it's like 20 to 40 ish percent of the world's food are cultivated in these areas.

So if you start putting, depleting these aquifers and putting pressure on populations and agriculture, whatever, you're gonna disrupt humans in a very profound way that will cause serious environmental and social and economic and political issues. And so the data industry has to be really mindful of how they think about that.

It also has, you know, coming down to more like 10,000 feet, business risks that are pretty salient to companies, whether you're, a, you know, co-location company, whether you're a hyperscale company or you're a tenant in one of these types of data centers, putting, you know, residents or agriculture, putting pressure on them, it is not a great way to build community relations. And that's a big topic that has been happening over the last, you know, five years where, you know, community bridge building is one of the big efforts made by sort of the data center industry to work in their local communities. And so being aware is really, and being proactive is really important there.

Operational disruption, when you have water cooled systems and you can no longer access water either for, you know, physical constriction or political reasons, you're gonna have serious trouble. You're not gonna be able to cool your data centers and they will literally melt down. And that may not happen today, right?

It may not happen tomorrow or next year. It may happen, you know, further in the future. It's also worth noting that the power sector operates with a lot of water. Most thermal power plants, coal, natural gas, nuclear use millions and millions of gallons a day. So again, if the water runs out, aquifers run out, you're not gonna have power to power your data center.

So it's an area that where we're not really paying attention to, but it's an area that we need to think about. So, I mean, how can we avoid this? Just to put a more maybe rosier picture on it a little bit. It is of course avoiding water-stressed regions, right? Ones that are deemed high or very high on the WRI scale that I mentioned earlier.

It may not always be possible. There are data residency drivers that a lot of customers expect. There's embedded, you know, current regions that have a lot of data center infrastructure. We realize it's not gonna happen overnight, but if you're a company like us thinking about going into a new continent or a new sort of sector, thinking about where the water constraints are, I think is, really important. And that's like areas like the US southwest, Western Europe, Singapore, India, the Middle East, you know, paying attention. And if you do site there, make sure you have proper cooling systems that are being used, right?

Closed loop systems wherever possible, air site decarbonization, liquid cooling for chips, even hybrid systems using recycled water, things like that. And also consider projects for aquifer recharge and wetland restoration and watershed retention. Which, by the way, can also help with fire risk too, which is another big factor as climate change increases for our data center environments.

And then just disclose, right? Disclose your withdrawals, your consumption, your discharge. That's an important way to show the impact over time. 

Sanjay Podder: I am glad that you brought out the aspect of water dependency in power generation because typical conversations are limited to cooling, right? But there is a lot of water required during power generation which does pose an operational risk if you are not able to ensure that water supply. One question that comes to my mind is similar to the carbon accounting solution you have provided, I guess, through your net zero cloud solution platform, is there anything that addresses the water problem in a much more comprehensive way?

Eric Gertsman: We do have the opportunity within our net zero cloud platform to track water and to manage it in the same way as carbon. So it's absolutely within that paradigm. That's a great tool. I'm glad you mentioned that. It actually rose that the product rose out of our internal efforts to use Salesforce's own software to do carbon accounting for ourselves, which is really cool.

And we got so good at it that we said, "Hey, let's productize this and sell it to customers." 'Cause we think it'd be valuable to them. And today many, you know, big companies, you know, Accenture, CVS, Bank of America, NBC, like a lot of big names are using that tool to, you know, as a central resource for managing their carbon accounting.

And actually, you know, the roadmap is gonna continue enhancing for this product where we're, as you know, we're, Salesforce. So AI and agentic capabilities are kind of part of our strong ethos today and said it's gonna get really fun where we start applying AI onto the data we're getting within net zero cloud so that we can do more in that area. Opportunity identification and a variety of things that I think are gonna be really useful to sustainability.

Sanjay Podder: Wonderful. Eric, you talked about Salesforce's culture, how sustainability isn't just a department, it's moving into the company's DNA. You have science-based targets as well as 1.5 degrees Celsius reduction as your company's North Star. How do you keep the culture alive across global teams and how do you balance compliance with the deeper business case for sustainability?

Eric Gertsman: Yeah, good question. Lemme start by saying one of the things that salesforce did 26 years ago at its founding was establish the 1 1 1 model. And that's a model that means employees collectively devote 1% of their time to volunteering, the company gives 1% of its revenues to philanthropy, and we donate 1% of our product to, nonprofits in other institutions.

And clearly that all isn't focused necessarily on sustainability, but it does create this ethos of doing the right thing and helping our community and helping our world. So it sort of sets a foundation that feeds into sustainability and ESG efforts within the company. But that said, right, sustainability still isn't easy.

There are a lot of headwinds for all practitioners, I think, in this function. And on the tech side, like I focus on, sustainability, I mean, executives have dozens of priorities, right? Profit margin targets and trust and reliability issues, AI integration, new product delivery. And we personally, you know, our company are transitioning aggressively to public cloud from co-lo (co-location).

So there's just a ton of priorities. Those are the big broad categories. There's a lot of even, you know, smaller, more salient things that they have to think about. So it's hard to carve out headspace for sustainability, and you know, much less dedicate the necessary resources to it.

So it's important obviously for sustainability professionals to be clear and concise and creative. But also I think to part of your question is to align sustainability with other business priorities. 

My view is that corporate action, you know, is, you know, sustainability is not altruism.

Sustainability is good business, you know, by its very definition, it looks at the long-term viability of a company and, you know, the world and its community, everything else., which obviously is essential to, right, the company's long-term success. So, and sometimes that involves short-term trade-offs.

Often not right. I'm a big fan of aligning sustainability with benefits like, you know, carbon savings being energy cost reduction, and optimizing, you know, our hardware or power and space infrastructure for, you know, better capacity constraints, you know, improving capacity constraints and voluntary compliance with regulations before they coming to pass so you can avoid risks down the line. From a macro lens, you could point to sustainability positively supporting brand and sales and marketing efforts and employee recruitment and retention innovation, right? It's, you know, it's hard to talk about those every day when you're talking about every sustainability initiative, but it's important that people re that remind themselves that sustainability does have business values and it, you know, many studies show that right there are, you know, a lot of claims, within many reports that sustainability is good for business. Whether you look at metrics like operational performance or profitability, return on equity, even just stock results. And you know, obviously some of this may be correlation, right?

But because the best companies do the right things, but I think there's a lot of causation to the topics I talked about, right. You do, you know, good sustainably work and you get a lot of business benefits along the way, so I absolutely think it's a critical function in business.

Sanjay Podder: Absolutely. When done the right way, sustainable tech, there is a very deep correlation between GreenOps and FinOps.

Eric Gertsman: Correct? Yeah. Yep.

Sanjay Podder: You know. Yeah. So, We have come to the end of our podcast episode, Eric, and it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Your work really captures what CXO Bytes is all about, moving from vision to implementation in a way that's practical, scalable, and deeply human. Thanks for your contribution, and we really appreciate you coming on to CXO Bytes. We'd also like to know from you how our audience can learn more about your work and the work that your organization is doing. So if you can also touch upon that.

Eric Gertsman: Sure. Well first thanks Sanjay for having me. It was a real pleasure to speak to you. I keep up your great podcast. It's, a fantastic thing. The way people can get ahold of me, probably the best way is through LinkedIn and you can search for Eric Gertsman. I'd love to see and hear how you guys are impacting the world and your perspectives on sustainability.

Regarding Salesforce, please go to salesforce.com/sustainability. You'll find a lot of resources there, a lot of case studies, a lot of articles, a lot of press releases, things like that you'll see about what we're doing in the industry, our stakeholder impact reports, things like that.

I think that'd be a great place to start for a lot of folks.

Sanjay Podder: Wonderful. So that's all for this episode of CXO Bytes. All the resources for this episode are in the show description below. You can visit podcast.greensoftware.foundation to listen to more episodes of CXO Bytes. See you all in the next episode. Bye for now. 

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