Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:32:39 · Taylor Francis, Alexa von Tobel
The verb that we obsess over at Watershed is accelerate. Accelerate the climate economy. Climate economy is an inevitability. We're just on track to get there a decade or two too late. And so how can we move faster? [00:32:54] S2: First of all, thank you for having some good news. It's nice to hear. If we fast forward, you obviously have just been, thank God for you seeing that movie decades ago. If you fast forward the next decade, what do you see? If you're gonna make a prediction, two or three, just things that feel obvious to you, Taylor, of where the world is headed. What's in your mind?
00:32:54 · Alexa von Tobel, Taylor Francis
[00:32:54] S2: First of all, thank you for having some good news. It's nice to hear. If we fast forward, you obviously have just been, thank God for you seeing that movie decades ago. If you fast forward the next decade, what do you see? If you're gonna make a prediction, two or three, just things that feel obvious to you, Taylor, of where the world is headed. What's in your mind? [00:33:22] S0: I think on climate in particular, couple things. One is the climate AI intersection matters a great deal. I think about that in two dimensions. One is we're building a ton of new energy capacity to power the data center economy. It really matters that that economy be powered by clean power. Because if it is, then this can be a catalyst for building new generation that decarbonizes the grid. If it's not, it can be backwards progress on decarbonization right at the worst possible moment. So it's really important. And I think it's a mixed picture actually on that. I think that there are some companies that are deeply, deeply committed to renewable energy for data centers, and there are others that aren't. And where the dollars end up falling, back to our earlier discussion around supply chains and choice across supply chains, really matters. The other part of AI and climate is that if we're gonna spend all this energy building the superpower, we'd better point that superpower at solving the climate problem. [00:34:24] S2: Amen.
00:34:25 · Taylor Francis
[00:34:25] S0: And there's no shortage of parts of the climate problem that would benefit from acceleration by AI. That, of course, is a huge obsession of ours. We view Watershed as a company trying to harness the best of the AI superpowers for the climate problems that matter as people use data to make decisions. We've built a bunch of products in that area. We're gonna build a bunch more. We're super excited about what's possible there. So I think that AI climate intersection is one thing that I think is gonna be really dominant over the next decade. And then the other I would say is I think you can chart the progression of how does climate interact with business. And it was initially about reputation and brand, and that motivated a lot of the early climate programs. And brand and reputation have value, so that was useful. Then it was around policy and compliance and regulation and paperwork. That also serves a purpose. I think we're now entering this mode of climate as a driver of revenue. A thing that I'm really obsessed with is, what's the Fortune 500 of climate businesses if you were to rank the businesses with revenue from their climate products? BCG did research that the green products market is worth $5,000,000,000,000 today, second only to the technology and AI and data center market. And that includes everything from EVs to batteries to solar panels to people selling green materials and green crops. And we see it across our customer base. But I think like, the bigger that number is, the more the kind of forces of capitalism and companies are gonna take us to a good place.
00:36:21 · Alexa von Tobel, Taylor Francis
[00:36:21] S2: Actually, on that note, because for me this feels adjacent, in September 2025, you launched the first of its kind AI tool product footprints with Mind's AI engineering climate science input from the most complex business... Businesses to to solve scope three. Yep. Talk a little bit about just visibility layer that you're getting up, because that's really what you're saying. It's like right now, people wanna make good decisions. No one wants the planet destroyed. Totally. You're simply illuminating them [00:36:51] S0: Yes. [00:36:51] S2: And making it clear that climate can be profitable.
00:36:55 · Taylor Francis
[00:36:55] S0: Yes. People wanna make good decisions if it's good for their business. And the good news is, because of all this technological progress over the last twenty years, there are lot of good decisions that are good for the business. There's a lot of climate action that's in the money today, but indeed, it's hard to find. So one of the most enduring unsolved problems in climate is the Scope three problem. If you've got all these emissions in your supply chain that go into the materials and ingredients that go into your product, but you can't see them, how do you open that black box and take the right action? And the traditional approach on this has been you send surveys to suppliers. And so over the last ten years, people have been trading surveys back and forth across the Pacific Ocean, and absolutely nothing has happened as a result. And we think AI can really change that. And so we built this product, Product Footprints. We launched it in September alongside one of the biggest EV automakers, one of the biggest healthcare companies, one of the biggest consumer product companies. It's the result of two years of joint investment by climate scientists and AI engineers. You can basically feed into it a description of any product. You could write it. You could bring in a bill of materials. It constructs the entire production process and supply chain for that product, measures the emissions of that process, and tells you exactly where the emissions are. And you can tweak it and say, actually, no, I have this supplier. I am procuring this from Vietnam, not from India. And it updates, and it takes what used to be a six month project for one product and makes it a afternoon project for as many products as you want, and it works whether you're building airplanes or you're building tennis shoes.
00:38:52 · Alexa von Tobel, Taylor Francis
[00:38:52] S2: That's awesome. [00:38:53] S0: And we think it could be really big, and so we are investing a ton in making that promise real for the customers we work with. But if we get it right, it means that a procurement team or product design team, at the moment they're making a decision, at the moment they're designing a product, can know the trade offs, can make the right decisions, and can see that feedback loop immediately, and it's literally something that would not have been possible twelve months ago. But the evolution of AI models paired with a lot of domain expertise and data that we've spent six years developing enables something that we didn't think we could have dreamed of, and now our sights are a lot higher on what's possible. [00:39:38] S2: That brings me to a a compliment Cliff gave... My husband, Cliff, gave you, which was... He was saying, you're not just supplying off the shelf AI. What you guys really are building is tools powered by proprietary mission data across global supply chains, which means that your dataset compared to just generic AI models significantly better. Talk a little bit about that advantage.