INSEAD Business Sustainability Series Season 2: Part 2 Recap

Sustainability is on the agenda of business leaders around the world. Many corporations and executives want to make a difference to the sustainability cause but often lack frameworks on how to prioritize their actions and investment as well as the business examples that show how sustainability objectives and business success can be aligned. The INSEAD Business Sustainability Series, led by Professors Karel Cool, the BP Chaired Professor of European Competitiveness, and Atalay Atasu, the Bianca and James Pitt Chair in Environmental Sustainability, is designed to enable and inspire discussions on business sustainability. It explores how to align sustainability and business objectives. As we gear up for season 3, take a read of the highlights from season two which ran from 13 June 2024 until 14 November. 

Here is part 2 of our recap covering the last two of the four sessions: 

Webinar Highlights: AI & GenAI as Accelerators of Business Sustainability

Professor Karel Cool, Co-Director of the INSEAD Business Sustainability Programme, and Professor Peter Zemsky, Eli Lilly Chaired Professor of Strategy and Innovation, welcomed two distinguished speakers for the third webinar of Season 2 of the INSEAD Business Sustainability Series: 

• Kaixiang Lin, Co-Founder and CEO of Chemix

• Paul Manwell (MBA ‘04D), Founder of TC Labs

   

Both entrepreneurs shared valuable insights into how Generative AI (GenAI) can be applied to specific industrial use cases to achieve measurable returns on investment.

Kaixiang Lin – Illuminating the Battery 'Black Box'

Batteries are widely recognised as a key enabler in the electrification of the economy and the transition away from fossil fuels. Yet, they continue to face challenges related to safety, cost, charging speed, durability, and environmental impact. Compounding these issues is the fact that battery performance remains largely opaque: it is currently extremely difficult to predict battery health or how performance will evolve over time. This lack of transparency hampers quality assurance across the supply chain and inhibits wider adoption across industries.
Chemix identified an opportunity to address this challenge by applying GenAI to the R&D process. However, rather than relying solely on pre-existing large language models or publicly available data, Lin and his team took a more foundational approach. They built an end-to-end system — establishing their own laboratory to generate high-quality proprietary data, developing a custom Transformer architecture to process it, and ultimately building a dedicated GenAI platform tailored to battery innovation.
The early outcomes are remarkable: within two months, Chemix developed a battery model with charging performance seven times faster than conventional alternatives. According to Lin, this marks the beginning of a shift from opaque battery systems towards intelligent, predictive energy storage solutions — opening the door to entirely new use cases.

Paul Manwell – Leveraging GenAI to Optimise Complex Manufacturing Operations

Industrial plants involved in high-energy transformation of raw materials — including sectors such as steel, non-ferrous metals, chemicals, and food production — account for approximately 15–20% of global carbon emissions. These facilities operate as highly complex systems, often reliant on the tacit knowledge of a limited number of seasoned engineers.
TC Labs is addressing the challenge of capturing and scaling this expertise through digital tools powered by GenAI. While traditional statistical models have offered plant-specific optimisations, GenAI adds a powerful new dimension: the ability to synthesise diverse data sets, contextualise problems rapidly, and generate solutions with greater precision and speed.
Paul Manwell and his team have built tools that support plant managers in a range of tasks — from impact assessments and diagnostics to data integration and operational planning. Their goal: to enhance decision-making, minimise waste, and reduce emissions, all while ensuring safety and efficiency.

Though working in vastly different sectors, both speakers emphasised a shared principle: the critical importance of data quality. For GenAI to reach its full potential, robust, context-specific data is not a nice-to-have — it is essential.

Webinar Highlights: GenAI as Sustainability Accelerators for the Construction Industry

As part of the second season of the INSEAD Business Sustainability Series, Professors Karel Cool (Co-Director of the INSEAD Business Sustainability Programme) and Atalay Atasu (Professor of Technology and Operations Management and The Bianca and James Pitt Chair in Environmental Sustainability) welcomed Janne Aas-Jakobsen, CEO of Consigli, for a thought-provoking session on the future of sustainable construction.

The webinar addressed the urgent need for innovation in the construction sector, which is currently responsible for 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Aas-Jakobsen noted that traditional engineering business models still reward greater use of materials and billable hours, rather than efficiency. The sector has, to date, remained relatively untouched by digital transformation, resulting in frequent project overruns and legal disputes.

Consigli’s mission is to fundamentally redefine the early stages of construction planning — a stage the company sees as critical for reducing risk and environmental impact. By developing a category-defining approach, Consigli supports developers in defining building requirements to the level needed for permits, investor alignment, and binding contractor bids — all while embedding sustainability from the outset.

At the heart of this transformation is what Aas-Jakobsen refers to as the "Autonomous Engineer": an AI-powered system trained to translate architectural models into engineering requirements. This technology ensures alignment between design intent and technical execution, optimises the use of materials and energy, and can generate complete technical systems (e.g., lighting, HVAC) with minimal error and waste. The result is both environmentally and financially compelling — with up to 20% reductions in material usage and engineering timelines reduced from months to mere days.

Consigli does not replace architectural creativity; rather, it complements it by removing inefficiencies and risks in the engineering phase. However, challenges remain — particularly in talent acquisition, navigating cultural nuances across markets, and managing liability in a context where AI is not yet covered by standard insurance.

The company’s growth has been grounded in deep industry knowledge, especially in the Norwegian real estate market, and an early decision to expand into more dynamic markets such as the UK. Today, Consigli operates with a global team and a competitive advantage built not only on technology, but on an intimate understanding of the construction supply chain — an edge not easily replicated.
Looking ahead, Aas-Jakobsen envisions a future where AI becomes an integral part of building engineering worldwide — driving both sustainability and performance in equal measure.