Today, sustainability from a corporate perspective can be defined in many ways, with many sustainability “initiatives” highlighting several general best practices that businesses should already be following. To us, a successful sustainability initiative requires clearly defined goals and a transparent roadmap that helps our employees, customers, partners, and other stakeholders truly understand how we plan on getting there.
A mission statement is always a good starting point…
Here is our commitment:
To create measurable progress in environmental performance, social impact, and governance excellence through innovative AI solutions, an inclusive workplace, and responsible business practices
At the end of 2023, we formalized our first comprehensive ESG program. Over the last year, we’ve started to put these plans into action, breaking our initiatives up into three key categories. To accomplish our goals in each of these categories, we’ll tap every segment of our value chain, including our product, operations, customers, and suppliers. The sum is always greater than the parts, and we will strive to excel in the following 3 key pillars to create a culture of success and sustainability that we’re proud of.
Boost Green - Reducing our climate impact
From data centers to the lights that keep our office running, we recognize that our business has an impact on the environment. As we continue to expand operations around the goal, we’re dedicating resources to ensure that our operating practices help to minimize our greenhouse gas emissions and ensure our business is future fit. This pillar of our sustainability initiative expands far beyond our doors, as we’ve already started working with strategic partners such as Amazon AWS to accomplish our goals.
Highlighted Goal: Achieving 100% of all hosting energy to be matched by renewable energy purchases by 2026.
Plans in action: The development and daily use of AI platforms is an energy game, heavily dependent on data centers to keep the solution on 24/7. We’ve already started working with suppliers to gain visibility into the share of renewable energy that powers their operations, and their plans to increase it. To date, we’ve already accomplished one goal, having 100% of customer cloud environments powered by energy matched with renewable sources.
Automated shut-down. We’re reducing energy use in our demo and test instances (servers). Instead of running continuously, they now shut down when not in use, e.g. weekends.
Boost Social - Embrace diversity and build community
We at Boost believe that support from our local community, employees, and stakeholders is at the core of our strength as a business. To continue enhancing our larger boost.ai community, we’re honing in on gender diversity, community engagement, and employee satisfaction as our three focus areas.
Highlighted Goal: We’re looking to contribute 1,200 hours back to the community through volunteer work and community service programming.
Plans in action: While gathering this report, I was extremely impressed by the variety of programs our employees are already involved in, such as the Race for Life in aid of Cancer Research, and Movember. To encourage these efforts, we’ve created a formal volunteering program, offering paid time off to support local charitable causes.
71% of employees who participated in our Mental Health Week now feel comfortable discussing mental health issues within the company.
Boost Govern - Act responsibly and transparently
We believe that retaining our reputation as responsible and ethical developers of AI can only be accomplished by embedding responsible practices into every aspect of our business. Our long-term plans reflect as much, with a heavy focus on ethical conduct and transparency being essential components of our development process. Our core focus areas for this pillar are built around responsible conduct, information security and privacy, and responsible AI. Here’s one example of how we plan to make a difference in this area:
Highlighted Goal: Reduce the number of ethical violations & non-compliance reports across all departments
Plans in action: At boost.ai, we champion a two-fold approach to responsible AI. Our first line of defense against misuse of our platform has been and will always be our unique platform architecture, which has been developed with enterprise and user safety in mind. To ensure our platform continues to exceed the standards set forth by organizations such as the Nordic government and ISO/IEC among others, we’ve upped our internal standards about responsible AI even further.
In the year to June 30, 2024 we experienced zero high severity/urgency breaches of data privacy or information security.
In publishing our latest sustainability report, we’re reaffirming our commitment to driving meaningful change through innovation. From reducing environmental impact to championing ethical AI and fostering social progress, we are proud of the strides we’ve made and energized by the challenges ahead.
This report is more than a reflection on the past—it’s a roadmap for the future, built on transparency, collaboration, and bold action. Together, we’re shaping a smarter, more sustainable world through conversational AI.
Join us on this journey by checking out the full report here!