French engineer-turned-entrepreneur and founder of The Beyond Institute, a think tank focused on humans, nature and tech, Arnaud Blandin will be in Luxembourg on March 5 for a mini-conference.
With career experience from Silicon Valley to Singapore, Arnaud Blandin is now based in the south of France, a place where he says his life really began to change. During our virtual interview, he comments on how he can see both snow-capped mountains and the sea, where he enjoys diving.
Blandin is deeply inspired by nature. With his engineering mindset, he has worked with Fortune 500 companies, helping them drive profitability. At some point, he says he realised that executives weren’t in tune with what sustainability was all about. “We are deeply connected to nature and each other,” he says. “The people who were supposed to help on sustainability had no business acumen.”
He decided to commit himself to designing systems where decision-making includes environmental and social impact. “To do that, I went back to AI, and it changed my life,” he adds. He now holds workshops for around 500 executives each year, helping them through regulations and compliance matters and AI-powered sustainability strategising.
AI has been helpful for planning scenarios and cutting the time it takes to sift through company documents in order to understand where these organisations are in their sustainability journeys. “AI allows them to have an audit right away, instead of waiting for hours,” Blandin explains. The tech also helps in transforming ideas into mini applications to track sustainability progress. “When you start using AI to map impact, you find, depending on where you are in your industry, where you can have an impact,” he adds. “The problem of sustainability for our brains is the numbers are way too big.”
Seven principles
In addition to contributing to The AI Revolution: Thriving Within Civilization’s Next Big Disruption, Blandin has also written several other publications, including an article in which he develops “The 7 Principles of a Sustainable Company” with case studies.
As he explains, “If you look at the seven principles, it’s actually really hard… some companies have a purpose with no positive impact.”
Take the American tech giant Meta, for instance: the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and other platforms has as one of its principles to “build connection and community”. As Blandin notes, “They could have said, ‘build communities that improve human beings,’” for example.
But among the seven principles, Blandin sees the most difficult one for a company to fulfil is the measurement and management of its environmental footprint. “A lot of companies that you see doing well on sustainability are because they know they have a massive footprint,” he explains.
For him, value creation goes beyond financial value, but he thinks “we’re going through a purpose crisis in the Western world… people make a difference between growth, capitalism, finance and sustainability, but we can continue to grow.”
More information
In addition to his work with The Beyond Institute, Blandin also serves as lead faculty on sustainability at CEDEP Global Executive Education and an entrepreneur in residence at the business school INSEAD.
During his mini-conference, he hopes to impart on attendees the need to rethink capital allocation, perhaps to even do a bit of soul searching about purpose. The mini-conference “Entrepreneurship, Leadership, and the Holy Grail of Sustainability: How Creative Minds Outpace Executive Habits” takes place on March 5, at 6pm at the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce.
Click here for more information or to purchase tickets.
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