February Breakfast Briefing - Leveraging AI in Sustainable Finance

Neural Alpha HQ was a flurry of activity on Tuesday 18th February as we hosted our first ever breakfast event - a networking morning with two presentations and roundtable discussion. the event was a great success so we'll be running similar events on other topics in the near future. Do contact us if you are interested in collaborating around a future breakfast briefing - we've already had strong demand for a NatureTech breakfast briefing which we plan to run in the spring.

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The breakfast briefing kicked off with networking and some of the world's largest pastries supplied by our in-house cafe. Delicious but they really were the size of footballs (noted in future to only order 1 per delegate next time as we were struggling to get through them even the day after!). This was swiftly followed by two excellent talks - firstly a market landscape assessment by our Advisor Nawar Alsaadi entitled "The State of Sustainable Business" (slides available below). This was a preview of Nawar's annual State of Sustainable Business Compendium - a 130 slide pack of detailed charts, statistics and market trends set for release this year in April. The second talk was by Neural Alpha CEO James Phare entitled "Getting started with AI in Sustainable Finance - the do’s & don'ts" - a summary of key lessons learned in leveraging GenAI and Large Language Models (LLMs) in Sustainable Finance during the recent rapid development period of LLMs in recent years. This was both informed by custom AI software projects Neural Alpha have delivered for insurers, banks and asset managers in recent years and also our own development journey and early client feedback on our Responsible Capital platform.

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The event yielded a number of key takeaways emojified for posterity below.

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🥬 ESG is far from 🩻 and market surveys point to continued strong growth and adoption particularly in data & AI solutions. In spite of political headwinds and the perceived ESG backlash ESG AUM, Disclosure volumes, initiatives and budgets continue to grow.

📈 The ESG data & technology market continues to grow - albeit at a slowing growth rate in recent years.

🤖 The majority of ESG data & technology solutions now feature AI.

🦾 Users of AI are increasingly looking at a range of factors in model selection - price, accuracy, latency and increasingly sustainability factors such as energy and water consumption play a role in solution decisions.

🙈 AI can still be quite dumb in places - particularly for nuanced ESG requirements. Having the right architecture, data curation processes and fine tuned models is key to achieving strong results.

🏆 There are lots of quick wins out there for strong AI business cases in ESG to drive adoption. AI integration doesn't have to cost the earth.

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Huge thanks to everyone who attended and participated in the roundtable discussions and to partners Responsible Capital, KanataQ & Kanata Advisors for helping to make the event happen.

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Getting started with AI in Sustainable Finance - the do’s & don'ts

James Phare, CEO - Neural Alpha

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The State of Sustainable Business

Nawar Alsaadi, CEO & Founder - Kanata Advisors

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