How Jonathan Martin Of WEKA Is Helping to Promote Sustainability and Climate Justice

An Interview With Monica Sanders

Make sure the solution isn’t part of the problem. When it comes to activating AI for climate justice, the potential is enormous. AI can be applied to monitor, predict, and counteract the harmful effects of climate change. But when you realize that AI is accelerating the very problems we hope it will help us solve, it’s time to recalibrate.

According to the University of Colorado, “Those who are most affected and have the fewest resources to adapt to climate change are also the least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions — both globally and within the United States.” Promoting climate justice is an incredibly important environmental responsibility that is slowly becoming more and more recognized. In this interview series, we are talking to leaders who are helping to promote sustainability and climate justice. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jonathan Martin.

Jonathan Martin is the president of WEKA, a global data platform provider in the emerging green data space. He is responsible for the company’s global go-to-market (GTM) functions and operations, which include sales, marketing, strategic partnerships, and customer success. A veteran of the enterprise data management industry, Jonathan previously served as Chief Marketing Officer at Hitachi Vantara, Pure Storage (through IPO), and EMC (acquired by Dell Technologies). He has also held senior leadership positions in product management, marketing, and GTM at HP, Salesforce, and VERITAS Software.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?

I grew up in the north of England, out in the countryside, in a very blue-collar community. I loved spending time outdoors. I was, and still am, a big nature kid. Looking back, that set the foundation for my interest in sustainability.

Everyone has a cataclysmic moment or marker in their life which propels them to take certain actions, a “why”. What is your why?

If you’re paying attention, you can’t help but notice that our climate is changing drastically. Whether you believe in climate change or not, the environment we’re in today is quite different than it was even 10 years ago.

Watching your home environment change dramatically is typically a big “why” for many sustainability advocates — myself included. For example, the number of major wildfires I’ve seen while living in Southern California is increasing. In the past, we would experience maybe one fire every four or five years. This past year, my family and I were evacuated three times in just three months due to fires. What used to be anomalies are now becoming more regular occurrences. It’s startling.

I’ve always had an interest in science and I’m a scientist by training. I have an undergraduate degree in volcanology and a master’s degree in computer science, which is how I transitioned to a career in enterprise technology. It was all of these experiences rather than one specific lightbulb moment that led me to my current role at a data platform company that strives to help companies manage their data more sustainably.

I believe technology can help our society evolve on a massive scale, and I firmly believe that artificial intelligence (AI) holds significant promise and potential to change the world for the better — if we can mitigate its unintended consequences.

You are currently leading an organization that is making a difference for our planet. Can you tell us a bit about what you and your organization are trying to change?

At WEKA, we’re working to help our customers build more efficient data technology stacks that can harness AI, machine learning, and other next-generation technologies to innovate and reach business outcomes or scientific breakthroughs faster.

Although we believe in AI’s near-limitless potential to help our customers solve pressing societal and business challenges, including climate change, we also understand that it requires huge amounts of energy to train and run, which has a massive carbon toll.

Analysts believe that AI’s computational overhead has been causing data center-related energy consumption to double every couple of years over the past decade. It is estimated that data centers are responsible for roughly 3% of the world’s total power consumption — without intervention, that number is expected to grow to 8% or more by 2025.

The generative AI boom is accelerating this faster than anyone could have anticipated. These AI models require massive amounts of energy to train and run. I’ve seen reports stating that it costs a whopping $4.6 million to train GPT-3 and a staggering $100 million to train the GPT-4 model. There is an urgent need to find ways to curb their impact.

WEKA is deeply devoted to developing sustainable solutions to improve the efficiency of modern data environments and next-generation workloads. We have a responsibility and an opportunity to positively impact the future.

Earlier this year, we launched a Sustainable AI Initiative to raise awareness about these impacts and promote more sustainable and responsible use of AI. As part of that initiative, we are working to unite members of the scientific, business, political, and tech communities to find solutions to address this pressing issue. We are also making nature-positive investments in reforestation and other programs that can help to reduce the harmful effects of greenhouse gas emissions associated with the world’s data centers.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?

WEKA is fortunate to work with some of the most creative people driving innovation in various industries — our customers are truly on the cutting edge of technology. But one stands out that really made me rethink my approach to the way I conduct business every day.

We have a customer in Switzerland that we planned to visit in person. Before departing, I sent a note to their CEO expressing our excitement for the face time and the opportunity to visit and get to know their team. His response? “Who else will you be meeting with while you’re in Switzerland?” I replied that we were going to Switzerland only to meet with him. His response? He asked us not to come. Why? Because the carbon footprint of traveling there was at odds with his firm belief in being a champion for sustainability and living that daily. Ultimately, we canceled the trip and had a great conversation with that customer via video conference instead. He had a point, and our team really started to think about how we could all incorporate more sustainable measures and thinking into every aspect of our work and daily lives.

Of course, I always try to make the most of business travel by scheduling multiple meetings whenever I’m traveling somewhere, but this experience really taught me to reevaluate which trips are essential in the first place.

None of us can be successful without some help along the way. Did you have mentors or cheerleaders who helped you to succeed? Can you tell us a story about their influence?

The work WEKA is doing today with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore is truly inspiring. He is a founding partner and chairman at Generation Investment Management, which led our Series D funding round last November. WEKA is the second investment in their Sustainable Solutions Fund IV, which is committed to advancing green data solutions. His leadership and contributions to driving the sustainability conversation at a global level, even when it was wildly unpopular and inconvenient to do so, have been immensely influential and inspirational to me and so many others.

He is the ultimate ‘challenger’ personality — eager to dive in and identify problems, but also recognizes that if you believe there’s a problem, it’s on you to find a solution. If, like me, you believe that the world is different than it was 10 years ago, what are you doing on a personal level to make a positive change? What is your contribution? That really resonates with me.

Thank you for that. Let’s now move to the central part of our discussion. Let’s start with a basic definition of terms so that everyone is on the same page. What does climate justice mean to you? How do we operationalize it?

I believe climate justice is about finding win-win solutions. For example, we need to find a way to harness AI’s considerable potential to solve society’s biggest challenges, like climate change and the energy crisis, without melting the planet in the process. This is what we refer to as ‘AI’s sustainability conundrum.’ You hear a lot about the promise of AI to monitor and solve climate change, but you don’t often hear about its significant contribution to accelerating the very problems we hope it can help us overcome.

With regard to the AI explosion the world is seeing now, one very specific way to operationalize sustainability at the enterprise level is to rethink your data stack. As noted earlier, data centers are huge energy consumers that traditionally have not operated very efficiently. That’s why WEKA set out to build an entirely new approach to more efficiently and sustainably manage data and next-generation workloads like AI.

Science is telling us that we have 7–10 years to make critical decisions about climate change. What are three things you or your organization are doing to help?

As I mentioned earlier, WEKA is deeply committed to promoting more sustainable and responsible use of AI. We are working to achieve this through our Sustainable AI Initiative, which is intended to put a spotlight on AI’s energy and carbon impact while supporting the development of sustainable solutions that can improve the efficiency of modern data environments. We are leveraging every opportunity we have in the course of business to raise awareness and ignite cooperation and discourse on this critical topic — at industry and partner events as well as by creating our own series of events focused on the topic (watch this space).

We also believe nature and climate-positive investments are critical to helping remove carbon and mitigate its harmful effects on the planet while we work to curb it. Reforestation is a critical tool in the fight against decarbonization. That’s why WEKA has partnered with One Tree Planted and is contributing 20,000 trees to its global reforestation projects in 2023. We have also pledged to plant 10 trees for every petabyte of software we ship each year moving forward.

Finally, we are committed to helping to reduce avoidable carbon in the development of our own product, the WEKA® Data Platform, which can help our customers avoid over 260 tons of CO2e per petabyte over the course of their data infrastructure lifecycle compared to traditional methods. While there is still much more work to be done, we believe this is a good start.

Are there three things the community, society, or politicians can do to help you in your mission?

There are several things that come to mind, but here are a few:

1) Expand conversations on the ethics of AI to include the environment. Public discourse around the benefits and ethical considerations of AI, like explainability, privacy and bias, has been robust and prolific but rarely touches on AI’s insatiable energy demands and environmental impact. The climate crisis is a pressing, urgent issue, and we need to ensure AI’s energy and carbon impact is a bigger part of the ethics discussion.

2) Commit to identifying, adopting and promoting sustainable and responsible AI practices. As an industry and as global citizens, we all have work to do here. AI innovation is evolving more rapidly than our plan for how to address its environmental impact. It’s time to commit to identifying more sustainable and responsible AI practices and sharing them with our colleagues and industry peers. When it comes to the climate crisis, all boats rise or fall together.

3. Revaluate and rethink your data stack. Among the primary culprits perpetuating AI’s energy sustainability conundrum are traditional data infrastructure and data management approaches, which simply aren’t equipped to support AI workloads simply because they weren’t built for them. In the era of cloud and AI, we need a complete re-think of the enterprise data stacks with modern workloads and next-gen technologies in mind. We need to get better at meeting and processing data where it’s generated, lives or needs to go — whether that’s on-premises, in the cloud, at the edge, or distributed, hybrid and multicloud environments.

How would you articulate how a business can become more profitable by being more sustainable and more environmentally conscious? Can you share a story or example?

One obvious solution is to move at least some sta and applications to the cloud, which can save energy, reduce a company’s carbon footprint, and lower costs associated with maintaining a physical data infrastructure.

One example that comes to mind is our customer, 23andMe, which initially used an on-premises facility for its human genome research. But as their data storage and compute needs grew, the company began looking to the cloud for greater scalability and flexibility that could still replicate the benefits of its on-premises high-performance computing (HPC) environment. They also wanted to reduce operating costs for facility maintenance while accelerating their ability to adopt new hardware and tech by transitioning to the cloud. To solve this issue, 23andMe turned to WEKA’s data platform solution running on AWS. Since they began working with WEKA in conjunction with AWS HPC services, 23andMe has dramatically increased the scalability and flexibility of its data environment, while reducing costs. With WEKA, the company is also able to accelerate its data pipelines to reach research insights faster, which is crucial to the large-scale, high-throughput genetic testing and research work it does.

This is the signature question we ask in most of our interviews. What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started promoting sustainability and climate justice” and why? Please share a story or example for each.

1. Think long-term, but start today. Many companies are creating ambitious three, five, or even 10-year sustainability targets. That’s all well and good, but when it comes to protecting the planet, we also need to balance planning for the future with a bias for action. Start by making any changes you can to have an immediate impact. At WEKA, we wanted to make an immediate impact on decarbonization, so we started investing in reforestation projects. At our offices, we’re reducing our reliance on single-use containers and finding ways to curb other waste. In the mid-term, we’re building a migration, plan and path to get our labs moved to renewable energy sources. These are examples of things we identified as areas we could move to make an impact relatively quickly.
2. Sustainability means different things to different people — that’s an opportunity. I’ve found that within the tech industry and across different business sectors, there are a wide variety of definitions and metrics for sustainability. I think that presents an opportunity for business leaders to really think about what sustainability means to their business and their industry to create solutions that will have a meaningful impact
3. Get to know your customers’ sustainability needs. Increasingly, we’re seeing customers starting to factor sustainability into their IT purchasing decisions. That trend will only grow. Businesses are looking for ways to operate more sustainably and don’t always know how to get there. If you can help them meet both their sustainability and their performance goals, you’ll be ahead of the game.
4. Make sure the solution isn’t part of the problem. When it comes to activating AI for climate justice, the potential is enormous. AI can be applied to monitor, predict, and counteract the harmful effects of climate change. But when you realize that AI is accelerating the very problems we hope it will help us solve, it’s time to recalibrate.
5. AI will be an unprecedented accelerator — for better or for worse. It seems like a new AI startup or project is launched every day, all of them with the best of intentions. Whether AI will accelerate the demise of our planet or save the day remains to be seen, but I believe, as a society, we can and will find a way to get AI’s power and carbon footprint under control so we can harness its immense potential to power good. I’m an optimist, after all.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Queen Elizabeth II. I find her extremely inspiring as a leader because she was the epitome of balance and stability. She maintained that all her life no matter what was happening in the world around her.

How can our readers continue to follow your work online?

You can learn more WEKA’s Sustainable AI Initiative and our latest news here:

website: www.weka.io
company blog: https://www.weka.io/blog/

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/weka-io
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wekaio

This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!

About the Interviewer: Monica Sanders JD, LL.M, is the founder of “The Undivide Project”, an organization dedicated to creating climate resilience in underserved communities using good tech and the power of the Internet. She holds faculty roles at the Georgetown University Law Center and the Tulane University Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy. Professor Sanders also serves on several UN agency working groups. As an attorney, Monica has held senior roles in all three branches of government, private industry, and nonprofits. In her previous life, she was a journalist for seven years and the recipient of several awards, including an Emmy. Now the New Orleans native spends her time in solidarity with and championing change for those on the frontlines of climate change and digital divestment. Learn more about how to join her at: www.theundivideproject.org.