AI and Big Data: How Startups and Corporates Drive Sustainability Together

In today's episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, I chat with Camille Manso, a partner at Silicon Foundry. We dive into their work in assisting large corporations to work with startups to tackle significant issues, particularly focused on sustainability.

Camille sheds light on the importance of sustainability driven by evolving consumer preferences, investor expectations, and regulatory demands. We explore the myriad challenges in corporate-startup collaborations, the pivotal role of AI and big data in advancing sustainability initiatives, and some success stories within supply chain sustainability projects.

We also touch upon the difficulties in scaling pilot projects and the crucial role of data in fostering successful corporate-startup partnerships.

Here is the article published by Camille in Supply Chain Technology News which she referred to. 

00:00 Introduction
01:31 Upcoming Episodes and Special Guest Introduction
02:01 Camille Manso's Background and Role
03:55 Corporate Innovation and Startup Collaboration
05:58 Sustainability Trends and Challenges
12:52 Success Stories and Technological Advancements
18:33 AI, Big Data, and IoT in Supply Chains
23:08 Scaling Innovations in Large Corporations
28:16 Final Thoughts and Contact Info

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Transcript

Camille Manso: 0:03

So I would say about over 50 percent of our work to date has been revolving around the topic of sustainability. And it may be, you know, directly related to sustainability. Hey, we're trying to reduce our carbon emissions. Or it may be something that does, go towards progressing sustainability.

Tom Raftery: 0:23

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, the number one podcast focusing on sustainability and supply chains, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 22 of the sustainable supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery. And I'm excited to be here with you today. Sharing the latest insights and trends in supply chain sustainability. Before we kick off today's show. I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to all of this podcasts amazing supporters. Your support has been instrumental in keeping the podcast going, and I'm really grateful for each and every one of you. If you're not already a supporter, I'd like to encourage you to consider joining our community of like-minded individuals who are passionate about sustainability and supply chains. Supporting the podcast is easy and affordable with options starting as low as just three euros or dollars a month. That's less than the cost of a cup of coffee. But your support will make a huge difference in keeping this podcast going strong. To become a supporter. You simply click on the support link in the show notes of this, or any episode or visit tiny url.com/s S C pod. In today's episode, I'm going to be talking to Camille Manso from Silicon Foundry. And in the coming episodes in the next few weeks, I'll be talking to Matthew van Niekerk from Settlemint, Nick brown, from Ansell. Andrei Denescu from Dexory. And Elizabeth Corbett from AE global. So some absolutely killer episodes lined up, but now without further ado, I'd like to introduce my special guest today. Camille. Camille or welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Camille Manso: 2:01

I'd love to. Thank you, Tom. First and foremost, thank you so much for having me. I've been very excited to have this conversation. I'm Camille Manso. I am a partner at a firm called Silicon Foundry. We are a corporate innovation advisory firm. We work with global leading corporations and we help them navigate emerging trends and technologies. We mostly do this to help them solve some of their biggest problems by pairing them with the right startups So as you can imagine we get a lot of requests these days around AI So I'm sure that'll be a topic that comes up, but we work with large corporates, including those who are in logistics, and CPG and retail, oil and gas, so pretty much across industries I've been with a firm for about three years now, but prior to that, I was a corporate attorney. So we can also delve into some of the dynamics between my, my experience in law and helping navigate the different incentives that drive corporate decision making as well as the startups that I worked with while, while representing them.

Tom Raftery: 3:04

Okay. Interesting. There's got to be a story there. How the shift from corporate attorney into SI Foundry.

Camille Manso: 3:12

Ooh, that's a long story. I'm not sure we'll have enough time to dig into today, Tom, but the long and short of it is pretty much I spent a lot of time doing M&A and private equity transactions and saw that the common denominator in the, in the deals that I really enjoyed was really around tech and innovation. And then by process of elimination, realized it was less about the types of deals and more about just the practice of law and really wanting to be more closer to where the innovation was happening and working with corporates and startups to help connect those dots on the, you know, earlier side of things, rather than when we're when we're working on papering them in the legal transactions.

Tom Raftery: 3:52

Okay. Fair enough. That was a short of it, definitely. How I mean, I, I'm assuming what happens and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm assuming what happens is you have corporate clients and then they come to you with a problem and you say, ah, I know just the startup you need to talk to. So how do you go around finding those startups, to connect to the corporates or are the startups, the clients as well, or how does it all, how does all that work?

Camille Manso: 4:22

Excellent question. So, really the magic behind what we do is where we sit in the innovation ecosystem. So really being at the center, we are constantly interacting not only with startups, and other large corporates, but also VCs, academics. So really sitting at the heart of the innovation ecosystem. Who we work with are the large corporates. Now, that doesn't mean that these startups aren't constantly seeking to have conversations and understand what we call kind of these demand signals, right? They want to make sure that the problems that they're solving are ones that need to be solved by some of the largest enterprises. So some of this is actually proactive and some of it is reactive. So, you know, in your example, we may get a request from one of our large corporates saying, Hey, we're trying to solve X, Y, and Z within warehousing. Can you help us find the right startup knowing our priorities, our tech capabilities, our risk appetite. And you know, a number of other factors that are very specific to that large corporate. And then in some cases, it's actually we're out in the field talking to founders, which is probably one of the most exciting aspects of what we do. And we say, Hey, this may not be a really obvious fit. You know, it might be a financial services, company but it could be really strongly aligned with a specific interest area or strategic focus area of one of our other corporates. And so we'll bring that to them as well, proactively.

Tom Raftery: 5:57

Okay, great. And this is the sustainable supply chain podcast. Are you seeing a lot of interest from your corporate customers or your startups in sustainability? How does all that work?

Camille Manso: 6:12

Absolutely. So I would say about over 50 percent of our work to date has been revolving around the topic of sustainability. And it may be, you know, directly related to sustainability. Hey, we're trying to reduce our carbon emissions. Or it may be something that does, go towards progressing sustainability. So, you know, returns and reverse logistics is a really hot topic right now as well. Especially with the rise of e commerce and returns are very much tied to waste. And if we can reduce the level of returns, that's something that definitely helps with sustainability initiatives as well.

Tom Raftery: 6:50

And why? Why that increased, importance of sustainability for your clients and for the startups,? Is it, is it customer led, is it shareholder led, is it investor led? Is it, you know, where, where is it coming from?

Camille Manso: 7:08

All of the above, I would say. One of the key drivers and excited excitingly one of the key drivers is that this is consumer demand preferences changing. So you're seeing, you know, upwards of 60 percent of Gen Z and millennials say that they would go with a brand that they believe are more sustainable in their practices and the materials that they use. So there are, you know, purchasing decisions being made with sustainability in mind at a level that we haven't seen before. And that really drives a lot of brands to think more, more deeply about how they're going to change their products and how they're going to meet these customer demands. Right. Because that's where, that's where the revenue lies.

Tom Raftery: 7:51

Okay. And it's got to be challenging because I've worked in startups and I've worked in large companies like SAP. And the philosophies, tend to be quite different between them. So how well do they play together?

Camille Manso: 8:12

This is such a fantastic question, and one that pretty much defines our existence, because we did see that this is a big pain point on just the translation between the startup speak and corporate speak. They do operate at very different risk levels as well as who they report to, right? You made the comment about investors. The investor base of a startup has very different expectations around what the startup will do and at what timeline versus, you know, public shareholders. Right. And so just ensuring that you're operating in a way that is keeping in mind the, the demands and expectations of your investors. We also have things like going to, to the comment on risk appetite and agility really. Startups are able to pivot pretty quickly, and that's the beauty of them. And why we, we really encourage large corporations to partner with startups, because these are some solutions that can rapidly change, you know, emerging technologies. AI yesterday was not the same as it is today. And it's constantly evolving. And the developments make yesterday's Chat GPT tool irrelevant when, when they launch a new one. Right? So having the ability to partner with a startup who's going to be able to pivot, whereas a large corporation will have to go through multiple rungs of decision making in order to either adopt or refine or, or change their strategies around specific technologies.

Tom Raftery: 9:47

And what about the cultures? I mean, again, that's gotta be challenging having, cultures of startups working with cultures of entrenched large companies.

Camille Manso: 9:58

Absolutely. So part of the culture is one of the different filters that we use when we're identifying which startups we believe would be strong fits for our corporate partners. And that's because there are going to be startups who are more well versed in what our corporate needs and, you know, understanding responsive. And then on the corporate side, you need to have the right champions. Right. And so with that, you have champions. And if you dig a layer deeper, you have incentives. So if we think about how can a corporate really embrace innovation, oftentimes we're talking more about, like, what are your KPIs across your BU's in order to incentivize them to want to engage with startups, right? It is risky business. There are not not necessarily immediate results. So ensuring that you have alignment from Hey, you know, we know that this isn't going to play out for the next year. So you need to do a pilot. Right? And then you need to also have. What we say when we think about what is success, how do you build success in a corporate startup partnership? It often comes down to communication. So on the startup side, being very straightforward with, hey, here's what we're going to be able to achieve in what timeline and here's what we need from you. Large corporate, right? And then on the corporate side, saying, hey this is kind of how we operate and we're not going to be as fast as you because we have to go through all those layers of decision making. And so that's part, part cultural, part more you know, the, the, the structural aspects, governance aspects of each of the startup and, and a corporate, but all things you need to keep in mind if you're really trying to drive a successful partnership across the two very different groups,

Tom Raftery: 11:49

Sure, sure, sure, sure. Any funny or unexpected, clashes you've come up against when you've worked with companies?

Camille Manso: 11:59

Not funny per se, but we have heard some stories where, you know, there were over promises and under deliveries. And those are the ones that you really want to avoid. And that's where we encourage a lot of the companies that we work with to be transparent upfront, right? You know, you may not have a working product today, but part of that partnership with a large corporation is to say, Hey, let's build around your use case. Let's test in your facilities. And, and so just, you know, not, not saying, Hey, this is ready to go. And there is that fake it till you make it mentality oftentimes talked about. Especially in the startup world. So probably not a ha ha, but we've heard stories of, you know, robots tripping over themselves in the middle of a, of a showcase and, and things that you definitely want to avoid as, as a company.

Tom Raftery: 13:24

Okay. And any, sustainability related use cases you can talk to?

Camille Manso: 13:31

Definitely, so given that this is a sustainability podcast, I definitely want to spend a lot of time talking through why I'm, I believe that sustainability is a really important topic, not only today, but just in the grand scheme of things. And specifically within supply chains, because I think there's a massive opportunity. And so when we look at the amount of emissions that are attributable to supply chain operations, we're upwards you know, 60% of global emissions. So that's really significant number and thinking about just transportation alone. You know, you have billions of tons of of supply related items moving through through ground through sea and whatnot. And those alone comprise 8% of global emissions. So how can we create more sustainable practices? And I think what's interesting about supply chains is that word chains, right? You go back to a chain has many links, and that's exactly how it works. So within supply chains, you're working across multiple different participants. A varying levels of sophistication with different technologies disposable to them. And so just having some sense of collaboration and when we think about sustainability, the four key problems that I, that I see and that kind of stand in the way of us being able to achieve a lot of these net zero or, you know, D carb goals that have been set out not only by governments, but also by enterprises. Those include things like we have an issue understanding how to measure. Right, how to measure our carbon emissions. And if you, if you are able to measure them, assuming that you can communicating them, right? So, as I said, going back to the, those, all those links, how do you communicate how the emissions, how, what those emissions are to all of the relevant players along the supply chain? Then you have the ability to access tools, right? So there are all of these technological advancements, and we can talk more about AI and big data that are unlocking these use cases that weren't previously available. Yet those tools aren't, aren't going to be affordable to, you know, maybe some manufacturers, some, some smaller shippers that are further upstream in in the supply chain. And then I think lastly, just the ability to orchestrate across players. You know, having best practices. Uniform standards so great if you're communicating what your missions are, but if they're not in a compatible format, it's not going to be super helpful. So these are some of the challenges that I, I believe are being addressed right now by emerging collaboration solutions.

Tom Raftery: 16:33

Okay. And any success stories you can talk to?

Camille Manso: 16:36

Sure. One company I'm really excited about and that we've actually connected to a number of our corporates who have explored or in the midst of kicking off a pilot is Watershed. I believe you may have had either the CEO or founder on one of your podcast episodes. But Watershed is tackling this issue from a number of different angles. So on the measuring and communicating, their platform facilitates this, allowing a lot of large brands, you know, across different industries to understand what their scope 3 emissions are. And scope 3 is really important because it really accounts for, you know, maybe 11 or so times the number of the, the volume of carbon emissions compared to scope one and two. So really having a grasp of what are those scope three emissions that we can begin to address them. This is something that Watershed enables. So allowing brands to say, Hey, who are my suppliers? What are there carbon emissions that I can account for that as I look at my scope three. And then allowing for simulations. That one's a really neat tool that, that I think resonates with a lot of corporates. It's not just, Hey, here's the information, but let's think about what you can do about it, right? If you are to change one of your suppliers or one of your materials, how can that impact? You know, doing a scenario analysis. How can that impact your emissions and get you closer to achieving your goals? And then one of the other legs is actually helping you reduce emissions. So being a climate platform they allow you to buy offsets buy credits directly from a direct air capture solution that they've partnered with for example And then I guess the last really neat thing that they do is around getting the consumer involved. So DoorDash, for example, is one of their customers and they have worked with DoorDash to allow not only the insight into what are the carbon emissions per delivery, But allows the consumer to offset those emissions when you order your, your food. Right? So as a consumer who is worried about my carbon footprint, this is just such a seamless way to go about reducing that.

Tom Raftery: 19:04

Interesting. And you mentioned then the use of big data, for example, and AI. And how are those technologies helping customers, you know, with their sustainability initiatives?

Camille Manso: 19:20

Yes. Great question. So I'd say AI and big data have especially over the last year or so with respect to AI have been all the rave. So why? Because we have all of this data that we've been accumulating across enterprises across functions, and now we have the tool to do something with it, right? So AI, these LLMs are being trained on massive amounts of data to deliver insights that can really help businesses transform their operations. So some really exciting use cases that again go towards sustainability initiatives are route optimization, right? If you can optimize your routes and drive fewer miles that that makes a big difference across multiple companies, multiple logistics providers. You also have things like supply chain visibility that are made possible. And, and really advanced through AI. Supply chain visibility gives you the ability similar in some ways to what I was mentioning earlier with Watershed, but the ability to say, Hey, if there's a major disruption, right? Take, take the bridge collapse that occurred recently. What, how is that going to impact my supply chain? So if I have a good sense of what my supply chain looks like now, introduce this outlier event. And how is it going to impact? And then I can use that information to say, how am I going to reroute my supply chain? And how, how can I reroute it in a way that will be more efficient or will optimize on what carbon emissions are? are resulting from that, right? Like you have congestion that may occur. So using tools like Flexport to see, you know, if we move a lot of the traffic to the west coast, how is that going to impact congestion? And then again, fuel costs and everything that kind of plays out from there.

Tom Raftery: 21:27

Okay.

Camille Manso: 21:28

Other some other use cases, I would call out demand planning is a big one. Especially coming out of the pandemic you have these severe fluctuations in supply and demand that weren't particularly predictable. And, you know, with better demand planning, you have optimized inventory, and then from there reduced waste. So a lot of this, again, is made possible through advancements in AI.

Tom Raftery: 21:57

Okay. And as well, I mean, one of the other, things that I'm seeing, and I don't know if this is mirrored in your experience, but in particularly in the likes of the manufacturing space and also in warehousing, the rollout of, cheaper and smarter sensors, the whole IOT and IIOT space leading to, again, even more data, which requires even better AI to get better outcomes. Is that, you seeing anything in that space as well?

Camille Manso: 22:26

Definitely you have lower costs for cloud computing, which a lot of these devices are, you know, on the cloud. They're transmitting data directly through the cloud. The components. The parts of IOT devices have significantly gone down. You're seeing the reemergence of RFID technology, right? As a, as a more cost effective way to track at the item level and with all of this, you know, to your, to your comment, it does go to you have all of this data, and then now you have the ability to make sense of it. And and make sense of it in real time, right? That that's really critical because then you can make decisions quickly. And you have increasingly in cold chain, for example the ability to understand what the conditions are of some of your shipments along the route. So again how do you reduce waste? You can track temperatures ultimately also resulting in better traceability and more transparency for consumers on where their goods are coming from and in what condition they were kept.

Tom Raftery: 23:37

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And. There's got to be a challenge as well for large organizations. I mean, if they're dealing with a startup very often, it's going to be on a pilot project, small case, small use case internally. What about the challenge of taking that and scaling it up to, you know, roll out across the entire company, the entire corporation? Is that something that you've come across?

Camille Manso: 24:03

This is probably the most common question we get. we're at the

Tom Raftery: 24:08

No original questions here.

Camille Manso: 24:10

The the and don't and I would say common recently we're at the point of corporate innovation where we, we have less around, Hey, how do I plug in to the startup ecosystem? In fact and that may have been the question about 10, 15 years ago when we were first created, right? That was really kind of the impetus for Silicon Foundry needs to exist because how do you even know how to get in. And now it's moved to, okay, we're in and there's so many companies. How do we figure out the signal versus the noise? And now that we're getting pretty good at that, it's okay. We found the, the, the signal, but how do we actually take that from pilot to scale? And one of the biggest challenges that we see is education and getting the, the, these tools adopted across, across an organization. And so something we've seen work really well is having at least some centralized innovation group within organizations who helps coordinate across different BU's so that when you take it from pilot successful pilot to scale, you have somebody who is plugged in across different BU's and can say, Hey, this is why you should adopt this, and here's how it worked and really helping facilitate kind of that, again, the, the translation between the startup and, and other stakeholders within an organization who may not be used to working with startups, right? And there is a lot of education around that. And then I go back to incentives. Right. How do you make sure that the incentives are aligned? That there are KPIs around partnering with some riskier solutions when it may not be so clear, right? Or you may be, you may be measured against different metrics. So that really comes from kind of the leadership level and ensuring that the leadership of these organizations are keeping in mind that the need to align incentives to promote adoption of new technologies.

Tom Raftery: 26:25

Okay. Sounds like it needs a lot of communication between all parties at all times. That sounds quite, quite a management exercise.

Camille Manso: 26:35

Just as it is in dating, Tom. Communication is key.

Tom Raftery: 26:41

Okay, so you're a relationship advisor really.

Camille Manso: 26:45

That's exactly, I mean, when it comes down to it our biggest asset is our network. Knowing the right people, we, we don't hold ourselves out to know everything, and we'd be foolish to say we do. We are industry agnostic. We believe technology is, pretty much horizontal, which is why we work across industries. And what we rely on is being able to contact our VCs who are looking at thousands and thousands of startups and picking winners, right? The ability to call up a founder who we spoke to recently and say, Hey, what are you seeing? What trends are emerging in your view? And then, you know, part of what we do from there is we contextualize that for our corporate members. So it's not just general information, but it's why this matters to you.

Tom Raftery: 27:35

Interesting. Yeah. And speaking of trends and what trends people are seeing, what trends are you seeing in this sustainability and supply chain space?

Camille Manso: 27:45

Sure. So, I mentioned earlier around Watershed. I think they are capitalizing on a big trend, which is the challenges around understanding scope three and, and the collaboration needed across various participants along a supply chain to actually make it work and help you achieve your goals as a, as an enterprise. We're also seeing a lot, you know, I mentioned demand planning. It's a really hot topic right now and utilizing AI to really create more accurate models and insights that allow you to plan better around, you know, what you're gonna be making and when, and even when it comes down to fulfillment, right? We're seeing a lot on how do you get things closer to the end customer so that that last mile isn't as expensive or isn't as carbon emitting as it would be if we can get closer to that end customer and in a more efficient manner,

Tom Raftery: 28:46

Okay. Cool. Cool. We are coming towards the end of the podcast. Now, Camille, is there any question I did not ask that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to think about?

Camille Manso: 29:02

I think going, going back to your question around challenges corporates face, I guess I would just double click on the challenges they face around adopting some of these solutions that we've talked about within sustainability and supply chain and why we're seeing a little bit of tension around actually getting onto these collaboration platforms. And there is a big question around data, right? We're, we've kind of taken it as, as a given here, but one of the biggest challenges we see is actually having data in the right format, right? Even within organizations, we're hearing a lot of great, we're we're saying all of these things about the valuable data we have, but are we, do we have it in a valuable format, you know, structured versus unstructured. And oftentimes within very large organizations, the data lives in silos. Right. So even if we were to get that in a format where it is usable and it is, you know, helpful, you hear, you know, bad data in bad output with AI, which is very real. Assuming we, we can have the data, you know, in a manner that, that makes sense now, why, why give that off to a collaboration platform? Why give away your data? And so this is a big question that needs to be addressed on, you know, that first mover. You know, if I give my data first, am I the loser? But instead, really adopting the mentality of we, we will all win and we all stand to benefit if we contribute because it makes our visibility platform is more powerful and more accurate. So that we, you know, some of the smaller players are able to, to get access to gain access to this without the heavy costs that they would incur in trying to, you know, either develop enough data on their own, which is not practical or, or, you know, have to bear the cost of adopting some of these solutions, which is a pretty heavy fee for some of these smaller companies who are you know, still using pen and paper and maybe Excel sheets. So, so we definitely want to think through some of these challenges and how we can overcome them. And oftentimes it'll be around educating and again, putting the right incentives in place.

Tom Raftery: 31:26

Okay. Cool. Cool. Interesting. Camille, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Camille Manso: 31:38

I would have you direct them to our website. We do have a blog and so you'll see I've written a number of pieces around sustainability around supply chain. But I can definitely send those to you offline. And you can share that if that works.

Tom Raftery: 31:52

Yeah, no problem. I'll put those in the show notes and that way everyone will have access to them. Great. Camille, that's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today.

Camille Manso: 32:00

Thank you so much, Tom. Great to see you.

Tom Raftery: 32:04

Okay. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.