I have to admit that I haven’t been to a conference in quite a while, and I’d forgotten just how nice it feels to meet with a group of sustainability experts. It’s not just about sharing best practices, but also about bolstering each other’s morale in this daily „struggle” against a business system that—as comes as no surprise to anyone—is focused primarily on building capital.
We face this challenge every day, both within companies and from the perspective of consultants. We still encounter the belief that sustainability is nothing more than a regulatory requirement—endless investments in bringing the business into compliance, a waste of time and money. And we keep explaining, time and again, that the opposite is true. Every company grows. By growing sustainably, building resilience to climate change, and adapting to trends and to a society that is increasingly demanding equality and inclusion (and rightly so)—ultimately gains: long-term savings, resilience to geopolitical shocks, and the ability to retain and attract talented people. I left the conference with my head held high and with the hope that there are more of us and that we all believe in the same thing: that sustainable development is simply the optimal path for business growth in the long term.
Right at the start, Anna Gorączka introduced the new program Responsible Business Forum, Nexus, which is based on supporting business experts by fostering knowledge-sharing partnerships between companies. It comes as no surprise that some organizations already have a well-developed approach to sustainability, while others are just beginning to embark on this path—and it is precisely for this latter group that the program can prove to be a tremendous support. To me, this is a small ray of hope: even though everyone is playing toward their own business goals, we, as experts, are playing toward a single, shared goal of sustainable development as one team.
This year, the theme that ran through virtually every speech at ESG Ideas Fair, ...was artificial intelligence. But it didn’t appear on its own—right alongside it were cybersecurity and inclusivity. I’ll start with the latter, because it moved me the most personally. I was deeply impressed by the two sign language interpreters who translated every presentation throughout the day. I caught myself watching them more often than the speakers themselves, and I think I managed to catch how the words „person” and „law” are signed in sign language. It was a small thing, but it stayed with me for a long time, along with thoughts about the challenges I don’t face myself and the question of whether I can help others in any way—and whether anyone would even want that.
One of the speakers, Daria Uljanicka, pointed out that as a society, we’ve been conditioned not to look at people with disabilities. And that really struck a chord with me, because I immediately recognized myself in that. On the street, I look away and tell myself I’m doing it out of tact, so that my gaze isn’t perceived as scrutinizing or judgmental. Except that I don’t look away from other passersby. To those whose eyes I happen to meet, I offer my reflexive, awkward smile. So it turns out that I’m conducting a silent selection—I ration my own awkwardness and, out of politeness, decide who deserves a share of my social embarrassment and whom I tactfully exclude from it. And yet every person I encounter has exactly the same right to that moment of awkwardness. Perhaps the speaker was talking about something completely different, but that one sentence directed my attention not toward business, but toward myself—something I hadn’t expected after an industry conference, and for which I am grateful to her.
Cybersecurity, however, has returned as the natural flip side of AI: the faster artificial intelligence develops, the more the area that needs to be protected expands, because entirely new attack vectors emerge alongside it. This is a risk whose „prevalence” is undoubtedly on the rise and should be taken into account in analyses of an organization’s resilience.
And so we come to the focus of this year’s conference. For most of us, it’s already clear that AI will become an integral part of our lives—not only because of how we use it ourselves, but also because of everything around us over which we’ll have no control. And this isn’t some future scenario—it’s already a reality.
The panelists didn’t mince words as they listed the risks associated with the development of AI: cyberattacks, rising energy consumption by data centers, the enormous amounts of water needed to cool servers, the use of critical raw materials, and even the growing demand for copper. Perhaps one day, when calculating a product’s carbon footprint, we’ll also factor in the environmental footprint of artificial intelligence, which is becoming increasingly integrated into our day-to-day operations and is even emerging as a new paradigm for improving efficiency.
What stuck with me most, however, was the conclusion of Dr. Ewa Jastrzębska’s speech, in which she, while summarizing the topic of AI, referred to „Magnifica humanitas,” the first encyclical in history devoted to artificial intelligence and digitalization. And it was then that she voiced what none of the previous speakers had explicitly mentioned: that alongside water and energy consumption, there is another, less obvious threat—the loss of our humanity. The risk is that by entrusting more and more decisions, actions, and thinking to machines, we are quietly losing what makes us human. This is, of course, no great revelation. Each of us has likely already noticed how temptingly easy it is to turn to AI for help. The point is not to let this ease of use make us forget our own capabilities and to treat artificial intelligence as a tool, not a substitute for thinking.
Polish 
English