AI Sustainability Calculator

1. Human Environmental Footprint
Human emissions are calculated by aggregating daily fixed costs (office energy, commute, water) multiplied by the number of people and time spent on the project. We factor in Remote Working (% WFH), which offsets office energy and commuting footprints. Annualized impacts like laptop manufacturing, HVAC refrigerant leaks, and meeting room hardware are amortised per project based on the team's total annual output. Finally, project-specific travel (flights, hotel stays) is added directly to the total.

2. AI Environmental Impact (Carbon & Water)
AI impact is evaluated across three primary vectors:

• Inference Energy: The electricity used to generate the output (Queries × kWh/query × Data Center PUE). This is multiplied by the grid carbon intensity of the data center, accounting for their specific renewable energy mix.
• Training Amortization: The massive, one-off carbon footprint of training the foundation model is divided by its estimated global user base and allocated proportionately to your workload.
• Water Usage: Calculated using the data center's WUE (Water Usage Effectiveness in L/kWh) plus the model's direct cooling estimate (water evaporated to cool the GPUs) per query.

3. Financial Overheads & ROI
ROI is the net revenue (Gross Revenue - Project Cost) expressed as a percentage. Human costs include fully-loaded hourly rates, sick leave burdens, and recruitment overheads amortised per project. AI costs include direct API usage charges plus amortised enterprise platform subscriptions, integration/dev costs, and any human QA review time required to verify the AI outputs.

4. The Scaled "Time is Money" Effect
The most significant enterprise impact of AI is workflow velocity. By accelerating a process from (e.g.) 24 hours to 2 hours, a fixed-size human team can deliver exponentially more projects in the same fiscal year. The Scaled Annual tab visualizes this compound effect: calculating the extra revenue unlocked by this speed, along with the comparative ESG Efficiency (kg CO₂e emitted per £1 earned).