Canvas8 reports are available to Canvas8 subscribers. What follows is an adaptation of the research; the full report can be accessed via the View Report link.
Abstract
Asking ChatGPT a question uses nearly ten times the electricity of a Google search. Hardly anyone thinks about that while a smart speaker adjusts the heat, an app plans the week's meals, or a shopping assistant picks out an outfit. AI is making everyday life faster and more personal, and people have welcomed the help. But every convenience runs on data centers with a growing appetite for energy, and the "cloud" makes that cost invisible. Many of the same people pay more for products labeled sustainable, yet few connect those values to their screens. When they do, AI's footprint will become part of what they're buying.
The research draws on interviews with Thomas Klaffke, foresight expert and author of Creative Destruction, and Andreas Wegner and Thomas Kueber of Berlin design and foresight practice Futur2 Studio.
The findings
73.5% of people are comfortable with brands using AI to speed up customer service on social platforms, and 54% expect AI to cut the time it takes to get things done. 65% of organizations now regularly use generative AI, and funding for the technology rose nearly eightfold in a year to $25.2 billion.
ChatGPT's daily electricity use is around 17,000 times that of an average US household, and Europe alone will need more than $1 trillion to prepare its power grid for AI. Even streaming adds up: the five billion YouTube views of Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee's "Despacito" used as much energy as heating 40,000 US homes for a year. "[D]igital technologies or digitalisation are presented as something that sort of lives in a non-natural 'cloud' with no impact on nature," says Klaffke. "There's a mismatch and [that can cause] confusion."
69% of Americans support the US becoming carbon-neutral by 2050, and 49% of people across ten countries paid an average of 59% more for products labeled sustainable. Activists are already connecting the dots. Earthjustice and the Sierra Club helped block a New York power plant permit for cryptominer Greenidge Generation.
Norwegian online grocer Oda added carbon labels to receipts, and customers began buying plant-based products at twice the rate of meat. Snap worked with Scope3 to measure the emissions of ad campaigns, and Xbox launched what it calls the first carbon-aware console. VML and Amazon Web Services built Vanishing Emails, which deletes old promotional emails to cut storage emissions and won a Cannes Lion in 2024. "Consumers today are not just passive recipients of technology," say Wegner and Kueber. "They are active participants who expect their values to be reflected in the products and services they use."
What this means for brands
- Put the impact in the interface: Oda's carbon receipts changed what customers bought, and a label or energy estimate at the moment of choice can do the same for digital.
- Build it into the product: Xbox's console schedules updates for times when the local grid runs on more renewable energy, so the lower-energy choice takes no effort from the player.
- Clean up after yourself: training a single large language model can emit 300 tons of CO2, so building on existing models saves energy, and Vanishing Emails shows that deleting stored data can be worth marketing.
- Publish the numbers: Snap now measures the emissions of ad campaigns with Scope3, and a brand that shares figures like these gives people something concrete to check before anyone demands it.
Canvas8 is a behavioural insights agency whose reports are used by brands and agencies worldwide. This page highlights key findings from the report; the full version is available to Canvas8 members.
Alice Sweitzer
