05-26-2026IMPACT COUNCIL

How AI can help break the world’s fossil fuel addiction

Artificial intelligence opens the door to rapidly advancing fields to provide circularity.

[Photo: Getty Images]

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of top leaders and experts who pay dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership, and more.

The current AI boom reminds me of the dot-com era, which I watched unfold from venture capital in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Lots of hype. Eye-watering investments. Genuine transformative potential. Most conversations about AI today focus on the obvious value, productivity, and efficiency gains. That’s real, but it’s the shallow end. The deeper potential is something else entirely: ending the linear take-make-waste economy and with it, our reliance on fossil fuels.

For half a century, the global economy has run on a simple, destructive model. Extract finite resources from the Earth. Manufacture mostly disposable products. Throw away. Repeat.

Petroleum into packaging and apparel. Oil in cars. Critical minerals in the backbone of nearly every modern technology. The list is long, but the pattern is the same. We treat finite resources as if they were infinite, when we all know they are........

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