Closing the Adoption Gap

What happens to all the props, furniture and sets from our favourite films, TV shows and theatre productions once they're no longer needed? Too often, perfectly reusable items end up in skips, simply because production teams don't have time to find them a new home.

In this episode, Valeria Stromtsova sits down with Jo Kotas and Tin Brown, founders of USED Creative, a marketplace for pre-loved creative assets, to explore how lack of time becomes a major barrier to sustainable behaviour and how we can overcome it.

We talk about how Jo and Tin turned their firsthand experience of waste in the creative industries into a circular marketplace, why sustainability alone isn't enough to change behaviour, and how they developed an AI-powered tool to make reselling creative assets faster and easier.

We cover:

• Why lack of time is one of the biggest barriers to reuse in the creative industries
• How USED Creative is helping give film sets, props and furniture a second life
• How Jo and Tin built Superlister, an AI tool that automates much of the resale listing process
• Why consumers and businesses approach buying pre-loved items differently
• How financial incentives and removing friction can drive sustainable behaviour more effectively than good intentions alone
• The environmental trade-offs of using AI to solve sustainability challenges
• Why understanding your users' real constraints is essential to building climate-tech products people actually adopt

Know someone who should be on the podcast? Suggest a guest here: https://valeria-stromtsova.com/podcast

What if using AI more sustainably could also make it cheaper and more effective?

In this episode, Valeria Stromtsova sits down with François Burra, digital decarbonisation consultant and founder of Decarbonade, to explore how companies can adopt AI tools more sustainably, while also reducing costs and getting better value from it.

We talk about why giving everyone access to powerful general-purpose AI models doesn’t necessarily deliver ROI, and why choosing the right tool and model for each task can make a huge difference to both energy consumption and cost.

We cover:

• How choosing the right AI model and task can dramatically reduce energy use
• Why sustainable AI can also mean lower costs
• How to decide whether you actually need GenAI for a particular task
• The wider environmental footprint of AI, from electricity to hardware and raw materials
• Tools for comparing AI models and estimating the footprint of GenAI use

Resources mentioned in the episode:

• AI Energy Score Leaderboard:
  https://huggingface.co/spaces/AIEnergyScore/Leaderboard
• GenAI Toolkit:
  https://genaitoolkit.dgcgreen.ca/en
  

Know someone who should be on the podcast? Suggest a guest here:
http://valeria-stromtsova.com/podcast

What happens when your ESG product is built around regulation, and then the rules change?

In this episode, Valeria Stromtsova sits down with Morgan Woodward, ESG Analyst at Insig AI, to explore how regulatory and political shifts affect ESG products and how teams can build products that are ready to adapt.

We talk about Morgan’s first-hand experience navigating major changes to European sustainability regulation, and why building customisability into the product from the start made it possible to respond when the landscape shifted.

We also explore the role of AI: from using agents to keep track of regulatory changes, to choosing the right model for the right task, and why trustworthy underlying data matters just as much as the AI sitting on top of it.

We cover:

• How regulatory shifts can create major challenges for ESG products
• Why customisability can make products more resilient to change
• How AI can help teams stay on top of an evolving regulatory landscape
• Why strong, auditable data is critical when using AI for ESG
• How to communicate sustainability products in terms of business value, risk and time saved

Know someone who should be on the podcast? Suggest a guest here: http://valeria-stromtsova.com/podcast

Building a great climate solution is only half the challenge. How do you get people to actually use it?

In this first episode of Closing the Adoption Gap, I sit down with startup consultant Catherine To to explore why promising climate and nature tech solutions can struggle to gain traction – and what product teams can do differently.

We unpack some of the biggest adoption barriers Cat has encountered in her work: behaviour change, trust and data credibility, ecosystem readiness, and the challenge of building solutions that work for real communities in real-world contexts.

We cover:

• Why asking users to change their behaviour can be an adoption trap
• How trust, transparency and credible data influence adoption
• Why the surrounding ecosystem needs to be ready for your product
• What co-designing with communities looks like in practice
• Why specificity can be a strength, not a limitation

Know someone who should be on the podcast? Suggest a guest here: valeria-stromtsova.com/podcast