Sustainability and AI: A Brave New World.

Wim Casteels is an expert and a teacher in IT & AI. Having developed the curriculum of the IT & AI specialisation, he’s the first in line to know about the multitude of challenges faced whilst AI is becoming more and more commonly applied in our daily lives.

AI is not just an ethereal and holy creature, that floats around and knows the answer to our most silly to our most serious questions. It’s a super complex machine that slurps up power at an alarming rate. Even most of today’s search engines eat meagre meals compared to the big slices of energy AI gobbles up.

It has a real impact on our natural resources. Data centers use energy and water to supply the big AI’s that are most popular on the market right now. At his homebase, AP Hogeschool, Wim develops alternatives to the well-known AI’s, smaller models that therefore use up less resources and energy.

There’s many more chapters to the story between AI and sustainability. On both ends, we are only just starting to discover what to, how to do it and when. Although it’s clear that we best start working as soon as possible, or our AI energy use will prevent us from hitting our climate targets by 2030.

Wim wants to encourage students to be part of the story. “Right now, you have a unique chance to do your part in securing a more sustainable future for both AI and technology.” It’s not just in diminishing the use of natural resources, there’s many complex issues in the physical data centers, the software or the algorithms that together produce AI. Solving them can also produce important innovations for AI, while it becomes more and more relevant in our daily lives.

Do you want to know more? Discover the details at TechNight 2025, or read more on the topic on Wim Casteels' blog.

Discover the AI & IT specialization: https://www.ap.be/opleiding/it/artificial-intelligence

Discover more on the topic: https://wimcasteels.be/blog/2025/ecologische-duurzaamheid/