To learn to listen to yourself and to trust what your inner voice is telling you. I think it took me 10 years of my career to get there. And I think it's okay, it's a journey. What I think I could do better and maybe an advice for people who listen to us and who feel they don't listen to their inner voice is I would have liked to learn earlier. I think it's really paying attention to it and trying to listen. Progressively, you learn to detect what your inner voice is telling you. This is In.

Her Element, a podcast from BCG. I'm Karen Lynes.

I'm Suchie Srenivasson. In this episode, we have meaningful and vulnerable conversations with women leaders in digital, business, and technology.

This week, we're speaking with Charlotte to Go, CEO and founder of CO2 AI, an AI platform that helps the world's largest organizations successfully manage their end-to-end, net-zero journeys.

Charlotte started her career at BCG and rose to the level of Managing Director. When she discovered the boundless application of AI, she decided to return to university to learn more about it. That's when CO2 AI was born.

Here's my conversation with Charlotte.

My name is Charlotte Degasult, and I'm the COO of CO2 AI.

And if you don't mind, can we go back a little bit to your time at BCG? What were you doing in your time at the firm?

I spent more than 10 years at BCG. I started right after school as a Business Consultant. And at some point in my career, I shifted to tech and artificial intelligence, and I moved from the core BCG business to what is now called BCGX, which is a tech arm of BCG. And there I learned how to use tech to help the BCG clients, so very large organizations, worldwide companies managed to solve their strategic issues with tech and AI. And that was a fascinating journey. And then I progressively started to apply this AI and this tech skills that I had learned to sustainability.

So cool. And so why did you decide to go ahead and branch off and found your own company?

So it was not just a personal decision. The story of CO2 AI is really specific. Co2 AI was born within BCG when I was a Managing Director and Partner there. And we started, really, with the ambition of helping the BCG clients manage their sustainability journey. And what happened is that very quickly we shifted from consulting business to a software business and we grew very fast. I was based in France and the first CO2 AI clients were French clients, but very, very fast. People from all over the world wanted to hear about CO2 AI. It started to be complex to operate CO2 AI and to really foresee the growth it could have within BCG. And it was clear that if we were making it a standalone SaaS business, it would be far easier to feed CO2 AI with the right resources, the right structure to make it grow as fast as it could grow.

You returned to school to study data science and AI. And what was that experience like?

It was amazing. First, going back to school. After working for a few years, you see school so differently. You enjoy so much sitting in the room and listening to a teacher who's just there for you and tries to make you learn as fast and as easy as he can. That was amazing. It was amazing to get a class again and to meet new people. All this experience after a few years working was just I loved it. And then learning new skills, I think it's something that we should do throughout our lives. Overall, it was amazing and I really felt that I was complementing my business skills with something which was new, but very complementary, in fact.

So do you feel like that education gave you a leg up that you wouldn't have had otherwise?

Yeah, definitely.

What do you think the main issues are that you end up tackling in CO2 AI for organizations?

There are basically two issues. The first one, and I will give you two numbers and you will understand what I mean. The first number is less than 10% of companies worldwide today are comprehensively measuring their emissions. And we know that we don't reduce what we cannot measure. The first pain point is this measurement issue and helping companies measure their emissions with the right level of automation, accuracy, quality, so that they can really identify the insights that they need, the hotspots of their emissions, and see how they can reduce. The second number is less than 15% of companies are actually meeting the targets they have set themselves in terms of sustainability reduction. We don't measure, but we also don't reduce. That's the second pillar of CO2 AI is really helping companies manage their reduction journey so that they can say, I do measure and I do succeed on my ambition and I can prove it.

What should we be paying attention to at the intersection of climate and AI, do you think?

There are tons of applications of AI on climate topics. If you take the corporate world and if you look at the different functions: marketing, finance, supply chain, operations, all those functions have been going through a wave of digitalization and progressively using artificial intelligence. It's not everywhere perfect and everywhere super advanced, but the digitalization is ongoing. In sustainability, we are still very, very late. It's super frequent that I talk to CSOs or to head of climate in organizations and they tell me, Yeah, what we do is working in Excel spreadsheets. We assemble 50, 60 spreadsheets every year and we get a refresh on our carbon footprint this way. Well, it takes us 2-3 months. We have many errors and we realize it later, but that's the way we do things. The first thing is we know we are late on climate and the big potential of AI for me is acceleration. It can help catch up with the lack of digitalization that sustainability overall suffers from. That's one. And then when you look at the potential applications of AI in climate, there are really two fields. There's the field of reduction, measuring emissions, identifying where to focus to reduce and ultimately reducing.

And there is the field of adaptation. We know we are going to have increased temperature and consequences of climate change. How can we prepare, anticipate to avoid the consequences of the droughts or any climate disaster that we know we are going to have to face, unfortunately. For me, those two topics are equally important and interesting. I've been teaching the strategic perspective on sustainability and AI as two key drivers of change and of strategic implications for businesses. And this is what I've been doing at HEC. And then I've been also doing a class on how to leverage AI to solve concrete business issues. With my role as a CEO, I've stopped doing the second one. I kept only the first one from a time management perspective. It's far easier. The way I see this is I really like doing this because it helps me take my work and think about how to democratize what I do and how to make sure that I communicate on the most important ideas, most important insights of what I'm doing. It's something I do because I like it. It takes some time, but it also helps me to step back and to also reflect on CO2I strategy and where we are going overall.

So it's very complementary and I don't see that as a sunk cost or as something that takes time, but is not useful for me. It really helps me reflect also, and that drives decisions then for the business.

So in terms of AI generally, what do you think young people in the workforce today can do to get themselves career ready?

Everybody should know the basics of AI and what's going on. It evolves very fast. So there is no need to become an expert and to know the technical details, but I think ignoring it and ignoring how to apply it, what it means, how it can be used is just impossible today. And so for me, the biggest advice is it's okay not to be to be a geek and not to want to learn how to code, et cetera, that's totally fine. But you need to do the bare minimum in terms of education to know how it works and how it can be used so that you don't miss opportunities then in your day to day job to use it when it makes sense.

I'd love to talk to you about your idea of the inner voice and trusting your gut. Do you feel like you've been able to listen fully to your inner voice across your career?

No, I don't think so, if I'm perfectly honest. I think this takes time and to learn to listen to yourself and to trust what your inner voice is telling you. It took me time. I think it took me 10 years of my career to get there. And I think it's okay. It's a journey. I'm still learning every day. I'm super happy that I've reached a point where I'm able to do it and I feel much more aligned in what I do in my everyday life today than five years ago. I'm sure that then I still have a lot to learn. What I think I could do better and maybe an advice for people who listen to us and who feel they don't listen to their inner voice is I would have liked to learn earlier. I think it's a learning. I think it's really paying attention to it and trying to listen. And progressively, you learn to detect what your inner voice is telling you.

Using your inner voice to lead a team versus using your inner voice to guide your inner motivations and what you want to do in your life are different. Can you speak to that a little bit and how you think of leading and listening to your inner voice in both contexts?

I think what matters when you want to embark a team on an idea that comes from your inner voice is to make sure that you can really explain your inner voice and give a meaning to what you're suggesting to do. This is usually when you need to complement your inner voice with some more fact-based arguments just to make sure that this does not just look crazy. That reminds me of a year or so ago, I had the crazy idea of we were building the product. And part of the product, I thought we had to build it with a non-profit organization, which makes no sense from a SaaS perspective, business perspective, et cetera. But I was very convinced that I don't know, I knew we had to do it this way, but then I had to really try to make sense of this idea myself and embark my team behind it. Because if you look at the idea from a very rational perspective, you will say, Whoa, that does not make sense. So this is important to manage to just not speak with your intuition and your inner voice, but speakers.

So founding your own startup is risky, of course. I'd love to get into the idea of being comfortable with risk. You left BCG. How do people grapple with the idea of risk and how do you?

I got a ton of questions about it when I was leaving. I was leaving my comfort zone. I had been working hard to become a managing director and partner. And so usually people at my stage of career, they are more thinking, Okay, I will stay a few more years because now I can really enjoy. And after all this learning curve, I can use what I learned finally and feel in my comfort zone. And it was never something that I could really think of doing. Of course, I question myself whether it was the good choice or not. But ultimately, what is risk, really? What is going to happen if I fail? And what does failure mean also? Honestly, I'm learning every day. I feel I'm winning every day. And so maybe the adventure will stop and maybe I will have to find something else after that. But I feel really comfortable with the idea. I feel I'm at the right place. I'm trying to do what I think is right for the planet, for my team, for CO2 AI, and for myself. And I'm trying my best to make it succeed. I think I would have had a lot of regrets not trying.

I'm trying. I will see what the future will bring. But really, the risk, I don't see it as something... Of course, I wanted to succeed. I don't want it to fail. And yes, sometimes I have some fears. But also when I step back, the personal risk I'm taking is very limited. I'm really learning. I'm winning every day.

I am so inspired by you, and I can only imagine what our listeners are going to feel. And just asking the question of what is risk really? How many people ask that? I think it's very rare. If we can just put it into that context, we can go so much further. But often we don't even examine that question. What would you say to others who are thinking about pursuing something meaningful that could also be perceived as risky?

I would tell them to really project themselves in a few years and try to think, What can happen if you do it? How will you feel? What will happen if you don't do it? How will you feel? And even if it fails, think about, Okay, what will happen? Really? And this helps me a lot make choices personally. So this would be my advice. And then really follow... The biggest advice, I think, is follow your heart. Try to see what speaks to you and try to follow it. Usually fear is showing you the way in reality. The more fear you have, the more it means that this is where you are going to grow and you need to go for it.

So during the process of founding your own company, did you ever doubt?

I think I have doubts every day. I'm questioning myself on many things. Creating a company is hard, right? There is nothing that is easy and that flows. And so, yeah, tons of doubts. But at the same time, a confidence that I have a great team around me and I'm not the only one looking for the solution. So I trust us collectively to find the best way through the problems.

Can you tell us about a time when you felt you were in your element?

It feels right to me to be at the place I am now. It's not easy. It does not mean I have all the keys and I have all the answers. By I don't. But I feel I am where I am supposed to be.

That was my conversation with Charlotte, Suki. What were some of your key takeaways from that conversation? The thing.

That struck me is about the problem that she picked, or I mean, maybe the problem picked her, which is the climate change. This has, of course, been a steady drumbeat, right? Being in our headlines now for, gosh, almost a decade, and to the point where I think it's very much in our collective consciousness, but also with a sense of helplessness, at least just speaking for myself, Yes, there are small actions that we all are doing. And what I really like is how knowingly or unknowingly she arrived at this point of breaking down this big interactable problem into these very specific components. Okay, there's a problem. So how do you measure the extent of it? How do you decompose it into the micro actions that can actually make a difference? Now, if her client stakeholder set is these companies, enterprises, then what's holding them back? If it's the lack of data, so almost drawing this tree in a very engineering-like way with facts and data and issue—we used to call it issue trees and measurement trees—and then just using this technology to go after it, what it does is I think it turns the situation from feeling hopeless and powerless about a very big, vast, humanity-sized problem into something that she can feel very concrete about.

By the way, that's also the factor that allows her to enroll her team because there is a cause, it's measurable, it's actionable, and you can put one foot in front of another and go after it. I just loved that intersection of the cause, the mission, but her approach, which was very grounded and practical. And then, of course, the sweet spot culmination of that with AI is just, as you would say, gives me goosebumps.

I love this part where I guess it's just me thinking back on other guests and other conversations we had. And this really stood out to me when she says, What is risk, really? What's going to happen if I fail? And what does failure mean? What a poignant question and almost so incredibly deep. I felt like no one has ever asked it in such a way. I just thought that that was really empowering for so many of us to listen and just be like, Yes, there's a thing called failure, but what does that mean in your world? And it's the power of the mind. And how do you want to interpret failure? Or is it just like a new experience that you're going to grow from? I thought that was beautiful.

It's putting your arms around the fear and embracing it, and then actually the resulting from it because you have actually embraced it and the risk of failure. You're liberated because now you can do what you want, and that just sets you up to take probably those really big leaps of faith and swing for the fences, basically, which is what you have to do with some of these massive undertakings if you're tackling problems like climate change and things like that.

Well, that's all for today. This has been Inher Element, a podcast from BCG.

Join us next time to hear more meaningful and vulnerable conversations with women leaders in digital business and technology.

Thank you so much for listening.