AI is an Enabler for People-Driven Innovation

At Nellie Technologies, we build technology designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That means operating at the intersection of science, engineering and environmental policy.

It also means dealing with an enormous amount of complexity – both in the design of our systems and in the processes required to verify and report what they’re doing.

In that context, artificial intelligence has become an increasingly valuable tool, not as a replacement for human judgement, but as an enabler. I tend to think of it like a calculator. If you’re not the very best at mental arithmetic, you’d rather get the right answer quickly than struggle through something manually. The same applies here: if a tool can help you do something more efficiently, and to a high standard, then it’s worth using.

We don’t use AI for everything. But when it comes to supporting the technical and administrative side of the business, it has real value. A good example is patent research. When we develop new technologies, we need to understand what has already been patented and what the state of the art looks like. That can take days of desk research but with the help of AI tools, we can get about 80 per cent of the way there much faster. It still needs expert legal review, but it helps us narrow the field and make better use of our time.

Another area where AI helps is in software development. As a company, we have to report everything we do to our certification bodies, which means running and maintaining quite a bit of code. We’ve found that AI can generate some of that code more quickly and efficiently than we can manually. As a software developer myself, I can confirm it’s faster – though not always better. You still need human oversight, and you need to understand what the code is doing, but the time savings are hard to ignore.

In that sense, AI has become part of the toolkit. Not using it now would put us at a disadvantage. But we’re careful about how we apply it. For our core science and engineering, we still rely on people because that’s where the real innovation happens. Tools like AI are there to support that work, not to direct it.

That said, I’m very aware of the environmental concerns around AI. Large data centres use significant amounts of water and energy. We’re often approached by operators in that space who want to reduce their impact, and we’ve had conversations about how waste heat from data centres might be used in our own engineered systems. So while AI helps us operate more efficiently, it also presents new challenges that the industry needs to address.

In the long term, I think we’ll see more innovation not just in how AI is applied, but in how it’s powered. For companies like ours, there’s an opportunity to play a role in making that more sustainable, whether through better energy use, heat recovery, or even offsetting through carbon removal.

For now, I see AI as a tool that helps us keep pace. We work in a sector that is moving quickly, where innovation isn’t optional. If we don’t keep refining our systems and improving efficiency, someone else will and we’ll be overtaken. That’s the nature of a young and fast-developing market.

But AI is never the driver of our innovation. Our motivation remains the same: to remove atmospheric carbon and play a role in addressing climate change. Where technology – AI or otherwise – can help us do that more effectively, we’ll use it. But the ideas, the direction, and the ambition still come from people.

Stephen Milburn talks about this and more in the Mentera podcast episode Beyond Business as Usual: Fuelling Growth with Innovation. Listen to the podcast here.