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The business case for rightsizing AI is also an environmental one

Deployment must match the scale of the model with the task

    • Rightsizing AI is pointless if companies do not ask the fundamental question: whether it is even the right solution.
    • Rightsizing AI is pointless if companies do not ask the fundamental question: whether it is even the right solution. IMAGE: UNSPLASH
    Published Fri, May 22, 2026 · 07:00 AM

    ARTIFICIAL intelligence has become a boardroom priority, but chief executive officers are not considering its environmental footprint highly in the race to deploy it.

    By now, many of us have heard the headline-grabbing statistics about AI’s energy and water use.

    One widely cited estimate suggests that generating a single image using a powerful AI model can take as much energy as fully charging a smartphone.