Hypercube Podcast Transcript

Title: Andrew Hughes, TripShift, on Gathering Real-Time Scope 3 Data

Host: Adam Sroka
Guest: Andrew Hughes

Intro: Welcome to the Hypercube podcast, where we explore how companies in the energy and utility sector leverage data analytics to make smarter decisions and accelerate business growth. I’m Adam Sroka, founder of Hypercube, a strategic consultancy that supports asset owner-operators, traders, route-to-market providers, and energy services companies to unlock the power of data.

If you’re interested in hearing real-world examples of how data and AI are advancing the energy sector, this is the show for you.

Adam Sroka: Today, I’m joined by Andrew Hughes, who is CEO at TripShift. Andrew, thank you for joining us. Could you, yeah, give us a little bit of an introduction? What do you do at TripShift?

And what do you, what’s your role entail as CEO?

Andrew Hughes: Hello. Yeah. Thank you for having us. Great to be here. So yeah, TripShift, we’ve been around for about three years now, or actually about four years whilst we were building some technology in the background. We’ve been in the market for the last 18 months or so.

So yeah, my job, I guess I was one of the, there was five founders originally came up with the idea of a various cups of coffee and whatever during lockdown TripShift evolved into what it is today of the founders. We have two of the founders of CEO and Steve, who’s the technical brain. So I’m not, I’ve not have a technical background.

So any technical questions are not for me today, but that’s where, how we split that sort of workload between us managing a team of about 15 people now based here in London. Operating in the UK and Europe and increasingly beyond that, we’re just branching out into with interest in Asia and stuff at the moment as well.

Interesting times for us.

Adam Sroka: Okay, for those in the audience that maybe aren’t familiar with TripShift, what problems are you solving and how?

Andrew Hughes: We call ourselves, I’m going to argue, we’re not a carbon accounting platform, but we’re involved in carbon accounting, if that makes sense. We specialise in travel and transport emissions.

So scope three and scope three, obviously a huge problem. The biggest issue around scope three is normally the organisation who’s So in legislative terms, organisations are now being held accountable for scope free emissions that they create in various forms and travel and transport and commuting. So that could be your business travel.

It could be your supply chains. If you’re delivering goods or services with using transport, business travel, commuting, all of those things, organisations are now being asked to account for that. The difficulty for organisations is they don’t typically have any control over those scope three emissions.

They’re not in your control, right? So an organisation, when it comes to scope one and scope two, they are strategic decisions that a company can make or an organisation, their choices you can make. You can elect to provide or elect to procure only renewable electricity, for example. That’s scope one and scope two.

The scope three? You have no control. Other people create those emissions and yet you’re now responsible for a proportion of those emissions that other people are creating without any direct control at all. So there’s obviously a huge issue around data collection. There’s a line between too much data and too little data, too much data, you run the risk of them getting into, this is inevitably at some point in the near future is going to be linked to some form of taxation or levies around the amount of scope three, probably more focused around.

So the challenge at the moment is organisations are being asked to set their reduction strategies. They’ll probably have an overriding corporate sort of net zero. 2030, 2035 whatever date they’ve gone for. The legislation at the moment requires those companies to then set a benchmark now in terms of your scope three, how much are you creating now?

And then select a reduction target in coming in the coming years. And then the challenge will be for you as the organisation to demonstrate how you’ve actually reduced your emissions and verify that with data to prove it. There’s a growing problem there. Sensitively, the organisation doesn’t control it.

They’re still working out what they have to report and how they have to manage that. And then of course, they’ve got to work with either their people or their organisations, if only a supply chain to try and get them to understand the importance of the data they’re providing and that unless the scope to re-challenge, but actually building a degree of understanding around that so that they can start to change behaviour because ultimately you need to reduce.

We at TripShift as an organisation We’re advocates of travel and whether it’s business or personal, movement in business terms creates value, right? It could be a business trip to new markets overseas. It could be the delivering of your services or your product to your customers.

They’re all creating value. So we advocate travel. Travel is a good thing one way or another. What we’re suggesting is that companies need to be able to manage that data. They need to understand how they’re creating those emissions where they can make changes in the way they move so they can move having thought about it rather than just being reactive.

We, we use a tagline of move better, so we want TripShift and we want organisations to move better. In other words, movement is good, but when you’ve got the opportunity to think about it and measure it, move better. On one level, it could be, you’re going to shift your entire commercial fleet, if you’ve got a fleet of lorries or vehicles, whatever to an electric fleet.

But on another level, it could be, you’ve got all your people coming to a single factory site and all your people live within a five ten all your employees live within a ten mile radius of that factory get them to car share use public transport there’s multiple levels of the same problem. But all of them require you to understand that as an organisation, then you need to engage with your people so that they understand it.

And then you can drive change, changing behaviour which will hopefully then cascade down into resultant sort of savings in those scope three emissions. And we obviously provide the data model that allows you to collect that data and manage it over time and visualise it as well.

It’s such an interesting topic

Adam Sroka: It’s such an interesting topic because it’s, there’s very few things I think that rile people up or are so human and like where they are and where they get to move and was it the, yeah, the department of security saying that it’s 80 to 95 percent of an organisation’s emissions could be scope three.

And like you said, you’ve almost got no control over it. Previous organisation I worked for was very forward thinking, trying to be carbon negative. And the scope three problem was, it was really difficult. And that was like a mature organisation that understood yeah, green energy and like reduction techniques and things like that.

So what are you Biggest challenges with data, like at TripShift, like what bit’s easy and what bit’s hard?

Andrew Hughes: Making the technology do the right thing consistently. So we clearly, we work with GPS is one of the constituent constituents of our data platform, but equally, we’ve got a lot of algorithms built into that as well.

So getting the technology right in the first place. And essentially what we do is we understand your movement. So if you think about a phone, your phone will differentiate between you walking and you being in a vehicle. And that’s simply a factor of speed, right? If your accelerometer in your phone reckons you’re moving along at 35 miles an hour.

You’re probably not walking, probably in a vehicle of some sort. So that’s as far as that classification goes. So algorithmic, we look at the exact characteristics of your movement. And obviously we can see where you’re moving. We can then detect how you’re moving. Are you in a car, planes, trains, automobiles, very plain, whatever it may be.

We have various profiles set up and we look at that algorithmically, decide the mode that you’re actually moving on and then give you the accurate emissions for that. And that’s fed back to you as the individual. Cool. As soon as the journey is finished, clearly the journey has to finish for us to report on it.

But as soon as the journey is finished within about five, 10 minutes of that journey finishing, or you get to a sensible Wi Fi signal or whatever, we’ll give you that data for the journey you just created. That same data is going back to the organisation almost straight away. So the organisation can actually see their scope three emissions building on the day.

The value for that for them is that Because they can see it happening, they can challenge it and say hang on a minute, why are we doing that? What’s this sudden spike of air? Why have we got so many people on planes today going to the same location? Whatever it looks like, I’m picking a scenario there out of the air, but they can see the data, they can see it happening.

So they can use it to report and manage compliance, but they can also use it to challenge organisational behaviour and just say, why is that happening? Why don’t, why can’t we change that? Why have we not thought about changing the way that people are moving there? Why have we not hired buses, right? We’ve got people driving individually in cars. Why are they not on a shared bus or a coach to go to that come back corporate exhibition or whatever?

Adam Sroka: Yeah. And do you see the kind of acceleration of some of these data and AI technologies that are really hyped up at the moment? Do you see them contributing then to the problem and really helping what can be done? Are there any exciting or tantalising things in the pipeline for TripShift that you can share?

Andrew Hughes: Yeah, I think the real value for that, for us coming up or for our customers really will be the insights that AI will drive.

So we, we’re fairly contextual anyway. So we’re quite, it’s contextual. So we make the recording experience for the individual as contextual based around you as the individual and your travel patterns. And we obviously link everything we’re saying there into good behaviour, because we’re encouraging when I say good behaviour in the context of TripShift as you’ve reduced your carbon.

So if you’ve created less carbon this week, right over last week, that’s something to be celebrated. So obviously we can drive that through and conventional through, through apps and things like those notifications and ways you can do that reward, reward, good behaviour, gamification, we’ve got leaders.

TripShift points, which are a way of monetizing TripShift points to use as a result of saving carbon can then be monetised. So that might equal a company scheme that often offering e-bikes, for example or discounts on your season ticket or public transport, whatever that looks like for the organisation.

So we can monetise it that way that allows people to get into sort of pick up on that traction and make that change. So I think AI will really allow us to make that insight process much more contextual, much, much quicker and much more focused on them as an individual and an organisation as well, but on them as an individual, which makes their experience better.

So I think that’s probably our immediate development. Obviously where AI goes at the moment, then perhaps, we’re talking a good game around AI, it would be interesting to see where AI actually goes in terms of real application that makes a difference beyond, beyond the sort of language model that we’re seeing at the moment.

Adam Sroka: Yeah, everyone’s brushed the massive increase in carbon that these AI models have produced under the carpet a little bit and trying to get some true reporting on the numbers that these searches and stuff are generating would be interesting, but we’re in the Wild West for now.

Andrew Hughes: Yeah, I think it is the Wild West, and there’s always, for every positive, there’s always a negative somewhere, so it’s how those balance out.

But again, I think you mentioned at the start, you’ve got this sort of massive chunk of, let’s call it 75 to 95 percent of an organisation’s scope 3 emissions are scope 3. It depends a little bit on the type of the organisation, manufacturing organisation will inevitably have a different profile to an organisation that’s people orientated.

A large consultancy with thousands of people has a very different scope three profile to an industrial organisation with multiple factories around the world. Their transport profile is very different. And actually the bulk of their scope three emissions are coming from delivering their product from those sites to, to wherever their consumers are.

And whereas that, that people led organisation, the vast majority of their emissions are being generated by people directly. They’re not interested in lorries because they don’t got any, but they are interested in how people move around or fly around the world.

Adam Sroka: Yeah. And then so just, you will have a unique insight then because you’re most people think about this stuff from the perspective of their organisation.

I always say like being a consultant, right? It’s the value that we bring is that I can be nosy into loads of domains, loads of people’s businesses and think about stuff from a wider perspective. You’ve got that unique perspective. Specifically around this scope three carbon and reporting. What do you think are some of the nastier, more challenging situations that businesses face when it comes to scope three emissions and things to look out for, some of the more interesting cases,

Andrew Hughes: I think it’s the unknown nature for most people as well. For the people who are tasked with reporting it, might have a little bit of theoretical knowledge, but actually there’s very little data about the organisation has very little data in a transport sense.

Think of employee commuting, that, that came into the legislation. In the UK and Europe, and we’ll probably be in some part in the States and the Pacific from what we can see. Now traditionally as an employer, you pay your people a salary to come to work and you tell them to be at work at 9 o’clock or whenever their working hours are.

And that’s as much as you care, right? Traditionally, you’re not, how you got to work is your problem, not mine. I’ve given, I’ve paid you salary, so you, you buy yourself a car or get on the train, whatever, that’s your problem. That’s now not the case, of course. They now have to understand how their people are moving.

And that, that can be a massive problem. If your organisation has 25 people working for it, then you don’t really need TripShift, you can work this out. There’s a way of asking your people on a regular basis, some clever Excel spreadsheet or whatever. You’ll be able to do something which will satisfy your requirements.

If you’ve got 100, 000 people in different countries of the world with different legislative requirements depending on where they’re based, you’ll You suddenly have a whole different problem and suddenly you’re creating jobs resource just to match it, to collate that data before you even started to understand the data.

So we try and head that problem off. That’s what we, we automate the data collection process. We give context to the data and because it’s smart data, because it’s real data, you can see it’s happening there. And then the problem is we see with financial accounting is so financial accounting or carbon accounting at the moment is largely round.

It’s largely a piece around converting financial transactions, and there is normally in business travel, for example, there’s clearly a transaction you can follow because somebody’s bought a ticket, a train ticket, a hotel ticket, a hotel booking, whatever, there’s a transaction you can follow, but because it’s a transaction, you can’t do it until after the transaction has been spent.

It has to have happened before you can account for it. And then, because of the way accounts work, you’ve got to pay out everybody, it’s got to be reconciled, then it’s got to be extracted from the bookkeeping as a financial number onto a spreadsheet, then you’ve got to put some sort of carbon conversion factor into there to get from that financial number to a carbon number.

You’re building in inaccuracy at every level because it’s a conversion. It’s better than nothing, but it’s still a conversion. But the real problem is, that now happened six months ago. So it’s happened. It happened six months ago. You could use that, for your initial sort of benchmarking and your initial compliance reporting.

But you can’t challenge it, you can’t change that again now because it happened six months ago. You can’t even remember what you did six months ago. Never mind, why did I take that mode of travel on that particular day? So we avoid that. We give it you on the day, both as the individual traveller or the employee and as an organisation, which can be challenged and can be used as a learning point that says, we shouldn’t do that again.

We need to remember that and we need to build that into a strategy at an organisational level to make sure that doesn’t happen. That might be a travel policy change. It might be something softer than that. It could just be a note to the team saying, Hey guys, we, it’s right.

So a cycle to it was, I think it was national cycle to work day yesterday, Hey guys, this month, can we all write it? Can we all see what difference it makes? Can we all cycle to work this month? Is that going to work? What reductions would I actually achieve and get people on board with it?

And of course, most people, if you communicate with them in the right way and engage them in the right way, bearing in mind, we said at the start that everybody’s got a degree of concern, if they suddenly think, Hey, my employer is trying to do something good here. Which we’re actually trying to do something genuinely to save some carbon and get everybody moving better.

And they’re helping people get e bikes or EV transition or whatever that looks like. But if you’re doing something good, then your employees become more and more engaged with it. And actually it becomes a real positive brand retention thing at that point, because actually your guys, your employees, you would like to think are your biggest advocates within a company should be your employees are actually advocating in a positive way about what your company’s doing to try and make, to try and move better as an organisation, reducing carbon emissions.

Adam Sroka: I think that’s a really crucial point because especially larger organisations, in my experience, there’s a bit of like corporate says this and we’re going to save carbon and there’s these initiatives that feel a bit me too, but then on the ground of the cold face, like you, you maybe don’t feel that it’s coming from a genuine place. It’s much easier in small organisations if you know the founders and so on. So I can see how that live like reporting builds that buzz around things and gets, it’s almost like an element of social engineering to what you’re doing.

On behalf of the organisation, have you thought, because you’ve mentioned gamification and things like that, is that, does that come up a lot in your product design and the way you think about the problem?

Andrew Hughes: Yeah, gamification has been something we’ve definitely tried to build in from the outset because it does spur change.

We’re all, whatever we say, we’re all competitive to a degree. And there are different ways. I think in this case, individual competition isn’t really, that isn’t really the trick. I think at an organisational level, then you can play around with things. So for example, you might have the London office versus the Paris office, who’s saved the most carbon this month.

You can tap into those into company rivalries and it could equally be the sales team versus the accounts team, whatever it looks like for your organisation, but you can start to build in that sort of challenge within the organisation. And I think the real challenge is the softer element for the organisation.

The company has got two challenges here. They’ve got this, they’ve got this very official legislation compliance target, which is coming out of them. And we all know that legislation is changing and building and there’s more and more of it. So we’re ultimately trying to simplify that legislation compliance issue for them.

They’ve got a bigger, which is a softer issue around. Building that wave of uptake to try and change behaviour and change the organisation’s behaviour in the organisation’s thinking. And I think you’re right. There’s always that problem at the start where people, oh yeah, somebody’s come up with a good idea look at this, the challenge then is to take it from that sort of initial, that initial sort of spark to turn to allow it to create a momentum and actually become something genuine, different company, and that will be a challenge.

We haven’t got all the answers, but the answer has got, I think the solution, I don’t think there is a perfect solution because the solution will change depending on your organisation and what you’re actually doing as an organisation. But talking about it to your teams has to be the starting point for me and tapping into the, they’re all, they’ve all got the same, their employees, but their people, so they’ve got a degree of concern because we see the news tapping into it in the right way.

In a positive way without driving this sort of doom loop that’s, is the other version, try driving into a positive constructive change, move better, that’s a positive message as well. Move better. Move is good, but let’s move better. So to drive that impetus and drive that momentum is the harder part and it will take some time.

And I think organisations in two or three years time that when they’ve built some sort of. Track record of this. I think the organisations are going to really win at this. The people of the organisations are going to be communicating strongly and see it as very much a team game as opposed to the corporate top line.

We all know there’s a corporate top bar and we all know there’s going to be linked to taxation. There’s going to be cost savings. There’s going to be legislative requirements, lawyers, whatever going in there, filling out the compliance side of actually the real win in this is the team game in generating.

That change in behaviour, which reduces your scope three, and again, we go back to the point if the scope three isn’t directly under your control, therefore, you have to manage that indirectly, and that has to be in whatever form the scope three is, it has to come from a form of change behaviour and understanding as a result.

Adam Sroka: Yeah, I think the team game is a genius idea, actually, I might have to pilfer that one internally and we’ll run some of that until we’re big enough to use TripShift, because that’s really cool. I just makes me ask because I can imagine the volume and the breadth of data sets, the technologies you have to interface with can’t be straightforward.

Begs the question, why this problem? Like, why such a big hairy problem? What drew you to this and your co founders to this problem of everything?

Andrew Hughes: In my case, it’s probably a strange route. So my background, and actually the majority of our backgrounds were either technology or transport or connections into the transport, in transport and travel industry but in my case I’ve spent most of my career In fact, all of my career in aviation, initially is in air traffic control, but most of my career has actually been spent in the private jet world.

I’m a poacher gamekeeper in that context, but actually, I look on, I come back to my first point, yeah, I’m an advocate of travel here, and actually I’m an advocate of air travel. So my, my, my daughter graduated recently from a university and one of the conversations we had, and I’m sure other people have had similar conversations with their sort of Gen Z kids now is, Oh I can’t travel anymore.

And, it’s bad for us to jump on a plane and on a personal level, I’ve seen you. I look at my life and look at how much I’ve benefited in personal and business terms from travel, whether that’s your holiday, whether it’s a business trip that’s gone and got you promoted as a result, whatever, it’s generated a huge benefit.

So the answer cannot be, we can no longer travel. So the answer has to be something different and we can look at how we travel and in order to look at how we travel, we need to understand the emissions around travel and we just don’t do that very well. So on a personal level, it was like trying to, so I had this frustration with the aviation industry of not really grabbing the narrative to the point that, everybody now thinks the worst thing in the world, the worst thing you can do for the, for carbon is go on holiday.

Jump on a plane to go to Spain or Greece or wherever you want to go, it doesn’t matter. Most people would now tell you, oh, that’s terrible, think about the carbon. The reality is, if you look at that in real terms, the amount of carbon you create by jumping on your plane to, to, I don’t know, the Mediterranean, Tomorrow, a couple of hours flight, two, three hours flight, shared with 200 other people.

The amount of carbon you’re going to create on that flight is tiny. When you look at that proportionally and look at how many times you’ve driven to Sainsbury’s or your supermarket of choice, whatever flavour that is, that consists of a mile, maybe a mile and a half from your house to the shop and back again in a car on your own that you’ve just loaded up with the groceries.

You look at the proportionality of the carbon you’re creating in that car journey versus the proportionality of that flight to Spain and then look at the proportionality of the joy or the relaxation or whatever that holiday has given you. It can’t be right to say we can no longer travel. We just have to travel better, move better and travel more sustainably and we have to understand that to get to that point.

Adam Sroka: I’ve not heard it put that way around, that’s a really interesting thought. It’s yeah, don’t move wastefully, like through the convenience, but use it when it’s necessary and just be mindful, of how you’re generating carbon and try and holistically bring it to a point where you’re making an improvement.

Yeah, okay. That’s quite interesting. So on the thread of something I always like to ask actually on the thread of people is internally your team. Do you find access to talent and the right skills straightforward or difficult? Because in the data and technology space, it’s very up and down. There’s like a wealth of people one day and then there’s a almost a drought the next and as big organisations overhire.

But in energy and these sort of ESG aligned organisations, in my experience, you tend to tap into some subset of people that actually really Believe in, in, in the vision and the goal. And so just interested, like, how are you finding talent acquisition for TripShift and do your team, are they like really believe in line with that vision and that journey?

Andrew Hughes: They are. And I think it’s essential. Break it up. So to finding people up until now, it’s been okay to find the right people because it’s a small team. And therefore, it’s not like we’re going to the market every month wanting another 20 people. We’d like to be in that position where we’ve got that sort of growth, but we’re not there yet.

So we haven’t come across it yet. Although if geospatial AI specialists, and if there’s anybody listening that wants to talk about TripShift, then geospatial AI is an interesting area. And there aren’t many people that know that much about it. You aren’t already working for Google Maps or whoever so geospatial AI specialists, yes, get in touch.

However, outside of that, yes, we’ve got some good people. Again, come back to our ethos, we’re pro travel, but pro travel in a better sense, in mood better. So having a bunch of hardline activists working for us wouldn’t work either. So yes, we need them to be really interested and engaged in what we’re doing, but equally, we need to try and in cultural terms, we need to push that down.

We are pro travel, we’re pro good travel, pro sustainable travel, and we need to, Push it in that direction for all that, for the reasons I was talking about earlier, that has to be, that has to be, and I think that could be a difficult line to tread. We haven’t had that problem yet.

And again, that might come up on us later as we start to scale and the people, the sheer number of people coming to the organisation that gives you a different cultural challenge, right? When there’s only 15 of us, we can, the culture is something we can manage quite closely and you can influence quite directly.

When you’re talking about a couple of hundred people, then that cultural challenge becomes one, one degree harder and so on as the larger the organisation gets. But I would like to say that will be a positive challenge for us to have. So we’ll get there.

Adam Sroka: I wanted to touch point on, you mentioned access to geospatial AI experts and it’d be remiss of me not to plug the Data Lab’s geospatial fringe event which is going on throughout August.

I’m hosting some of the events. I’m actually hosting one on day of recording tomorrow, but I think this will get this recording right later. I’ll definitely keep an ear out for any geospatial AI experts and send them your way, but other people interested in this domain should reach out. Conscious of time, I really appreciate you speaking to us today.

One last question I ask everyone before I let you leave. If people in the audience want to find out more about you, or about TripShift, or if you’ve got anything you’d like to plug or promote, where should we be sending them?

Andrew Hughes: I guess our website is a good start. Tripshift.eco will always give you ways of getting in touch, but equally you can look me up on LinkedIn or wherever else and always happy to have a conversation, obviously about TripShift and what we’re doing.

But equally, I’m actually a believer in that sort of collaboration piece. We all have different companies, but I think, The problems around sort of carbon are, I’m going back into the doom, doom loop piece now, the problems are huge and global. And I don’t think any one organisation is going to get a hundred percent of the answers, right?

So I think in business terms, then collaboration will be the way ahead in this space, wherever you are in the world. And I think those collaborations will probably look different in different parts of the world because of different requirements, whether geographic or otherwise. Yeah always happy to have a conversation.

Always happy to help if we can. And of course, we’re always happy to bring on board more customers as well.

Adam Sroka: Andrew, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us today and all the best at Tripshift.

Andrew Hughes: Thank you very much. No, it’s been a pleasure and thank you for having us.

Outro: And that’s it for this episode of the Hypercube podcast. Thanks for tuning in today.

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