Akila Utilizes Data and Technology to Enhance Corporations' ESG Initiatives
- Joseph Low
- 20 hours ago
- 9 min read
Akila is a digital twin platform designed to transform sustainability, performance, and human-centricity in the built environment, while also facilitating ESG reporting for executive leadership.
Akila is a real estate data and management platform established in 2021 that employs digital twin and AI technologies to facilitate data-driven decision-making and enhance ESG for extensive global portfolios. In what manner was the concept of Akila developed?
Akila commenced with a cohort of individuals from many disciplines pertinent to the built environment, including 3D design and simulation, systems engineering, energy, construction, IoT and smart buildings, and facility management. Our unity stemmed from the acknowledgment that buildings account for a substantial portion of carbon emissions, around 40 percent, and that the sector remains among the lowest in terms of digitalization. This necessitates alteration. We were determined to develop a platform that might facilitate a sustainability change in the built environment. This transformation focuses on data, digitalization, enhanced performance, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. It significantly encompasses the luxury sector and its constructed assets – mining activities, factories, warehouses, retail spaces, yachts, and more entities.
A multitude of stages led us to our current position. We drew significant inspiration from our strategic partner, Dassault Systèmes. Since the 1980s, they have entirely revolutionized manufacturing in the aerospace and automotive sectors by employing digital twin technology and 3D simulation, transitioning from an analog and paper-based system to a fully digital and model-driven approach, utilizing the principle of a single source of truth from design through production and operation.
We aim to replicate this approach for the built environment, assisting businesses and portfolio managers in attaining significant decarbonization throughout their assets. The Akila platform is an enabling technology that optimizes the whole value chain, from design and construction to operations and decommissioning. At Akila, we are assured that we have developed a distinctive digital twin platform, meticulously crafted for the era of ESG.
Describe the intimate association between Akila and Aden Group.
Aden Group served as the incubator for Akila and continues to be one of its three primary strategic partners, with Dassault Systèmes and Microsoft. Aden Group possesses 25 years of practical competence in managing intricate operations across extensive sites, including factories, industrial parks, commercial spaces, and retail environments. This experience has significantly influenced the development of Akila, which, in addition to providing ESG and performance dashboards for senior decision-makers, is also tailored as a solution for operational teams at various sites. The functionalities of Akila are profoundly influenced by Aden's extensive experience in comprehending client needs, addressing their challenges, and transforming their buildings into high-performing, comfortable, and human-centric environments.
Our partnership with Aden Group presents opportunities for collaboration on net-zero carbon projects with other entities within the Aden Group framework. I am particularly considering Tera Energies, the clean-energy joint venture co-founded by Total-Eren, and NXpark, a series of turnkey Industry 4.0 industrial parks currently under development in China. In essence, our collective strength enhances our capacity to advance decarbonization and optimization more effectively.
What role has Dassault Systèmes played in defining the data to be collected and the overall process involved?
As previously stated, Dassault Systèmes is a pioneer in 3D design and simulation. In the last 40 years, they have emerged as global leaders in software for sophisticated simulation and 3D modeling. Collaborating with Dassault Systèmes as one of our three primary strategic partners has significantly enhanced our competencies in two specific domains.
Firstly, Dassault Systèmes is pivotal in establishing and sustaining the "digital thread" of a site within the built environment. This guarantees the preservation of a singular source of truth for a project throughout design, construction, and commissioning, while the Akila integration ensures the continuity of this digital thread during operations. Accurate outputs can only be achieved through precise data inputs; otherwise, as the adage states: garbage in, garbage out. Dassault Systèmes guarantees the integrity of all structural data incorporated into our platform.
Secondly, Dassault Systèmes software offers extensive simulation of an unlimited range of scenarios for a building or asset without limitation. This encompasses energy modeling, thermal comfort assessment, carbon footprint analysis, and additional elements. Consequently, we can integrate the virtual and physical realms to create a continuous optimization cycle, enabling us to "foresee" developments that promote more intelligent and sustainable building design for greenfield projects. Then, during the operating phase of a building, this modeling capabilities enables crucial carbon-reducing features like predictive maintenance — this means we can tackle possible issues before they disrupt operations and generate excessive environmental effect.
Who are the principal members of the Akila team?
In truth, there are numerous examples to mention. Since our inception, we have expanded from a workforce of five to eighty, and we anticipate more growth. Our founding team is diverse and international, uniting eminent technology, business, and sustainability specialists from various worldwide technology, consulting, and industrial organizations. Our expertise encompasses ESG, energy, engineering, construction, PropTech, and LEED. We started in China, but we’ve been expanding fast in Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, with two main divisions: SaaS as well as an Architecture & Engineering Technologies division.
Akila’s Energy Savings Tracker: a smarter, simpler way to measure impact. What specific solutions is Akila providing?
Many firms are currently pursuing energy-savings programs but lack the tools to successfully conduct and measure optimisation at scale. For instance, some organizations don’t have a clear view of how much energy they are spending and where the inefficiencies reside – they can simply compare energy bills side-by-side, for the crudest measurement of energy consumption. Or, they have conducted energy optimisation programs, but they are still operating off large Excel sheets, relying upon manual input and management. This limits how often measurement can take place, adds the danger of human error, and becomes tremendously difficult to coordinate across sites and countries.
These are the difficulties Akila Energy Savings Tracker addresses. The platform employs IoT to establish a transparent baseline of energy consumption for each site, including particular pieces of equipment. Subsequently, it monitors all ensuing energy consumption in real time within the same digital environment, employing identical measures. This indicates that one may precisely quantify the energy conserved for any equipment, facility, or portfolio during any specified duration, as well as assess the resultant variation in carbon emissions.
Is the primary message sent to decision-makers the provision of real-time data and analytics through an intuitive dashboard?
Indeed, it constitutes one of the principal messages. Akila is engineered to enhance the speed and quality of decision-making among C-suite executives. We assert that consolidating essential information regarding ESG and building performance into a customizable "portfolio performance cockpit" is among the most effective methods to accomplish this. This report is not static; it is dynamically updated, allowing leadership to be promptly informed of any irregularities at specific sites and ensuring swift follow-up actions.
Is the Akila team functioning as an advisor — can the team assist clients in high ESG risk sectors in formulating their climate transition strategies?
In these instances, Akila serves as the facilitator, and we collaborate with experts to generate a comprehensive report. The specialists may either be internal experts from the company or sourced from a consultancy firm within our network. Once this foundation is established, Akila customizes its solutions to align with the particular recommendations and requirements of the company. We can significantly streamline the implementation of tour clients' climate transition by automating the data collection for Scopes 1, 2, and 3.
Which clients have commenced the implementation of the diverse Akila solutions?
We are collaborating with American, Japanese, and European multinationals, many of which are presently conducting pilot programs in China and Southeast Asia as an initial phase for global implementation. Our most significant contract for ESG and decarbonization is in the retail sector, with a public announcement forthcoming. However, the predominant portion of our client base has thus far been in industry and manufacturing, encompassing automotive, construction equipment, electronics, and petrochemicals.
The platform's advantage lies in its ability to collect and scale data from any building or asset across various sectors, with Akila facilitating this process regardless of the building type or sector involved. We have utilized Akila to assist clients in connecting and optimizing multisite portfolios that include commercial buildings, warehouses, hospitals, and international schools.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has recently acknowledged Akila as an emerging leader in the ESG sector. The prestigious award annually acknowledges the top 100 early- to growth-stage companies globally that are influencing the future through technological advancements. What is the impact of such an award on the entire team at Akila?
We were chosen as one of 100 global startups to participate in the WEF’s 2022 Technology Pioneers cohort. This significant milestone will facilitate our engagement with high-level audiences and partners in our decarbonization mission. This suggests that the factors motivating Akila — the climate crisis, the emergence of ESG, and digitalisation as essential for decarbonisation — are also resonating with a broader audience, including individuals in senior positions within business, technology, and government.
As participants in the Technology Pioneers cohort, we can engage directly with the WEF through working groups, such as our recent inclusion in the Digital Twin Cities Advisory Committee in Beijing, in addition to WEF events and networking within a group whose alumni comprise major tech companies like Google, Airbnb, Spotify, and Wikimedia.
Do you observe an increasing number of companies incorporating ESG into their investment strategies?
Indeed. This is logical, as ESG has consistently been designed from an investor perspective, facilitating a more straightforward and dependable evaluation of various companies based on sustainability and best practice metrics. The current luxury industry exhibits varying stages of progression among companies, yet the trend towards Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles is evident and enduring. In the forthcoming years, sustainability — grounded in transparent, quantitative ESG data — will undoubtedly emerge as a pivotal indicator of a premium brand, alongside conventional metrics such as material quality, craftsmanship, and design.
What is driving this is a real convergence in different sectors. On one hand, there is a wave of tougher government and industry regulation, but just as important is the market pressure coming from consumers themselves. This makes the robustness of a company’s ESG and sustainability policies a major strategic concern. Buyers today think about sustainability and carbon impact more than ever before and have been empowered by a new wave of apps and other tools to do their own research on a company’s impact. And, they are spending accordingly. In the past, companies have been able to pay lip service to sustainability and just greenwash, but ESG really takes an axe to that. The new reality is that companies which proactively adopt ESG policies will win, while greenwashers will pay. There will be nowhere to hide.
Overall, what should a company do to make sure its social and governance-focused targets are credible and ambitious?
They must put a premium on the transparency of their data. How do you achieve this? It requires digital transformation, carried out systemically across whole portfolios and across the property lifecycle — concept to operations all the way to operations and decommissioning. For credibility, companies also need third-party auditing of their data. Akila allows the requisite traceability, and is designed to ensure a consistent structure of ESG data, making this process transparent and smooth.
As for ensuring that aims are ambitious enough, that needs to be done on a case-by-case, looking at the clients’ particular and taking into consideration industry benchmarking. It’s also important to remember that ESG is not something you start today and finish tomorrow — it is a process, and continuous improvement is the name of the game. Akila is the platform that helps firms document this trend in great detail. And by partnering with organisations like SBTi (of which Akila is a partner), aims may be defined in both an ambitious and scientific approach.
Where do you see Akila in five years?
Well, by 2027, we won’t need to explain what a digital twin or ESG are anymore, because both will have grown so pervasive in business and life. Our objective by that moment is to have become one of the defining digital instruments of this ESG era, and to have hastened a considerable change in the carbon emissions of buildings and cities.
How do we get there? Our Asia-first strategy and the fact that we are functioning inside and outside of China will be very crucial. Asia will remain the world’s most dynamic economic zone. Then as now, it will be the place where MNCs have the freedom to pilot new technologies ahead of their global rollout. We have already begun this process with several important worldwide clients, and we see this as a road we’ll continue on over the next five years: in short, we’ll be moving Akila from Asia to the world.
The other feature we will see emerging more is Akila’s open Ecosystem – a space we can conceptualise as a kind of app store for buildings and assets in the ESG era. Akila is built as an open platform, so that partners with strong vertical specialisations can offer integrations inside the Akila platform. We have already begun this process by collaborating with partners in industries like AR (augmented reality), but in five years we should see this really coming to fruition.
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