AND finalists for FSB Business Innovation Award

We are excited to announce that AND are regional finalists for the FSB Business and Product Innovation Award. The award is where bold, new business models, and innovative products delivering real change can shine. Judges were looking for businesses which either offer ground-breaking products or services, or that are using an exciting new approach to improve or disrupt a traditional market.

Recognised within the award is AND Technology Research’s latest innovation; cutting edge, AI powered, algorithms for understanding and visualising energy consumption within businesses.

The climate emergency is pushing society to think more about the ways in which they use energy, and in particularly how to be more efficient. As a result, the energy market has seen considerable growth with green incentives schemes, the introduction of smart home products, and the smart metering roll-out. However, many SMEs are being left behind with no way of accessing the information they need to help reduce their emissions. And yet, 50% of all industry carbon emissions in the UK, that is 32.95 million tonnes of CO2 per year, comes from SMEs. Just a 6% reduction in emission in SMEs would offset carbon produced by the whole of Cardiff for a whole year.

AND have, for over 15 years, been working in the energy sector looking at the ways the businesses can contribute to a zero-carbon society. Early work indicated that with high upfront costs, no data access and a lack business specific products, SMEs struggle to find way in which they can understand and implement carbon saving actions.

In partnership with the Open University, and backed up the UK government and Carbon Trust, AND have developed innovative algorithms to help combat these market failings. The state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms have led to a ground breaking energy management system, called AEMS, that works by creating tailored business energy profiles based on a business’s energy consumption, detecting faults, unusual consumption and delivering energy saving insights to SMEs in real-time. And all this insight extracted from just half hourly meter readings.

With the algorithms at its heart, AND have delivered the energy management system, AEMS, all over the UK. From independent retail stores on the high street, to industrial manufactures shipping products, from a village in the highlands of Scotland down to the south coast in Brighton, from the smallest micro businesses to major UK food-chain such as the Co-Op, AEMS is empowering business to understand their energy consumption and take the much needed action to lower our emissions.