How AI can help break the world’s fossil fuel addiction

The current AI boom reminds me of the dot-com era, which I watched unfold from venture capital in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Lots of hype. Eye-watering investments. Genuine transformative potential. Most conversations about AI today focus on the obvious value, productivity, and efficiency gains. That’s real, but it’s the shallow end. The deeper potential is something else entirely: ending the linear take-make-waste economy and with it, our reliance on fossil fuels.

For half a century, the global economy has run on a simple, destructive model. Extract finite resources from the Earth. Manufacture mostly disposable products. Throw away. Repeat.

Petroleum into packaging and apparel. Oil in cars. Critical minerals in the backbone of nearly every modern technology. The list is long, but the pattern is the same. We treat finite resources as if they were infinite, when we all know they are not.

COVID and the recent conflict around the Strait of Hormuz have made clear how fragile these supply chains really are, and why our dependence on finite resources concentrated in a handful of geographies is no longer a defensible strategy. The linear model strands value and creates strategic dependence.

THE ALTERNATIVE

Circularity is not a new concept. It refers to an economic model where materials already in circulation are infinitely regenerated, reducing the need for extraction and putting to work what’s already above ground, much of it currently bound for landfill.

Circularity creates resource efficiency, strengthens supply chains and opens up new material sources. Instead of depending on a small number of extraction hubs, reserves diversify dramatically. Countries and industries gain genuine control over the materials they need. And the economics of reusing what’s already in circulation, rather than sending it to landfill, are increasingly hard to argue against.

According to a new report from Circle Economy and Deloitte, our lack of circularity is costing the world €25.4 trillion a year, equivalent to nearly 31% of global GDP. Circularity is far more than a sustainability measure. It’s an economic imperative, and right now the cost of ignoring it shows up in resource inefficiency, premature product disposal, underutilized assets, and mounting sovereign and supply chain risk.

AI is what gets us closer to making circularity the default economic model of the future, not the exception.

Biotechnology, the practice of engineering biology to design new industrial processes, has long been used to solve global challenges. Insulin. Vaccines. Biofuels. Biomaterials. But its potential for circularity has been constrained by the sheer complexity of biological systems and the time it takes to discover and validate new solutions.

AI’s strength is finding patterns in vast, complex biological datasets that sit beyond human cognitive capacity. It dramatically narrows the search space and shortens the time to discovery and validation. For circularity, that opens the door to rapidly advancing fields like protein design and the discovery of new enzymes capable of regenerating end-of-life materials (plastic packaging, apparel, and critical minerals in e-waste) into virgin-identical inputs.

AI applied to biotechnology is the mechanism that can make circularity viable at global scale, and in doing so, end modern society’s reliance on fossil fuels and the linear economy.

THE NEXT 50 YEARS

The world order of the last 50 years will not apply to the next 50. The raw materials that power everyday life will become more valuable, not less, and the economies that control them will hold enormous strategic power. Circularity breaks that dependency. And AI, the same technology being hyped today for productivity gains, is what makes it possible at the speed and scale the world actually needs.

AI is not without risk. It has to be designed responsibly, built ethically, and powered by clean energy. Otherwise, it simply adds to the problem it could solve. But if we get that right, the dot-com era will look modest by comparison. This is the technology that could finally close the loop, and with it, end our reliance on fossil fuels.

Paul Riley is founder and CEO at Samsara Eco.

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