Greening AI-enabled Systems with Software Engineering: A Research Agenda for Environmentally Sustainable AI Practices
It addresses the problem of AI's environmental footprint for researchers and practitioners, but is incremental as it synthesizes existing discussions into a research agenda.
The paper tackles the growing environmental impact of AI-enabled systems by proposing a research agenda from an interdisciplinary workshop, identifying key challenges like energy assessment and sustainability-aware architectures to guide sustainable AI development.
The environmental impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled systems is increasing rapidly, and software engineering plays a critical role in developing sustainable solutions. The "Greening AI with Software Engineering" CECAM-Lorentz workshop (no. 1358, 2025) funded by the Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moléculaire and the Lorentz Center, provided an interdisciplinary forum for 29 participants, from practitioners to academics, to share knowledge, ideas, practices, and current results dedicated to advancing green software and AI research. The workshop was held February 3-7, 2025, in Lausanne, Switzerland. Through keynotes, flash talks, and collaborative discussions, participants identified and prioritized key challenges for the field. These included energy assessment and standardization, benchmarking practices, sustainability-aware architectures, runtime adaptation, empirical methodologies, and education. This report presents a research agenda emerging from the workshop, outlining open research directions and practical recommendations to guide the development of environmentally sustainable AI-enabled systems rooted in software engineering principles.