Olex Sustainability Statement

Commitment statement

Olex.AI is committed to reducing its environmental impact and building a culture of sustainability across our team. We want the time we give back to teachers to come with as small an environmental footprint as possible, from how we run our business to how we use AI.

AI and the environment

We take the environmental impact of AI seriously, including the wider data centre concerns. Olex.AI’s use of AI is targeted and purposeful rather than open-ended: it supports defined teacher workflows.

We would not claim that AI has no environmental cost. However, the impact of a teacher using a bounded tool is materially different from the impact of building and operating large-scale data centre infrastructure. We are committed to using AI proportionately and continually monitoring our usage.

Targeted AI use can also create local resource efficiencies, such as reducing repeated drafting, printing and duplication. We see these as measurable efficiencies, not as a reason to dismiss broader environmental questions.

Our Carbon Reduction Plan

Our Carbon Reduction Plan sets out how we will reduce our impact, focusing on operational efficiencies, employee engagement and responsible resource management. It is a living document that guides our efforts to continually improve our environmental performance, and it will be updated as our work progresses.

We created the plan with our partner Giki Actions, to identify practical, achievable steps for a business of our size and to track our progress over time.

Summary of what we’re doing

Our first actions focus on the fundamentals, so that we understand our footprint and reduce it where it matters most:

Measuring our emissions with carbon calculators to establish a clear baseline
Running an employee commuting and home working survey to understand where our emissions come from
Using digital collaboration tools in place of unnecessary business travel
Making climate-friendly pension plans the default for all employees
Assessing the sustainability of our suppliers and co-working spaces
Engaging employees around sustainability, helping our team reduce their digital carbon footprints through better device management and energy efficiency
Using less paper, recycling more and buying sustainably, including print reduction and digital alternatives
Recycling office e-waste such as computers, printers and phones, aiming for a 100% recycling rate

Scope and system boundaries

Olex.AI runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure, primarily Amazon EC2 for computing and Amazon S3 for storage. We also use data processing with OpenAI and Gemini. Our system boundary covers:

Scope 1: direct emissions from Olex operations
Scope 2: electricity consumed by data centres
Scope 3: our upstream computing supply chain

Energy used by end-user devices, such as the laptops and tablets teachers use to access Olex.AI, is an indirect impact outside our direct boundary.

How we measure our emissions

Olex.AI measures carbon emissions using the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool, applying both the GHG Protocol market-based method and location-based method. Our most recent annual figures, for April 2025 to March 2026, are:

Estimated market-based emissions: 0.962 tonnes CO2e (Scope 1: 1.0%, Scope 2: 20.5%, Scope 3: 78.4%)
Estimated location-based emissions: 2.97 tonnes CO2e
Estimated emissions savings from AWS renewable energy purchases: 2.01 tonnes CO2e

Olex.AI’s emissions have grown in line with our user base over this period, and we are actively monitoring this trend.

As more schools use Olex.AI, we want our emissions per user to fall even as overall use grows. We are exploring technical changes to reduce the emissions behind every piece of feedback:

Prompt caching: reusing instructions that repeat across requests, rather than processing them from scratch each time
Tiered model selection: matching each task to the smallest AI model that can do it well
Request batching: grouping requests so computing resources are used more efficiently

Reporting and review

We will review this statement and our Carbon Reduction Plan regularly, and update both as our work progresses.

You can contact us about Olex and sustainability at info@olex.ai