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Navveen Balani Making systems intelligent, efficient & responsible

Day 1 · Why This Newsletter Exists

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Every AI feature ships an invisible bill. Cost. Energy. Water. Carbon. Hardware. Most teams see one. Almost none see the full picture.

Welcome to Green, Efficient AI — a newsletter about building AI that is intelligent in output and efficient by design.

Why now

AI is scaling faster than any technology in modern history. Every product is becoming an AI product. Every team is becoming an AI team.

The choices we make now — models, architectures, interfaces, hardware, defaults, retries and agents — will shape the cost, energy, water, and carbon profile of AI for years to come.

The good news: efficient AI is not a trade-off. The same decisions that reduce waste often reduce cost, improve speed, and simplify operations. One discipline. Many wins.

This is the rare topic where doing the right thing for the planet is also the smartest thing for the business, the fastest thing for the user, and the simplest thing to operate. We just have not yet built the shared playbook for it.

That playbook is what this newsletter is for.

What this newsletter is

Green, Efficient AI is an almost-daily read built around one small, actionable principle at a time. Some issues raise awareness. Some teach a technique. Some share a mental model, a story, or a number that changes how you see an AI system.

Every issue follows the same rhythm:

  • The Spark — one fact or story that changes how you see AI.
  • The Shift — one principle you will quote tomorrow.
  • The Lens — what it means for engineering, design, product, platform, sustainability, business, end users, and agents.
  • The Move — one thing to try immediately.
  • The Receipt — the evidence behind the idea.

Who this is for

Efficient AI is one of the rare disciplines where every role at the table has something to contribute, and something to gain.

Engineers touch efficient AI at every stage of the lifecycle — design, build, test, deploy, observe, maintain. Infrastructure and platform teams bring the hardware and region reality. Architects bring the system view. Designers and product managers shape demand at its source — through defaults, interfaces, and auto-triggers that decide whether AI runs once or a thousand times. Sustainability teams bring measurement. Business and finance leaders bring priorities and budgets. End users shape demand through prompts and habits. Increasingly, agents shape demand too — autonomous systems generating hundreds of model calls on a user’s behalf, deciding when to retry, how to split the work, and which model to use.

And most importantly, waste runs through every layer — model, infrastructure, interface, prompt, agent, embodied emissions — and every role decides where it enters or exits the system. No single role — human or agent — solves efficient AI alone. All of them, on the same page, can.

This discipline will not be built through one framework, one model, or one standard. It will be built through everyday decisions made better — one small, actionable principle at a time.

That is what this newsletter is for.

Subscribe, and forward this to one person on the other side of the AI conversation from you — the engineer, the designer, the platform lead, the sustainability colleague, the finance partner, or the colleague building the next generation of AI agents.

This newsletter works best when the whole table is reading the same thing.