Tencent’s 2023 ESG report released, advancing sustainable development goals with digital technology

On April 8, Tencent released the 2023 ESG report. "Digital technology and artificial intelligence are the core competitiveness of Tencent to achieve sustainable development." Pony Ma, chairperson and CEO of Tencent, said in the report that advanced technology is the foundation for Tencent to create user value, commercial value and innovative social value.

In the past year, Tencent has made many innovative explorations in various fields of ESG. In terms of environmental protection, it has continued to advance the goal of carbon neutrality, greatly increased the proportion of renewable energy, and continued to carry out biodiversity protection actions based on technology; in terms of social value innovation, it has actively promoted the construction of barrier-free environment, applying digital technology to medical care, education, emergency support and other fields; in terms of technical security, Tencent has long invested in research and development while focusing on strengthening AI systems and data security; in terms of improving governance capabilities, Tencent will join the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) in 2023 and actively promote the green transformation of the supply chain.

Based on the above practices, in December last year, S & P Global also included Tencent in its Dow Jones Sustainability World Index and Emerging Markets Index. The 2023 S & P Global Sustainability Assessment improved the ESG score of Tencent Holdings (00700.HK), making it ranked higher than Google and Meta in the industry and ranked among the top five in the world.

Core product "Accessibility +"

As one of the first technology companies to develop information accessibility, Tencent has invested a lot of technical strength to help people with disabilities cross the digital divide and better integrate into society.

By the end of 2023, Tencent had applied for more than 80 accessibility-related patents, involving more than 40 products and functions, and the core products had been optimized for accessibility. Tencent also open-sourced four accessibility-related technology patents to the society to promote the common progress of the industry in the field of information accessibility. Among them, in 2023, Tencent and the China Disabled Persons’ Federation jointly established a barrier-free joint innovation laboratory to help build a barrier-free environment and support people with physical disabilities and silver-haired people to self-help and participate in social life and economic activities on an equal footing.

In order to solve the problem of hearing impairment, in 2023, Teana Action further launched the "Tencent Teana Remote Hearing Service Platform", relying on Tencent Teana Audio AI technology, so that hearing-impaired people can complete the remote fitting of hearing aids at home through Tencent conferences. QQ Music uses technologies such as sound partner separation, artificial intelligence music generation, and backing track adaptation to enable people with medium and high frequency hearing loss to hear songs and enjoy the integrity and beauty of music without destroying or changing the melody of the original song.

In terms of supporting the digital rights and interests of physically handicapped groups, Tencent has also launched a number of solutions based on technologies such as voice-text transfer, OCR reading, and eye movement input. Users with physical disabilities can operate computers to complete input through eye movement and gaze. For individual businesses with physical disabilities, Tencent has also launched the "Self-reliance Shop Power Action", launching a series of support measures such as digital business training, providing barrier-free business tools, exclusive free insurance, and exclusive customer service.

Two cancer screenings were conducted in 13 low-resource areas

While focusing on accessibility for vulnerable populations, the report also mentions solutions to other social problems.

In terms of digital health, Tencent continues to explore the development of inclusive health care. Based on the accumulation of AI recognition and processing technologies in medical images, Tencent has developed the "Miying Digital Medical Imaging Platform" and multiple auxiliary diagnostic systems, which support inclusive large-scale screening and timely treatment of some diseases at the social level.

Advanced assisted diagnostic technologies can effectively reduce the cost of large-scale screening and diagnosis and treatment for some diseases. Taking cervical cancer and breast cancer as examples, with the help of AI-assisted diagnosis and other technologies, resources will be invested in 2023 to help provide large-scale screening and diagnosis of "two cancers" for about 100,000 women of school age in 13 pilot areas with low medical resources.

In 2023, Tencent released a medical model based on the self-developed basic model "Tencent Hybrid Yuan", which can be applied to a multi-scenario product matrix such as intelligent Q & A, family doctor assistant, and digital intelligence medical imaging platform. These products can be embedded in the whole process of medical treatment, and help improve the level and quality of medical services in application scenarios such as department guidance, doctor recommendation, pre-consultation, doctor-patient dialogue, automatic medical record generation, and intelligent hospital customer service.

In the face of sudden disasters, Tencent uses its information technology capabilities to help social institutions build disaster emergency rescue basic platforms and disaster early warning platforms, and works together in earthquake early warning, snow disaster rescue, AED rescue, etc., to help improve the success rate of emergency support. Among them, Tencent and the Sichuan Earthquake Bureau launched the WeChat earthquake early warning function to quickly push earthquake early warnings through WeChat, so that everyone can receive accurate earthquake early warning information in a timely manner, quickly avoid risks, and effectively respond to natural disasters.

In terms of digital public welfare, relying on digital technology and transparent and credible mechanisms, the Tencent Charity platform continues to improve donor services and strengthen "transparent" public welfare. For example, during the "99 Charity Day" held for 9 years, more than 65 million people donated more than 3.80 billion during the "99 Charity Day" in 2023 alone.

First "natural threats and risk assessment"

In addition to expressing concern for "people", the report also mentions the protection of "nature".

"We continue to advance our carbon neutrality program to reduce emissions through energy management. Our fourth-generation data center technology, T-block, can improve the energy efficiency of data centers, and we promote the transformation of operation and maintenance power to renewable energy." James Mitchel and Luo Shuohan, co-chairs of the ESG working group, said that in 2023, the proportion of renewable electricity used increased from 7.2% in 2022 to 12.4%. This was supported by an increase in the installed capacity of self-built renewable energy facilities to 52.20 trillion watts, and the purchase of renewable electricity also increased to 600 million degrees, an increase of 166.3% and 79.6% respectively compared to 2022.

In terms of energy saving, AI also has a new role. Relying on the AI algorithm model, the operation of each equipment is optimized by integrating IT data, terminal environmental data, and changes in outdoor weather data, so as to achieve overall energy saving optimization under the premise of meeting the cooling demand. The application of AI regulation optimization technology can effectively reduce the PUE of data center modules. In 2023, Tencent further expanded the application scope of AI regulation optimization technology. In 2023, the newly applied module of this technology will reduce the electricity consumption by about 5 quadrillion watt-hours, avoiding carbon emissions by 2851.5 tons.

In terms of ecological protection, in 2023, Tencent launched the "natural threat and risk assessment" for the first time, analyzing the impact, dependence, risk and opportunity of the company’s business operations on nature and biodiversity, as an important reference for the company to plan future actions. Tencent’s "Bird Watcher" WeChat Mini Program contains a database of 1,500 species of birds, and uses GPS and AI image recognition technology to track the location and migration path of birds, and encourages the public to take and upload pictures when they find migratory birds, so as to provide assistance for scientific research institutions to study bird migration.

Manage the technology "double-edged sword"

Technology is a double-edged sword, especially in the wave of generative artificial intelligence industry, Tencent has its own thoughts on how to make technology more "good". "Our technology and business teams will make good decisions before investing resources, and clearly’do something ‘and’do something not’ to implement the mission vision of’science and technology for good ‘," Pony Ma said in the report.

To this end, Tencent pays close attention to issues such as bias, discrimination, privacy, abuse, ethics, and values in the field of artificial intelligence, and follows the principles of "knowable", "controllable", "available", and "reliable" to establish an AI technical committee, focusing on areas including but not limited to AI large models, natural language processing (NLP), optical character recognition (OCR), image recognition, recommendation algorithms, deep learning training, and inference.

By the end of 2023, Tencent had obtained more than 3,600 authorized patents to protect users’ digital rights. With the wide and in-depth application of AI in social networking, advertising, gaming and other products and services, Tencent has further strengthened the control of third-party data processing, completed the technical upgrade of cyber security protection capabilities such as zero trust, API security, honeypot service and threat intelligence, and formed an active defense security capability system of "intelligence-attack-defense-management-planning". In addition, Tencent Cloud will also open some basic security capabilities to small and medium-sized enterprises for free.

(Editor in charge: Shen Ye)