I have a confession. Somewhere between the third heatwave of the summer and my fourth iced coffee before 10am, I outsourced my brain to AI. Not gradually, either. All at once, the moment the mercury hit somewhere I didn’t think Lancashire went.
And I don’t think I’m alone.
The hottest summer on record. Again.
Let’s start with the numbers, because they’re genuinely startling. This May, the UK broke its hottest May day record twice in 24 hours, with Kew Gardens hitting 35.1°C. Then June arrived and, apparently deciding May’s efforts weren’t dramatic enough, broke the UK’s hottest June day record on three consecutive days, topping out at 37.7°C in Norfolk. Reading recorded seven nights in a row where the temperature never dropped below 17°C, smashing the previous record of four. Roads in Holborn reportedly hit 65°C. Over 1,000 schools closed. Hosepipe bans arrived before they were legally required to, because nobody had the energy to wait for the paperwork.
The Met Office’s own chief forecaster described it as “unprecedented for June” and “another marker on how climate change is shifting the dial.” When the Met Office starts sounding alarmed, you know it’s not just you being dramatic in the group chat.
Enter: my AI-shaped crutch
Here’s where the irony kicks in, and where I’ll happily admit to being part of the problem I’m about to describe.
As the temperature climbed, my own bandwidth quietly evaporated. Thinking clearly at 32°C with no air conditioning is a genuine cognitive tax, and something had to give. So I did what a lot of us did. I leaned harder on AI. Draft this email, Claude. Summarise this report, Claude. Please, for the love of all that is holy, write the client update because my brain has the processing power of a melted Solero.
It worked brilliantly. It also nagged at me a bit, because the more I asked AI to carry the cognitive load I couldn’t manage in the heat, the more I found myself thinking about what powers it.
The bit nobody puts in the brochure
AI doesn’t run on good intentions. It runs on electricity, and increasingly quite a lot of it. Global data centre electricity demand grew by roughly 17% in 2025, with AI-specific demand growing faster still, and the International Energy Agency expects electricity use from AI-focused data centres to roughly triple by 2030. In the UK specifically, the pipeline of proposed data centre schemes could collectively need around 50GW of power, which is more than the country’s current peak electricity demand. Data centres already account for something in the region of 6% of UK electricity supply.
So there’s the uncomfortable loop. The heat saps our capacity to function, we reach for AI to plug the gap, AI needs power, power still leans heavily on fossil fuels in many grids, and the emissions from that contribute to the very warming that started the whole cycle. It’s less a virtuous circle and more a very hot hamster wheel.
Before anyone panics and unplugs the office
To be fair to the technology, it isn’t quite the villain of the piece. The IEA also notes that the energy required per AI task has been falling by roughly an order of magnitude a year in recent times, and that AI applied well, in areas like grid balancing, fault detection and renewable integration, could deliver emissions savings considerably larger than the emissions the data centres themselves create. The efficiency gains are real. The problem is that efficiency gains are currently being outpaced by how enthusiastically we’re all using the thing, myself very much included.
Which is really the point worth taking into any boardroom this summer. AI isn’t inherently the enemy of net zero, and it isn’t a free lunch either. The businesses that get ahead here will be the ones asking the harder question, not “should we use AI” but “where does AI genuinely save us effort and emissions, and where are we just adding heat to an already sweaty planet for the sake of convenience.”
So, is tech making us hot?
A bit, yes. But mostly we’re making ourselves hot, and reaching for tech to cope with it, which then adds its own quiet contribution to the problem. It’s less a technology story and more a very human one about convenience, comfort and consequences, wrapped up in a British summer that increasingly refuses to behave itself.
I’ll leave you with this thought while I sit here, fan pointed directly at my face, half convinced my laptop is generating its own microclimate: if you’re going to lean on AI to get through the heat this summer, at least make it count. Use it for the work that actually moves the needle. The rest of us can just complain about the weather the old-fashioned way, which remains, delightfully, carbon neutral.
Deborah Holmwood, Client Change and Transformation Partner, Trimontium AI
