Sure, sustainability leaders are heroes, but they’re not superhuman. In the time I’ve worked in the space, I’ve only known the amount of work and domains and projects thrown on sustainability teams to grow. Which, ironically, is far from sustainable.
For example, I’ve talked nature and biodiversity with many sustainability leaders who aver it’s an important focus area, acknowledge that they’d like to do more, but say they haven’t really gotten started. When the start is actually pretty straightforward – essentially, TNFD-style reporting – then you know the real answer is “I don’t have time or money, and no one is forcing me to”.
Combine the snowballing amount of work with budgets that are growing slowly, not at all, or going in reverse, then it’s clear that extreme measures are in order.
If I were head of sustainability anywhere, I’d do the following immediately:
- Assign a member of the team to dive deeply into GenAI and agentic AI tools.
- Start having them meet with everyone who does sustainability work across the firm to talk through their workday and tasks.
- Develop no-code AI-driven tools and workflows that take those tasks off their plates (or at least turn them from X hours-a-week jobs to X minutes-a-week jobs, or make those tasks redundant altogether).
There is nothing to lose, aside from the tasks that one person might have accomplished in the short time they were boning up on GenAI. But given the speed that AI is impacting all work and the upside of its time-saving benefits, the case is more or less bulletproof.
Start with where your teams are spending the most time. Our research shows that climate leaders feel their teams will spend the most time project-managing emission reduction projects:
A very common emission reduction project in the coming years will be programmes to address emissions in the supply chain. AI tools could radically accelerate these processes by automating:
- Specific kinds of supplier outreach.
- Analysis of ongoing emission reductions.
- Identification of additional opportunities.
The beauty of the technology is its ability to scale the activity to any number of suppliers. Sustainability leaders can look to have their teams build their own tools, or make this kind of tooling part of their software procurement – our 2025 forecast predicts that 10 vendors will release industry-specific GenAI-powered decarbonization tools in 2025.
Sustainability leaders who want to accelerate their journeys with AI are invited to get in touch with Verdantix, talk to our AI-focused analysts, and solve the paradox I traced out at the start of this article.
