🍃9 Practical Ways to Apply AI in Your Sustainability Work and 1 Watch Out (Part1)

Welcome back 🖐,

(this is Part 1 of a two-part series)

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic for the last few months, but how can you actually apply the technology to advance sustainability in your company?  Or maybe you have been asked by your management how AI can be used for sustainability, and you want to show you did your homework? In this edition of the Green Tea Academy, I am sharing with you a few practical use cases for the technology.

Here are 9 ways for you to apply AI in sustainability and 1 watch out! 👇

USE CASE 1: Manage your carbon accounting

Getting headaches from doing your carbon accounting? Spending a lot of time finding carbon factors? Startups like Persefoni and Hydrus are applying AI-GPT to their platforms to help users become more efficient in their carbon accounting. Persefoni is applying it to make it easier to perform functions including querying data, making calculation selections, learning how to use the platform, and receiving real-time support. These platforms come with the added, non-AI related benefit that you can say goodbye to your stone-age-tech days of using dozens of Excel files and manual-intensive processes to collect your carbon data and do it in a more scalable and seamless way.

USE CASE 2: Generate the content for your sustainability reporting

Writing the content for your company’s annual sustainability report and submitting your TCFD, CDP and other disclosures and reporting requirement can be painful and time consuming. You have probably already written many emails and documents, generated updates and collected sustainability data so why not use that information to get you a head start in your reporting requirements? You can train your own ChatGPT using a service like CustomGPT or the new ChatGPT Enterprise by loading your existing sustainability materials and then let your customized tool generate readily edited content to complete your reporting. The content will likely need refining, but at the very least you will have a solid place from which to start.

USE CASE 3: Score your sustainability reporting

There is a lot of quantity when it comes to company sustainability reporting, but how about quality? We are starting to get some AI-based offerings helping you access how good your reporting is. ChatReport allows you to upload your sustainability report and get a score based on how well it performs against the 11 TCFD recommendations. Scoring for other standards is likely to follow so stay tuned.

USE CASE 4: Get answers to your sustainability questions

ChatGPT can already be a tool to help you do your job more efficiently. It is knowledgeable enough to provide convincing answers around several sustainability topics and it understands subtleties (for example, the difference between sustainability and ESG) and that a sustainability strategy needs to be different for companies depending on their industry and company specifics. Here is how to use it and what to expect.

USE CASE 5: Calculate your Scope 3 Emissions

There are many companies that are not reporting scope 3 given the complexity of calculating the emissions with multi-tiered supply chains, and those that do might not have the most accurate numbers. Tech providers and startups are starting to apply AI to calculating scope 3 emissions in perhaps one of the best applications of the technology given the quantity of the data to analyze, use of geolocations, and the need for pattern recognition, categorization and optimization. Some offering services in this growing use case include Clarity AI, startup Muir and CO2A.

In Part 2, I will share the remaining use cases and watch out. I hope this gives you a few practical ways to use AI to save time and solve existing needs in your role. Obviously, do your due diligence before pursuing any of the solutions or suppliers mentioned here or others available. This is particularly important given how new the technology and some of these suppliers are.

Feel free to share with me any reactions to these use cases or other ways in which AI has supported your efforts 🙋‍️.

Enjoy and reflect 💭. Warm regards / saludos,

Julio