Boost ROI & Trust
How AI and Automation are Transforming Sustainable Growth
In this webinar, AI & Automation leaders discuss the next-gen tech helping investors, sustainability, and marketing teams save time, scale, and boost customer acquisition.
Event Summary
In the rapidly evolving sustainability landscape, businesses and investors are racing to streamline data collection, reporting processes, communications, and deliver measurable impact in terms of both customer value and progress toward global Sustainable Development Goals. Host, Sarah O’Sell, founder of Anim8 Collective, curated a powerhouse panel of sustainability workflow innovators.
By leveraging automation and artificial intelligence (AI), organizations can:
Enhance the reporting and risk mitigation efforts of often small sustainability teams
Eliminate inefficiencies to shift the focus from reporting to implementing informed actions
Track and optimize the value of their efforts to maximize customer acquisition and ROI
Our special guests dive deep into what’s evolving now, how these technologies can revolutionize sustainability operations, and help build trust with stakeholders. Read on for more about their innovations.
Featured Speakers:
Co-Founder & CEO
Ripple
Founder & CEO
The Anti-Greenwash Charter
Founder & CEO
Improvability
Co-Founder & CEO
Carbon.Crane
AI & Automation - Innovation Preview
Utilize AI to Streamline Data Collection for Sustainability
Collecting and managing sustainability data can be daunting. In fact, three-quarters (73%) of global SMEs are concerned about ESG reporting costs. What’s the issue? Data can be fragmented across systems, departments, internal, and external stakeholders, making integration complex. Accuracy is questionable with a lack of standardization and the intensity of collecting, cleaning, and analyzing can require significant investment and expertise. Evolving organizational processes as global frameworks develop requires endless adaptability. This means that SME’s face a triple whammy of complexity, time, and cost pressures.
AI platforms like Ripple simplify this process by integrating data from diverse sources—such as IoT devices and operational systems—into a unified platform, enabling businesses to automate data gathering, ensure accuracy, and generate actionable insights. AI capabilities can streamline carbon emissions tracking, supply chain transparency, waste monitoring, and sustainability reporting. It’s possible to automate the collection of energy use and transportation metrics, and flag inconsistencies to improve accuracy, while aligning with reporting protocol.
By utilizing AI, companies can standardize data collection across locations, enhance team collaboration, and make data-driven decisions that scale their sustainability efforts. This extends to downstream processes for Scope 3 monitoring, a company can track the lifecycle of its products, identify inefficiencies, and optimize recycling processes, all in real time. This empowers organizations to align with circular economy principles, reduce environmental impacts, and demonstrate ROI on sustainability initiatives.
Help Derisk Content with an Assistant for Claims Consistency, Clarity, and Credibility
One of the most significant challenges in sustainability communications is the risk of greenwashing - overstating or misrepresenting sustainability claims. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Nearly three-quarters of corporate leaders say most organizations in their industry would be caught greenwashing if they were investigated thoroughly.”
This issue is so rampant that many firms practice “greenhushing” or silencing communications about their work to avoid the risk. AI-powered writing assistants such as The Anti-Greenwash Charter’s emerging tool are transforming the auditing process. Breakthroughs like this can help identify greenwashing language in marketing materials, recommend legally compliant and transparent phrasing, and unify claims across silos to ensure alignment between legal, marketing, and sustainability teams.
The Anti-greenwash Charter has been recognized as a finalist for the UK Green Business Awards and has achieved partnerships with major construction, engineering, and innovation firms. A little bird told us that they have a US partner to announce during this panel! Their goal is to streamline the use of sustainability claims and boost trust with verified, transparent communications. By mitigating legal risks and enhancing content accuracy, such tools empower teams to focus on action and create value-driven narratives that capture the sustainability market opportunity.
Evaluate Web Assets at Scale and Recommend Actions to Reduce the Digital Footprint
Digital communications carry hidden environmental costs. Each page creates a digital footprint from assets including large images, videos, widgets, animations, text, and color styling. Unoptimized web pages increase energy consumption and carbon emissions. Emerging tools, including browser extensions and auditing platforms like Carbon.Crane enable companies to identify and optimize oversized or data-loaded assets, reduce page content while retaining essential information, and simplify site architecture by retiring unused pages.
How big is a website’s digital footprint exactly?
In 2024, the Anim8 Collective website had around 23 pages and 4824 page views, consuming an estimated 52.94GB of data. Using the equation above from the open-source Sustainable Web Design project, it is estimated that the Anim8 Collective website’s embodied emissions in 2024 were:
2772.23 gCO2e (grams of carbon dioxide equivalent)
Using the United States EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator, this is equivalent to 224 smartphones charged, or about one person’s phone use in a year. By optimizing only images in a test earlier this year, we were able to reduce the impact of our website by 15%!
The Council on Library and Information Resources estimates over 4 billion public web pages are connected to an additional 550 billion documents, so it makes sense to utilize a scalable solution like Carbon.Crane. Try out their quick calculator tool for your site’s home page! Data-based assets are receiving increasing attention for inclusion in sustainability reporting and action, so efficient digital asset management is key. Beyond sustainability, optimizing the data that web pages generate impacts site load time, which improves SEO rankings, accessibility, and customer experience.
Streamline Sustainability Reporting, Promotions, and Orchestrate Communications to Stakeholder Groups
Sustainability reports are often lengthy and data-intensive, taking up to 70% of the year to create. While they are pivotal for transparency and compliance, this leaves little time for meaningful action and hinders progress. AI-based data orchestration platforms like Improvability simplify this process by connecting disparate data streams and automating information routing, generating customized reports tailored to audiences, such as executive summaries, blogs, or social media posts, and enabling dynamic storytelling with living data that evolves alongside corporate initiatives.
Resentment with compliance and challenges in transformation have led to a wave of recent rollbacks of corporate sustainability commitments. Improvability exists to shift the narrative, offering a customizable solution that increases accessibility to published knowledge. Users can upload data once and generate unlimited reports of unlimited length, bringing it all together with cited sources, facts, and figures. Their AI research assistant helps accelerate research across internal, published, and web data.
The possibilities of this platform had us imagining a system that upon sustainability report publication, updates are pushed to a web page summarizing sustainability efforts, to digital product passport portals across an entire retail portfolio, assets are tagged, and customer engagement with sustainability-focused content is associated. Data from Anim8 Collective’s experience shows that up to 25% of customers may engage with sustainability content, yet many leaders are unaware of its impact on revenue. We’d love to see that gap close!
Additional Event Topics
AI and automation are not without their sustainability challenges. There are tactics to explore at a platform level as well as at data centers. Digital operations contribute significantly to energy consumption, water use, and e-waste.
Panelists will share how their teams:
Manage compute or data processing intensity
Cloud partner selection, and
Consider human factors to reduce the impact of AI
Emerging technologies like automation and AI offer unprecedented opportunities for growth through sustainability initiatives. By conducting content and web audits, automating reporting, and optimizing data management, businesses can save time and resources, enhance trust among stakeholders, and scale the impact of new business models.
To deploy AI solutions responsibly, companies must take a human-centric approach that addresses workforce impacts while leveraging AI’s transformative potential. The next wave of sustainability communications will integrate these tools to bridge the gap between progress and performance. Companies that adopt these technologies early will not only lead the market but also set new standards for accountability and innovation.
