The international community continues to face an urgent call to action on climate change as the 29th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) opens today in Baku, Azerbaijan. Coordinated and innovative solutions are paramount to addressing this complex crisis, and advanced technologies, particularly AI, are powerful enablers of the transition to a net-zero economy. Recognizing the potential of AI to advance climate action, SAP is launching two use cases that highlight how AI-driven sustainability software can streamline processes, eliminate manual labor, and improve accuracy. provided.
With automatic emissions factor mapping in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management and AI-assisted ESG reporting in SAP Sustainability Control Tower, SAP helps companies set meaningful environmental goals, ensure compliance, and increase efficiency and accountability to reduce carbon emissions. We can help you manage your portions.
“Sustainability executives are leveraging artificial intelligence. More than half say using AI to improve data analysis and integration is the top action they will take in the next three years to strengthen their ESG capabilities. ”
“Addressing the Strategy Execution Gap in Sustainability Reporting,” KPMG, February 2024
To accurately calculate a product’s carbon footprint, companies must assign emission factors to the thousands of products they purchase. Ideally, emission factors would be provided directly by the supplier, but companies often need to use industry averages based on product attributes such as name, category, and location. Historically, this mapping process has been manual and time-consuming, requiring expertise in life cycle assessment (LCA) to determine the environmental impacts associated with all stages of a product, process, or product lifecycle. , was an error-prone task. service.
Drive scalability, standardization, and reliability in carbon data exchange across the supply chain.
To make this process easier and more efficient, SAP has introduced AI-based capabilities within the SAP Sustainability Footprint Management solution. SAP’s AI engine can automatically suggest emission factor mappings for purchased products and services and assign a similarity score to each recommendation.
For mapping, SAP generates embeddings of both emission factors from the LCA database and product data from the ERP system. An embedding is a vector representation, a numerical representation of textual information that provides the context and meaning of the text. Both embedding sets are stored in the SAP HANA Cloud Vector Engine.
The system compares these embeddings to determine the quality of the mapping and provides suggested results. This allows companies to reduce manual effort by up to 80% and calculate the carbon footprint of products and companies faster and more accurately, without the need for LCA experts. It also accelerates sustainability reporting timelines and allows you to respond quickly to regulatory requirements.
AI-assisted ESG report generation in SAP Sustainability Control Tower
Additionally, SAP has built in AI-powered generative reporting capabilities within SAP Sustainability Control Tower. Producing sustainability reports that align with internal strategy and meet external standards such as the CSRD is essential to maintaining compliance and transparency. However, collecting relevant environmental, social, and governance data and creating these reports can be extremely resource-intensive, involving multiple teams and complex data sources.
Therefore, SAP’s AI capabilities can help generate draft comprehensive ESG reports based on best practice templates and the company’s available ESG metrics. Once a user selects a template, AI automatically collects the most relevant metrics from SAP Sustainability Control Tower, creates charts to visualize the data, and generates a polished draft report. This allows companies to spend up to 98% less time collecting ESG metrics and up to 80% less time creating reports.
The main benefits of this feature are:
Efficient data usage: AI-powered solutions leverage large-scale language models and underlying SQL technology to transform natural language queries into precise database queries that access real-time data from structured databases. will help you. In this way, raw data from the customer’s systems is transformed into accurate and comprehensive reports tailored to specific time frames. Visualization: AI generates insightful textual content through SQL-based data retrieval to help ensure data integrity and compliance. Additionally, create visually appealing charts and tables to enhance clarity and understanding of your reports. Automatic validation: Our robust system prioritizes data security by avoiding direct SQL query execution and employing a search augmentation generation (RAG) process to prevent information discrepancies.
Check out the demo to learn more.
The future of AI in sustainability
The use cases above are just the beginning. The potential for AI to transform sustainability management is huge, and at SAP we are accelerating the creation of use cases that will be at the forefront of our customers’ sustainable transformation journeys. For example, users will now be able to interact with SAP’s AI copilot Joule through natural language, providing actionable recommendations and simulations to help improve environmental and social performance. We will also continue to apply AI to facilitate the capture of sustainability data.
Using SAP’s ERP-centric, cloud-based, AI-enabled approach, we are working to ensure that the vast potential of AI translates into both real business transformation and sustainability outcomes. AI and technology can help understand and monitor the environment, improve energy efficiency, optimize resource management, and develop innovative solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
As COP29 takes place in Baku, it is imperative that world leaders and decision makers fully consider the transformative role of AI in tackling climate change. The urgent demands of this crisis call for innovative AI-driven solutions that can deliver greater accuracy, efficiency, and effectiveness. Leveraging AI to not only streamline business operations, but also to set and achieve ambitious environmental goals, enabling technology to help companies grow responsibly and be proactive about a sustainable and resilient planet. We are shaping a future where we can contribute to
Gunther Rothermel is Chief Product Officer and Co-GM of SAP Sustainability.
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