Part 2/5 of David Carlin's series on sustainability teams' use of AI today
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In his digest series Ask David, David Carlin explores the challenges sustainability teams face today, giving actionable advice on demonstrating financial value, strengthening business strategy, managing risk, and driving real organizational impact. His new five-part series offers insights into how AI can help bridge the gap between sustainability teams' broad mandates and limited resources. You can read Part 1 here. Part 2 dives deeper into the areas where AI can have the biggest impact on the work of sustainability teams.
When we advise sustainability teams on AI, we typically ask two questions: where can it improve existing processes, and where can it accelerate and scale the value of human insight?
The highest-potential applications I have seen are about augmentation.
Sustainability teams spend huge amounts of time gathering data, reconciling different formats, reviewing documents, synthesizing research and bringing together inputs from different business units, workshops and stakeholders. AI can increasingly accelerate many of those activities.
Research gives us some indication of what that could mean. A research study examined more than 5,000 customer-support agents and found that access to a generative AI assistant increased productivity by nearly 14% on average, with gains of around 35% for less experienced and lower-skilled workers.
Sustainability work is obviously very different from customer support, but the underlying lesson is interesting. AI can help people process information and complete repeated tasks more efficiently, creating additional capacity for higher-value work.
For sustainability leaders, that might mean spending less time assembling information and more time asking: What does this mean for our business? Where are the risks? Where are the commercial opportunities? How do we unlock value for the organization?
Sustainability professionals are often systems thinkers. They are used to connecting developments across markets, regulation, technology, risk and strategy. AI can give them considerably more leverage to do that well, provided they continue to apply their own judgment.
One of the biggest mistakes I see is asking AI to think for you. AI is most valuable when it creates more capacity for people to do the thinking that matters.
For more information, visit the D. A. Carlin & Company or explore David Carlin's Substack.
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investESG
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