Salesforce launched a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-based environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting feature within its Net Zero Cloud, which is designed to alleviate the operational challenges of measuring, analyzing and reporting data on corporate environmental impacts.

This move closely follows the International Sustainability Standards Board's (ISSB) recent publication of new reporting standards designed to create a global baseline for ESG reporting, in which the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) standards are a "key resource" for effective implementation.

Salesforce's new ESG report-building tool will prepare organizations for those ISSB standards while aligning environmental reporting metrics to SASB's focus on enterprise financial performance and value as it relates to sustainability. In other words, the SASB standards "prioritize the sustainability issues that are most relevant to their business and stakeholders – and ensure efficient allocation of resources and risk management," Salesforce Net Zero Cloud VP and GM Ari Alexander told SDxCentral.

The vendor's cloud-based SASB reporting tool uses generative AI to build reports for 14 different industries in the consumer goods, financial, services, and technology/communication sectors. Salesforce expects the tool will "drive more transparency with stakeholders by helping [customers] create climate- and ESG-related reports that deliver useful decision-making information on a company’s ESG impacts, risks and opportunities, including scope 3 emissions," Alexander said.

The report-builder is also expected to streamline the ESG reporting process, which traditionally requires significant time and effort, by prioritizing topics based on SASB standards. This will "enable organizations to better measure, manage and disclose ESG data," he added.

According to Alexander, the ESG report-building use case is the tip of the iceberg in terms of how generative AI can impact organizations' sustainability efforts. But "as businesses race to bring AI technology to market, it’s critical that we do so inclusively and intentionally," he argued.

"AI has tremendous potential to transform the future of ESG reporting" by improving how companies gather, analyze and report their sustainability impacts, he noted. Automated data collection can limit the need for manual data entry and accelerate data aggregation, and AI-powered analytics can improve the speed and comprehensiveness of data analysis to reveal "valuable insights and patterns that may not be readily apparent to the human eye," Alexander explained.

But without approaching the technology responsibly, it's unlikely the full benefits of AI for sustainability will be fully realized. "We must prioritize responsible innovation to help guide how this transformative technology can and should be used – and ensure that our employees, partners and customers have the tools they need to develop and use these technologies safely, accurately and ethically," he said.

Part of that responsibility is acknowledging the energy consumption-based carbon footprint associated with training and running complex AI models. "As we strive to create more accurate models, we should develop right-sized models where possible," he said. "When it comes to AI models, larger doesn't always mean better. In some instances, smaller, better-trained models outperform larger, more sparsely trained models," he pointed out.