Human bias and emotions can hurt corporate sustainability efforts, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) programs might be more impactful if left in the hands of bots, according to the results of a recent study by Oracle and CIO Advisor Pamela Rucker.

The "No Planet B" study reached more than 11,000 consumers and business leaders in 15 countries. It found that while 92% of business leaders believe sustainability is the key for their organization to succeed, a similar percentage (91%) report facing major obstacles to implementing ESG programs.

The biggest challenges they face are accessing ESG metrics like accurate emissions data from partners and third parties (35%), a lack of data (33%), and the time-consuming nature of manual reporting processes (32%).

However, the top three benefits business leaders see from sustainability are strengthening the company's brand (40%), increasing productivity (39%), and attracting new customers (38%). Those top benefits don't align with the most necessary impacts of sustainability efforts: lowering greenhouse gas emissions and limiting global temperature rise as much as possible.

Sustainability is often integrated into a company because of its business case, but that reasoning also conveniently masks greenwashing — the corporate habit of overstating positive environmental impacts or misrepresenting how sustainable a product, service, or business is.

Google Cloud recently found 66% of business leaders question how genuine their organization’s sustainability initiatives are, and  58% agree that their organization is guilty of greenwashing and overstating their sustainability efforts.

But the Google study also found 86% of those same execs claim they believe their company's sustainability efforts are “making a difference in advancing sustainability.”

In an atmosphere where greenwashing maintains relevance, maybe it's time to take the complexities of human nature out of corporate sustainability.

Oracle reported that 93% of business leaders would trust a bot over a human to make a company's sustainability and social decisions. This is because almost all (96%) of business leaders agree human bias and emotions often distract business leaders from the end goal, and letting lines of code lead corporate sustainability charges eliminates those distractions.

According to the report, this is a popular sentiment because leaders agree bots are better at collecting different types of data without error (43%), making rational and unbiased decisions (42%), and predicting future outcomes based on past metrics and performance (41%).

But this doesn't mean that humans shouldn't still be involved.

Oracle reported business leaders still believe people are essential to successful sustainability programs because they're are better at making changes based on stakeholder feedback (48%), educating others on information needed for decision-making (46%), and making context-informed strategic decisions (42%).