ESG AI Assistant

An ESG AI assistant leverages Generative AI’s deep capabilities to analyze sustainability reports, ESG policy documents, and related filings. Typical features of an ESG Gen AI platform include:  

• AI-Powered Chat. Ask questions of your dedicated sustainability copilot for near-instant answers based on a carefully curated knowledge base of ESG and regulatory documents.  

• Autosuggestion. Get ready to explore, as your AI assistant guides you toward related topics and themes. 

• AI-Powered Search. Navigate through a massive repository of ESG reports and sustainability disclosures to swiftly find the results you need. 

• Summarization: Cut through the jargon and distill key points from complex documents, identifying areas of similarity and divergence among your peers.  

• Categorization: Sort, rank, and compare ESG insights to produce report-ready research while surfacing emerging trends inside and outside of your organization. 

When it comes to selecting an ESG AI assistant, there are several things to keep in mind:  

• Source Transparency: Your ESG AI assistant must clearly reveal how it arrives at its insights, offering detailed citations that disclose the origin of its claims. 

• High-Level Accuracy: Not all GenAI is created equal: cutting-edge techniques, such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), can significantly increase the quality and relevance of your system’s outputs. 

• Human Oversight: Machines have blind spots too, which is why people remain critical to ensuring system integrity and overseeing document curation. 

• Intuitive User Interface (UI): The system’s search fields, chat functions, and category filters should be easy to navigate and customizable to your needs. 

• Trusted Provider: Security is paramount across the enterprise, and that applies the same to your ESG AI solution—from the security of its technical infrastructure to the credentials of the company that operates the platform. 

• Shareable Insights: Look for data management features, such as bookmarking and list creation, that allow you to efficiently gather insights and share them with your team. 

Like any technology, generative AI has its limits and risks. Some AI algorithms make it difficult, sometimes impossible, to track the information to its source, and this lack of transparency can potentially affect credibility. Models may also omit crucial context, resulting in a partial or misleading picture.  
 
While adept at style and grammar, general-purpose AI models are known to struggle with factual accuracy. They may even “hallucinate,” generating information that is coherent and plausible—but ultimately misleading. Using a custom-built model which draws on a closely controlled database goes a long way toward mitigating these concerns. 

Here are some considerations for getting the most out of your ESG assistant: 

Let Your Copilot be Your Guide: Your ESG copilot will quickly surmise the kinds of information likely useful to your research. It will proactively help you build topic-based insights while filling knowledge gaps around global frameworks, such as CSRD, TCFD, and others.  

Ask What’s on Your Mind: Wondering what a peer’s Scope 1 emissions might look like over a multi-year period, or what EU or SEC regulators had to say about a topic? Ask your assistant the question and get the answer, together with detailed citations for verification. There’s no need to crunch the figures or curate the extracts yourself. 

Be Open to New Insights: Human thinking is vulnerable to its own biases and assumptions. With an ESG AI assistant as your guide, keep an open mind and get ready to expand the frontiers of what you think you already know.