Climate Week 2024 Highlight: Sustaira Expands Sustainability and AI Collaboration Into Global Alliance Partnership With Capgemini
During Climate Week in New York City and a week after the launch of Sustaira’s Sustainability Marketplace, Sustaira expanded the collaboration into a Global Alliance Partnership with Capgemini. It’s been an exciting few weeks for both teams and find below the recaps and highlights!
Leverage sustainability initiatives to unlock business value
Technology will power the transformation of economies and societies into more sustainable models – but it also creates challenges related to complexity. Strategic alliances and new tools like sustainability marketplaces will help.
The power of technology to enable a new, greener industrial revolution was prominent at Climate Week NYC 2024 – an annual summit on climate action that brings together international leaders from government, business, and other stakeholders. This year’s gathering took place September 22-29 and consisted of more than 900 events around the conference’s theme “It’s Time.”
As part of Climate Week NYC 2024, Capgemini hosted an event on how companies can adopt a ‘Business to Planet’ mindset, which embraces Sustainability as an enabler, not a blocker, of value. It was full of exploration on ways organizations are transforming operations to join the clean energy revolution – from building sustainable supply chains to leveraging Gen AI. Corporate executives, thought leaders, and change-makers across sectors shared how they are reimagining business as usual and charting a path toward a greener future.
Capgemini's Global Data & AI Sustainability Lead, Christopher Scheefer, moderated an insightful discussion on Generative AI and accelerating Sustainability during the event.
One key topic was the major transition the corporate world is undergoing as societies attempt to reorganize along more sustainable models. This is a seismic shift – on par with the Industrial Revolution – with significant implications for business models, energy use, waste and emissions, and human resources issues such as recruiting and skills development.
Chris highlights, this Global Alliance Partnership forms the basis for the worldwide cooperation between the Capgemini entities and Sustaira:
“We’re excited to globally roll out our joint Sustainability proposition together with Sustaira, as the speed by which we can move and the extensive library of available Sustainability solutions, connectors, and services are truly impressive and offer a unique proposition to our Enterprise customers.”
Sustainability is a broad, continuously evolving challenge
Many enterprises have recognized the imperative to act, but few have all the required resources in-house to become sustainability champions. Companies are under increasing pressure to collect and disclose sustainability data, and must address several significant challenges to succeed:
Sustainability data is complex. It’s collected in different formats and stored in multiple systems – both inside and outside the organization.
This data must be collected in a timely manner, verified for its accuracy, then reported in a form that enables corporate decision makers to turn this valuable sustainability information into actionable insights.
Data must also be reported in a format that complies with all disclosure requirements.
A broad and continuously evolving landscape of regulatory requirements makes the task even more challenging – especially if the organization is expanding into new business lines or markets.
As Founder of Sustaira – a company on a mission to help business leaders make organizations more sustainable – I was pleased to see the summit highlight the central role technology must play in addressing climate change. The conference recognized the pressing need for companies and societies to develop, deploy, and finance sustainability solutions and technologies at scale. To help companies address this, Sustaira recently undertook two important initiatives – which can also convert a requirement into a driver of business value:
1. Sustainability Accelerator Marketplace.
In September, Sustaira launched its Sustainability Accelerator Marketplace. This includes more than 150 solutions and services, plus more than 50 connectors – all designed to accelerate how companies address their sustainability data aggregation and disclosure challenges. Available solutions include GHG-protocol-based Carbon Accounting, Sustainability KPI tracking, CSRD disclosures, Suppliers Sustainability, ESG reporting, Materiality Assessments, Scope 3 scenario analysis, and more. The portfolio also includes tools that accelerate net-zero environmental initiatives and solutions that address social and governance challenges such as DEI insights, supplier risk monitoring, and compliance tracking.
Sustaira’s sustainability accelerators include a number of out-of-the-box solutions, app templates, services, and widgets – plus configurable connectors for Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle. In addition to its own, flexible Carbon Accounting solution, Sustaira offers a GHG Carbon Ingestor and Integration Module that directly injects carbon data into the Sustaira platform, extending and unlocking more rigid sustainability point solutions such as IBM Envizi, Workiva, Enablon, Sphera, Sweep, Watershed, Persefoni, and Greenly.
2. Sustaira x Capgemini Global Strategic Alliance.
At Climate Week NYC 2024, Sustaira and Capgemini announced they’ve expanded their relationship into a Global Strategic Alliance. This software and services partnership enhances Capgemini’s global expertise in sustainability, data, and AI, by providing its clients with access to Sustaira’s complete portfolio of solutions. Capgemini and Sustaira are also building new solutions and services designed to solve unique sustainability challenges. Our two companies have already co-created a portfolio of flexible solutions that combine Capgemini's AI and domain expertise with the speed and agility of Sustaira’s Sustainability Platform. Solutions include the Carbon Visualizer, AI-enabled Net Zero Forecaster, Sustainability Scenario Planner, and Supplier Risk Monitoring.
“These applications are available on the Sustainability Marketplace and include the Carbon Visualizer, AI-enabled Net Zero Forecaster, Sustainability (Scenario) Planner, and the Supplier Risk Monitoring. To make it easy for Sustainability leaders, all solutions are accessible via a single-view Sustainability Launchpad, integrated with other data sources, and can sit on top of Capgemini’s Sustainability Data Hub via a Sustaira connector for a unified experience.”
Vincent de Montalivet, Director of Sustainability Data Practice and I&D North America, and Vincent de la Mar, Founder and CEO Sustaira, share the Sustainability Marketplace during Climate Week 2024.
Sustaira has also created a Capgemini-specific sustainability marketplace on the Sustaira platform, which was released during Business to Planet Connect – a Capgemini event held as part of Climate Week NYC 2024 to highlight the many ways in which leading organizations are reimagining their businesses to become more sustainable.
The result is a broad portfolio of solutions accessible via a single-view Sustainability Launchpad. This is integrated with other data sources and sits on top of Capgemini’s Sustainability Data Hub via a Sustaira connector to deliver a unified experience to Capgemini clients.
Sustainability as opportunity
It’s tempting to view the sustainability imperative as a burden that companies must endure. But Sustaira endorses Capgemini’s view – expressed during Business to Planet Connect – that it’s far more productive to embrace sustainability as an enabler, not a blocker, of value.
Larger enterprises need to collect and manage tons of Sustainability data from a multitude of rigid systems inside and outside the organization. This aggregation and integration challenge, combined with complex and unique requirements, demands a more flexible and open approach, replacing and extending point solutions. Sustaira has large Enterprise customers, such as Siemens, where Sustaira extends rigid out-of-the-box (Sustainability) solutions, filling gaps and unlocking the value of existing investments with more agile and innovative Sustainability apps, for instance, those focused on CSRD compliance and Scope 3 transparency.
“We’re incredibly proud that Capgemini’s leadership recognizes that its customers have the need for speed and agility offered by the Sustaira team, our Sustainability platform, and marketplace. This Global Alliance truly accelerates the roll out of impactful applications, while co-creating new Sustainability AI solutions.”
Please contact me if you would like to discuss this further or check out the content resources below:
Capgemini x Sustaira webinar on the 6th of November 2024: https://www.sustaira.com/events/capgemini-sustaira-sustainability-webinar
Sustainability Marketplace https://marketplace.sustaira.com/
Capgemini x Sustaira Partnership page: https://www.sustaira.com/capgemini
Sustainability & ESG Insights LinkedIn Newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6925197075181678592/
Webinar | Accelerating Your Sustainability Journey
Date & Time: November 6th, 09:00 EST
Join us for an insightful webinar on the Sustaira x Capgemini Global Alliance Partnership for Sustainability & AI, where we will share how we accelerate your Sustainability journey. Explore over 150 accelerators, including Sustainability solutions, templates, services, and connectors. Learn how AI and Low-code technology make your teams more efficient and effective. Use cases such as Goals/KPI Tracking, Carbon Accounting, Disclosures, (Net Zero) Scenario planning, Forecasting, Benchmarking, Supplier Monitoring, and more will be shared and demonstrated.
