Sustainability at Speed and Scale Requires the Right Data and Technology

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Using tech to move forward

At Cognizant, we have the opportunity to closely follow how leading businesses are using technology to both mitigate climate change and adapt to it, and we’re privileged to initiate and participate in many of these efforts.

A case in point is our Cognizant Oceans initiative, which is helping companies and industries associated with the blue economy use technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics improve business and sustainability outcomes.

We’ve partnered with Tidal, a project from the Alphabet “moonshot factory,” to create a range of solutions that improve visibility and decision making in, for example, aquaculture companies and their supply chains. The goal is to enhance their sustainability, environmental resilience and bottom line. This is possible thanks to Tidal’s AI, trained on 900 terabytes of video with 8 billion observations.

With our feet very much on land, we recently completed a study for a global distribution and retail business to determine how a sensor strategy might enable material cost and carbon reduction. Not only were we able to develop a roadmap for the business to remove 12% of its emissions and reduce its annual power and heating bill by 20%, but we were also so confident in that roadmap that we were prepared to underwrite the cost of delivering the strategy in a commercially creative risk-reward model.

We’re working with companies from various energy-intensive industries on the use of data, cloud and AI to produce more accurate and useful ESG reports. Sustainability reporting remains fraught with challenges. Data gathering is still often highly labor-intensive and, as a result, often error-prone. Businesses and their value chains remain littered with data in various forms and from various sources. Data management approaches can vary from site to site and business unit to business unit, leading to data inconsistency.

Moreover, systems are often structured for retrospective, not near/real-time, measurement that can drive superior operational decision making. Often, businesses have no common platform to aggregate, interrogate and easily detect errors or anomalies and make better use of data. The list of shortcomings goes on. The good news is that a well-tailored and effectively deployed ESG data strategy can quickly overcome them.

There is far more to be done. In fact, our recent survey revealed that often the technologies least used in sustainability efforts are precisely the ones considered the most effective by those that do adopt them (see Figure 2).

Base: 3,000 senior executives
Source: Cognizant Research and Oxford Economics
Figure 2

Twinning the digital and sustainability transformations

These examples, and many others from companies across industries, confirm the urgency of ”twinning” the digital and green transitions, as the European Commission recently put it. Our survey found that over 60% see a direct and positive link between their digital and sustainability strategies. To be sure, there will be costs in the short term, but businesses and the economy as a whole will benefit in the medium and long term.

And we should never lose sight of the ultimate truth: When the planetary systems on which our communities depend are under threat, we each bear responsibility for the solutions and, given the urgency and scale of the challenge, must use proven mechanisms and technologies to fix them.

For more, read our report “Deep Green: how data, technology and collaboration will drive the next phase of sustainability in business,” visit the Sustainability & Resilience section of our website or contact us.

Author Philip Smith is global head of sustainability advisory practice at Cognizant. More: Read more Cognizant guest blogs here.