How do you ensure sustainability compliance for your products and services, as well as communicating your sustainability efforts to your customers and internal teams?
It might be tempting to reach for AI chat bots such as ChatGPT for help. Unfortunately, as we outlined in a previous post, ChatGPT sucks at sustainability communication, and while these AI tools are constantly improving, it can be tricky (and risky) to use them out-of-the-box for sustainability purposes, especially with the ever-changing legislation around sustainability practices.
With custom tools created for specific sustainability use cases, AI can get the leg-up it needs to go from greenwashing to useful sustainability assistant.
Empowering sustainability and communication professionals
AI works best when it enhances the existing capabilities of humans and perhaps removes the tedium of some tasks. For marketing and sustainability managers, there are two use cases in particular where a lot of time is spent:
- Checking sustainability communication (marketing/PR/internal) for accuracy and correctness.
- Understanding and navigating a giant corpus of legislation documents.
Both of these use cases can be optimized by leveraging one of the best features of AI: Its ability to quickly summarize and comb through lots of data.
Even if an organization has sustainability communication guidelines, it can still be challenging to effectively communicate the sustainability efforts to a wider audience. In many cases, a sustainability manager has to check all external communication to ensure that sustainability claims are accurate. In this case, AI can help distill and guide the marketing and communication professionals, without involving the sustainability manager.
There is a growing number of legal requirements that companies have to fulfill regarding their sustainability claims. For example, terms like “eco-friendly” and “green” are problematic terms according to EU legislation1. So when the company has to write a sustainability strategy or communication guideline, they need to search through hundreds of pages of legislation documents. In this case, AI can help by quickly finding the most relevant information for a given topic, as well as summarize and tailor it to the specific company.
Getting started with AI in sustainability
Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Gemini and Llama are incredibly impressive tools, but they are designed for general-purpose use cases and sometimes fall short on specific topics, such as sustainability.
However, with careful prompting, the right context and sometimes a human-in-the-loop, LLMs become more useful for sustainability purposes. Simple prompting instructions such as don’t use the word “environmentally friendly” are a good start, but the AI needs more and better context (e.g. legislation/guidelines) to be guided in the right direction. This is why custom-built tools such as Svale AI are necessary to successfully use the capabilities of AI and LLMs.
