This week in New York, business leaders from around the world are uniting to tackle evolving global challenges and accelerate solutions. Through several events and stages, SAP shares how its artificial intelligence (AI) Edge helps leading companies shape the future of business by transforming environmental, regulatory and market pressures into opportunities for action.
AI, with its already proven applications, can provide insights to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 5% to 10% by 2030. According to KPMGmore than half of sustainability leaders say one of their top actions over the next three years is to expand their use of AI to improve ESG capabilities.
Most businesses have yet to realize the full potential of AI for sustainability. Actually, only 14% of companies are now using AI to reduce carbon emissions. But those willing to do so will gain a decisive benefit that goes beyond reducing emissions. SAP’s ERP-centric approach enables organizations to achieve sustainability outcomes through applications, data and AI integrated into SAP Business Suite. Through sustainability reporting, data processing, automation and strategic insights, AI can guide your business through today’s climate challenges and ensure tomorrow’s competitiveness.
Light up, ethically and responsibly
Scaling AI The solutions come with considerable energy and water consumption. To ensure a bottom line, this must be part of ROI discussions. However, with strong governance and support for renewable energy, AI is capable of reducing more emissions than it generates.
All SAP data centers are powered by 100% renewable energy and all emissions related to the use of third-party AI systems are calculated and included in the company’s Scope 3 emissions.
Used ethically and responsibly, AI can be the catalyst for sustainable transformation of your business. Here are eight ways businesses are using AI-enabled SAP systems to build their sustainable advantage.
Improve efficiency through automation
1. Processing of compliance information
THE SAPS/4HANA For product compliance, AI-assisted compliance information processing capability can automatically extract compliance information from updated documents and map the information to compliance requirements.
This can reduce costs related to product compliance disclosures, reduce environmental management penalties and fines, and automate processes to reduce the risk of manual errors.
This turns a 50-minute task into a five-minute job and reduces processing and evaluation costs by 90%.
2. Analysis of declaration images
With the SAP Green TokenAI-assisted declaration image analysis capability, you can automatically extract data and insights from sustainability declarations, regardless of their format.
This helps reduce review time, eliminates the risk of manual error, and ensures your reports are ready for required external audits.
Without AI, it takes about five minutes to review, extract and publish information from returns. With AI, it only takes 20 seconds.
3. Permit management
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, EHS environment management, AI-assisted permit management can read hundreds of pages in seconds, extract compliance requirements, and provide clear tasks to meet permit requirements.
This AI-assisted capability can save days of permit review and interpretation, eliminate the need to hire external consultants, and lead to an 80% reduction in environmental penalties and fines.
Your personal AI carbon consultant
4. Mapping of emission factors
With SAP Sustainable Footprint ManagementSAP’s AI-enhanced solution, users can calculate the carbon footprint of products and the company. When actual supplier emissions data is provided, it can retrieve this information from SAP Sustainability Data Exchange and other systems. When estimates are needed, the solution can automatically find the most accurate emission factors from databases and map them to products.
Audit-ready emission factor mapping can turn a 10-minute manual task into a two-minute audit.
5. Report generation
In the SAP Sustainability Control Tower solution, you can generate comprehensive ESG reports in just a few clicks:
- Automatically generate reports that align with internal sustainability strategies and meet external requirements such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
- Reduce data collection from half an hour to half a minute and report creation and writing from 30 hours to just five hours, while eliminating confusion and the risk of manual errors.
6. Analysis of carbon emissions
From reporting today to planning tomorrow, JouleSAP’s co-pilot, can leverage current carbon emissions data and provide actionable insights that help reduce emissions and guide companies’ sustainability strategies.
By combining financial and carbon data, Joule can create carbon intensity KPIs and can be your ultimate sustainability consultant.
The AI Security Manager for your EHS team
7. Safety Observation Reports
Complex safety reporting procedures discourage employees from reporting potential hazards. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, Workplace EHS Safety and AI-assisted Safety Observation Reporting capability, basic users can enter safety observations in natural language, and the AI model can process them into a formal incident report, prompting the user to provide any missing details.
This can increase the likelihood that employees will report safety risks and helps prevent serious incidents by identifying potential safety issues in advance.
8. Generation of safety instructions
Your AI Safety Manager can generate clear safety instructions for specific equipment based on the latest risk assessments and occupational hazard analyses.
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, workplace EHS safety and AI-assisted safety instruction generation, the time and effort required for manually prescribing and updating safety instructions can be significantly reduced.
Meeting current challenges in sustainable development while preparing for tomorrow
Proper AI integration can future-proof your operations while illuminating the path to competitiveness.
What sets SAP apart is our suite-first and AI-driven approach, which helps ensure that sustainability is not an add-on, but a strategic enabler capable of delivering measurable results at scale. SAP’s unique sustainability data model can drive consistent reporting, deeper insights, and reliable decisions across all sustainability processes, products, and partner networks.
With a responsible AI partner, businesses can realize measurable financial returns on their AI investments and unlock sustainability benefits; automate heavy manual paperwork; identify emissions hot spots and direct their activity towards a decarbonized economy; and make environmental impact monitoring visible to all business sectors based on a single, reliable source of truth. With an integrated set of features, SAP Sustainability The solutions help companies meet their sustainability needs globally and across multiple topics. The result is speed, trust and traceability, which turns sustainability into strategy, not just compliance.
Contact us to find out how SAP can help your business move forward with sustainability solutions.
Monica Molesag is Global Head of Sustainability Communications at SAP.