Running an agile, sustainable business is essential, but it’s also incredibly challenging. Organizations have enormous amounts of operational and value chain data that must be collected, managed and analyzed to drive reduction and reporting efforts while growing their business sustainably. Yet too few companies have the strong digital foundation needed to centralize and generate value from their environmental, social and governance (ESG) data assets.
Enter Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data and AI solutions. These include technologies such as Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Sustainability Manager and Microsoft Copilot which together enable organizations to centralize and standardize complex ESG data for analysis and reporting purposes and unlock critical insights into data to help them move forward.
We are excited to share details of the latest Sustainability Cloud capabilities that build on this potential, providing the opportunity to implement transformative, sector-targeted solutions for our customers and partners.
Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
Data and AI capabilities to help you transform for the future with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data intelligence
Three powerful new ways to advance sustainability with AI
To this year Microsoft IgniteWe announced our latest AI innovations enabling organizations to improve the transparency of their ESG data, gain insights to progress toward their goals, and continue to develop sustainable business opportunities. These features were developed to meet the needs of key sustainability decision-makers and practitioners, such as sustainability managers, CFOs, data managers, and information managers.
1. General availability of Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabricintegrated with Fabric to leverage the single AI-powered platform to centralize business data and analytics. With these solutions, organizations can manage their ESG data analytics in one place, accelerating progress by simplifying and accelerating analysis, collaboration and decision-making.
Sustainability data solutions enable organizations to:
- Centralize and transform disparate data into a single sustainability data lake aligned with a standardized ESG schema.
- Create custom carbon, water, and waste insights by connecting to their data in Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
- Calculate, visualize and analyze ESG metrics for regulatory standards such as Corporate Sustainability Disclosure Regulation (CSRD) using predefined and custom metric definitions.
- Generate social and governance insights from disparate social and governance data in the ESG data lake.
- Report and analyze Microsoft Azure emissions data by collecting and processing emissions data in the ESG data lake.
Now there’s also next-generation AI and the power of Large Language Models (LLM) to accelerate our customers’ work in Fabric at every layer. Users can simply describe the visuals and information they are looking for, and Co-pilot in Microsoft Power BI will do the rest.
All in conversational language, users can:
- Create and customize reports in seconds.
- Generate and modify calculations.
- Create narrative summaries.
- Ask questions about their data.
With the ability to easily adapt the tone, scope, and style of stories and add them seamlessly into reports, Power BI can also deliver even more impactful data insights with easy-to-understand text summaries.
Explore Sustainability Data Solutions in Microsoft Fabric and learn to deploy the solutions.
2. Coming soon: external reporting in Microsoft Sustainability Manager (formerly Project ESG reporting). To address the complexity of ESG reporting, improve efficiency and ensure greater transparency of ESG reporting, we have developed models based on various ESG standards or frameworks. With these, organizations can more easily create, complete and approve comprehensive reports on quantitative and qualitative indicators.
The report templates correspond to:
- Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)
- Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards (ASRS)
- Reporting on commercial responsibility and sustainable development (BRSR 1 and 2)
- Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
- International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS 1 and 2)
- Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB)
Organizations can also add standards manually or with a .CSV file.
This feature is available in Microsoft Sustainability Manager Essentials and Premium and in Power Apps as simply Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
3. Agents of sustainability. New prebuilt and custom agents are designed to help organizations quickly discover insights on a Microsoft AI platform like Microsoft Copilot Studio Or Azure AI Foundry. Agents can integrate enterprise data for real-time retrieval and be presented to users in multiple ways, from canvas apps to supported enterprise applications such as Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
Use a Sustainability Information OfficerOrganizations can quickly set up an AI assistant to gain insights and data about their company’s sustainability goals and progress. They can evaluate sustainability efforts year over year or against other organizations while quickly gaining access to general sustainability knowledge.
As compliance standards continue to evolve, it is crucial to have the ability to quickly adapt and meet diverse needs, such as varying standards across geographies or industries. Using agent models, organizations can use LLM with their Cloud for Sustainability schema-aligned data to help meet sustainability standards such as European Union Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) fees .
THE CBAM Agent (forthcoming) helps organizations estimate their costs for “carbon leakage” from less stringent climate policies in non-European Union (EU) countries. This can happen when EU-based companies shift their carbon-intensive production abroad or when EU products are replaced by more carbon-intensive imports.
The agent helps ensure that carbon pricing is taken into account in imported products while supporting the EU’s climate objectives, maintaining competitiveness and avoiding possible regulatory sanctions. Using it, you can leverage Copilot to:
- Align your carbon tax with CBAM.
- Price carbon-intensive goods imported into the European Union to ensure carbon prices of imports and domestic products are aligned.
- Estimate your carbon fee to pay on CBAM.
These solutions are available in Application Source and the Power catalog.
Partners: Create a solution practice with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability
Are you a systems integrator or independent software developer? By partnering with Microsoft, you can take advantage of the Microsoft Cloud Platform, which extends beyond Dynamics 365 and Power Platform to Microsoft 365 and Azure and includes industrial clouds, allowing you to empower your customers and deliver industrial solutions faster.
Use our cloud platform and resources to:
- Accelerate your innovation and reduce time to market by leveraging industry-specific capabilities, data models, connectors, and APIs on a security and compliance foundation.
- Invest in content, programs, incentives, and offers that will help you grow over time.
- Co-sell industry solutions alongside Microsoft using our commercial marketplace and increasing your visibility with software certifications.
To support your solution practice, we offer Cloud for Sustainability resources, such as sandbox offers, learning path, online technical summits, architectural advice, sales assets, Azure Marketplace And Application Sourceand more.
Are you already a partner? Join our Microsoft Cloud Sustainability Program to participate in preliminary conversations with program members from other organizations and the engineering team.
Are you looking for a partner or a Cloud solution for sustainable development? Visit Application source.
Learn more about sustainability solutions with Microsoft
As Director of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, Brandon leads the Cloud for Sustainability business, product strategy and execution to deliver a holistic approach to thought leadership, technology and business transformation to help customers apply Microsoft and partner technologies to solve fundamental support challenges and drive a sustainable future. Brandon has been with Microsoft for over 14 years, working on various business application product development teams.
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