This week in New York, business leaders from every corner of the world are uniting to address evolving global challenges and accelerate solutions. Across multiple events and stages, SAP is sharing how its artificial intelligence (AI) edge is helping leading companies shape the future of business by turning environmental, regulatory, and market pressures into opportunities for action.
AI, with already proven applications, can unlock insights to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 5%-10% by 2030. According to KPMG, over half of sustainability executives say one of their top actions in the next three years is expanding their use of AI to enhance ESG capabilities.
Most businesses have not yet realized AI’s full potential for sustainability. In fact, only 14% of companies are using AI today to reduce carbon emissions. But those ready to do so will gain a decisive advantage that goes beyond emissions reduction. SAP’s ERP-centric approach enables organizations to deliver sustainability outcomes with applications, data, and AI embedded into SAP Business Suite. With sustainability reporting, data processing, automation, and strategic insights, AI can navigate your business through today’s climate challenges and ensure tomorrow’s competitiveness.
Power on, ethically and responsibly
Put sustainability at the core of your business with AI-driven solutions
Scaling AI solutions comes with considerable energy and water usage. To ensure net benefit, this needs to be part of return on investment conversations. With robust governance and renewables-backing however, AI is able to reduce more emissions than it generates.
All SAP data centers are powered by 100% renewable energy and any emissions from 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 of your sustainable business transformation. Here are eight ways that businesses use SAP’s AI-powered systems to build their sustainable advantage.
Improve efficiency with automation
1. Compliance information processing
The SAP S/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 in product compliance disclosures, reduce penalties and fines in environmental management, and automate processes to reduce the risk of manual errors.
This helps turn a 50-minute task into a five-minute job and reduce processing and evaluation costs by 90%.
2. Declaration image analysis
With the SAP Green Token, AI-assisted declaration image analysis capability, you can automatically extract data and information from sustainability declarations regardless of format.
This helps cut review time, eliminate manual error risk, and ensure your reports are ready for required external audits.
Without AI, it takes roughly five minutes to review, extract, and post information from declarations. With AI, it’s just 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 the compliance requirements, and propose clear tasks to meet permit requirements.
This AI-assisted capability can save days of permit review and interpretation, remove the need to hire external consultants, and lead up to an 80% reduction in environmental penalties and fines.
Your personal AI carbon consultant
4. Emission factor mapping
With SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, SAP’s AI-enhanced solution can calculate and assign emission factors directly to purchased products. Where actual supplier emissions data is given, it can source that from the ERP system. When estimates are required, it can automatically find the most accurate emission factors.
Audit-ready emission factor mapping turns a 10-minute manual task into a two-minute verification.
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).
- Take data collection from a half hour to a half minute and report creation and drafting from 30 hours down to just five hours, all the while eliminating confusion and the risk of manual errors.
6. Carbon emissions analysis
From reporting on today to planning for tomorrow, Joule, SAP’s copilot, can take current carbon emissions data and return actionable insights that help reduce emissions and guide corporate sustainability strategies.
By combining financial and carbon data, Joule can create carbon intensity KPIs and can be your ultimate corporate sustainability consultant.
The AI safety officer for your EHS team
7. Safety observation reporting
Complex safety reporting procedures dissuade employees from reporting potential hazards. With the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, EHS workplace safety, AI-assisted safety observation reporting capability, basic users can input safety observations in natural language, and the AI model can process that into a formal incident report, prompting the user for any missing details.
This can increase the likelihood that employees report safety hazards and helps prevent severe incidents by identifying potential safety issues in advance.
8. Safety instruction generation
Your AI safety officer can generate clear safety instructions for specific equipment based on the latest risk assessments and job hazard analyses.
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, EHS workplace safety, AI-assisted safety instruction generation, the time and effort of manually prescribing and updating safety instructions can be dramatically reduced.
Solve today’s sustainability challenges while preparing for tomorrow
The right AI integration can ensure you future-proof your operations while shining a light on the path that drives competitiveness.
What sets SAP apart is our suite-first, AI-first approach that helps ensure sustainability isn’t an add-on, but a strategic enabler that can deliver measurable outcomes at scale. SAP’s one sustainability data model can drive consistent reporting, deeper insight, and confident decisions across every sustainability process, product, and partner network.
With a responsible AI partner, businesses can realize measurable financial returns on AI investments and unlock sustainability benefits; automate manual-heavy paperwork; identify emissions hot spots and steer their business toward a decarbonized economy; and make environmental impact tracking visible to all lines of business based on a reliable single source of truth. With an integrated set of capabilities, SAP Sustainability solutions help businesses address their sustainability needs holistically and across topics. The result is speed, trust, and traceability, which turn sustainability into strategy, not just compliance.
Get in touch to find out how SAP can help your business power on with sustainability solutions.
Monica Molesag is global head of Sustainability Communications at SAP.
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