Drive transformative business with new AI features in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Running an agile, sustainable business is critical and it’s also incredibly challenging. Organizations have massive amounts of operational and value chain data that need to be gathered, managed, and analyzed to drive reduction and reporting efforts while growing business sustainably. Yet, too few have the robust digital foundation needed for centralizing and driving value from their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data estate. 

Enter Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data and AI solutions. These include technologies like Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Sustainability Manager, and Microsoft Copilot which together enable organizations to centralize and standardize complex ESG data for analytics and reporting and unlock critical data intelligence to help them move forward.  

We’re excited to share details about the latest capabilities in Cloud for Sustainability that build on this potential, providing the opportunity to implement transformative, industry-targeted solutions for both our customers and our partners. 

Three powerful new ways to advance sustainability with AI  

At this year’s Microsoft Ignite, we announced our latest AI innovations empowering organizations to improve their ESG data transparency, gain insights to advance toward their goals, and continue to grow sustainable business opportunities. These features were developed to meet the needs of key sustainability decision makers and practitioners, such as chief sustainability officers, chief financial officers, chief data officers, and chief information officers. 

1. General availability of sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, built into Fabric to leverage the single, AI-powered platform for centralizing enterprise data and analytics. Using these solutions, organizations can take care of their ESG data analytics in one place, driving progress faster by simplifying and accelerating analytics, collaboration, and decision making.  

Sustainability data solutions enable organizations to: 

• Centralize and transform disparate data into one sustainability data lake that conforms to a standardized ESG schema.
• Build custom insights for carbon, water, and waste by connecting to their data in Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
• Compute, visualize, and analyze ESG metrics for regulatory standards like Corporate Sustainability Disclosure Regulation (CSRD) by using prebuilt 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 the 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 insights they’re looking for, and Copilot in Microsoft Power BI will do the rest.  

All in conversational language, users can: 

• Create and tailor reports in seconds.
• Generate and edit calculations.
• Create narrative summaries.
• Ask questions about their data.

With the ability to easily tailor the tone, scope, and style of narratives and add them seamlessly within reports, Power BI can also deliver data insights even more impactfully through easy-to-understand text summaries.  

Explore Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and learn how to deploy the solutions.  

2. Coming soon: External reporting in Microsoft Sustainability Manager (formerly Project ESG Reporting). To address ESG reporting complexity, enhance efficiency, and provide greater transparency for ESG reporting, we’ve developed templates based on various ESG standards or frameworks. Using these, organizations can more easily create, complete, and approve comprehensive reports across both quantitative and qualitative metrics. 

The reporting templates map to: 

• Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) 
• Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards (ASRS) 
• Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (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. Sustainability agents. New prebuilt and custom agents are designed to help organizations rapidly uncover insights on a Microsoft AI platform such as Microsoft Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry. Agents can integrate company data for real-time retrieval and be surfaced to users in a multitude of ways, from canvas apps to supported enterprise applications such as Microsoft Sustainability Manager. 

Using a Sustainability Insights agent, organizations can quickly configure an AI assistant to get insights and data about their company’s sustainability goals and progress. They can assess sustainability efforts year over year or in comparison to other organizations while quickly accessing general knowledge around sustainability. 

As compliance standards continue to evolve, it’s crucial to have the ability to quickly adapt and meet diverse needs, such as varying standards by geography or industry. With agent templates, organizations can use LLM with their data aligned with the Cloud for Sustainability schema to help meet sustainability standards like the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) fee.  

The CBAM agent (coming soon) helps organizations estimate their fee for “carbon leakage” around less stringent climate policies in non-European Union (EU) countries. This can occur when EU-based companies move carbon-intensive production abroad or when EU products are replaced by more carbon-intensive imports.  

The agent helps to ensure that their carbon pricing is factored into imported goods while supporting the EU’s climate objectives, maintaining competitiveness, and avoiding potential regulatory penalties. Using it, you can leverage Copilot to: 

• Align your carbon fee with CBAM.
• Put a price on carbon-intensive goods imported into the European Union to help ensure that the carbon prices of imports and domestic products align.
• Estimate your carbon fee to be paid on CBAM. 

These solutions are available in AppSource and the Power Catalog. 

Partners: Build 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 industry clouds, enabling you to empower your customers and deliver industry 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 foundation of security and compliance.
• Make investments in content, programs, incentives, and offers that will help you scale as you go.
• Co-sell industry solutions alongside Microsoft by 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 paths, online technical summits, architecture guidance, sales assets, Azure Marketplace and AppSource, and more.  

Are you already a partner? Join our Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Insider Program to participate in preview conversations with program members from other organizations and the engineering team.   

Looking for a Cloud for Sustainability partner or solution? Visit AppSource. 

Learn more about sustainability solutions with Microsoft 

• Bookmark Microsoft Industry Blogs: Sustainability for the latest updates, including new capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.     
• Discover solutions with Microsoft Sustainability Manager.    
• Explore the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Community, where you can find answers to questions and connect with peers and experts.    
• See what’s new in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.

The post Drive transformative business with new AI features in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Source: Microsoft Industry Blog