Related topics

Revolutionizing sustainability via AI

In this episode of EY.ai Unplugged, Nitesh Mehrotra, Partner – Sustainability, EY India, discusses how AI and emerging technologies are accelerating progress on climate and social challenges. Drawing from real-world client engagements, he highlights five key areas where AI is enabling organizations to scale sustainable impact — from enhancing value chain intelligence to addressing greenwashing risks.

Key takeaways:

Value chain intelligence: AI is strengthening upstream and downstream sustainability insights, helping organizations build resilience and stay ahead of the curve.
AI-driven innovation: From scanning climate startups to mining patents, AI is unlocking both sector-specific and cross-sectoral solutions to sustainability challenges.
Tackling greenwashing: AI offers early warnings and actionable insights to identify and mitigate greenwashing, enabling greater transparency in sustainability efforts.

For your convenience, a full text transcript of this podcast is available on the link below:

Nitesh

Hello, everyone. I am Nitesh Mehrotra, part of EY sustainability practice at EY in India. I welcome you all to yet another episode of EY.ai unplugged series.

Nitesh

As we all know, climate change, and social inequity, are the two biggest challenges facing humanity at the moment, and we are going to explore in this conversation today, how AI and emerging technology can help accelerate action.

Nitesh

So, what I have done today, for us, assimilated five real life examples that I'm seeing our clients, scale exponentially, led by AI and emerging technologies to create meaningful change.

Nitesh

The first one is around value chain intelligence. As we all know, most of the organizations are fairly mature within the four walls of an organization. But the value chain, including the upstream and the downstream intelligence that we need on sustainability, I think a lot is being done through AI to really strengthen resilience and I would say to create competitive intelligence.

Nitesh

The second one, clearly is around innovation theme. So how can we get sector specific and sector agnostic intelligence? In our innovation scan, we are seeing thousands of climate startups and patents being filed, every day on sustainability challenges. And how can we scan this through the power of AI, to inspire and create meaningful action on innovation.

Nitesh

The third one, clearly is around automated reporting and benchmarking. I think there is a lot of pain and time being spent on reporting. So again, with the power of AI and a common data model, with interoperability, how can we really ease off that pain and create reporting and benchmarking, so that all that time can be a help, and be enabled on action.

Nitesh

The next use case that we are certainly seeing is on, upskilling and capacity building. We all know climate science is evolving. So how can we, all of us, with the power of AI, help keep abreast with the changes and create inspiration and infusion, right for all our ecosystem on the latest climate science and reskill ourselves with the power of AI.

Nitesh

And the last one, certainly, I think we are seeing a lot of scaling being done is on the risk of greenwashing. We all know it is a big risk. So, how can AI create actionable insights, to create meaningful alerts I would say, it is like, driving the car at night, and we can never see further than the headlights, but we can make the entire journey that way.

Nitesh

And I think AI is like that headlight that can really provide direction, in this transition that we are on at the moment.

Presenters

Nitesh Mehrotra

Consulting Partner, Sustainability and Climate, EY India

If you would like to listen to our podcasts on the go:

Spotify

SoundCloud

Podcast

Episode 22

Duration

3m 54s

In this series

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.