Many companies will have to create transparency about human rights and nature conservation criteria in their global supply chains in the coming years.
Until now, companies have painstakingly collected this information from their suppliers using questionnaires.
"If you look at how many regulations are published in different regions of the world and how many companies are obliged to fill out these questionnaires, the workload is enormous - and will increase in the future," says Jolene Ernesti, co-founder of the start-up ecotrek , which now belongs to Ecovadis, the world's leading rating agency for sustainability.
Ernesti is working there on a more intelligent approach: Instead of manual questionnaires, artificial intelligence is to automatically record and evaluate all available information on the sustainability of the company.
The required information is often already available in the sustainability reports on the company's website.
The AI therefore first fills out supplier profiles with all publicly available information, after which people only have to collect the remaining questions using the questionnaires in a second step.
However, this process should not remain the same: "We are currently seeing that the amount of sustainability news is doubling every year," reports Ernesti.
In order to process this rapidly growing amount of information in the future,
this process could be automated in the future using new technologies.
AI solutions could, for example, use semantic search approaches to search documents more deeply for missing sustainability topics, or use live news monitoring approaches to include the news published by journalists or other people in the evaluation.
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