Amazon Web Services (AWS) has partnered with Clarity AI to leverage the company's social and environmental analytics tools, allowing investors and consumers to measure corporate sustainability impact and support climate-friendly companies.
Clarity AI provides analysis tools for use in investing, corporate research, benchmarking, e-commerce purchases, and regulatory reporting and is able to manage immense amounts of data from multiple sustainability reports and other relevant documents. Clarity AI said it will use Amazon’s platforms and generative artificial intelligence to collect and process information to create unbiased models of sustainability data.
With this data, the AI-based tool will help provide investors and consumers with the ability to make sustainable investing and purchasing decisions, the companies said.
“AWS provides the cloud services, flexibility, and scale we need to be a data-driven company, to unlock the power of AI, and to deliver critical sustainability insights to investors, consumers, and organizations making key decisions that impact our planet and its inhabitants each and every day,” said Ángel Agudo, board director and senior vice president of product at Clarity AI. “At Clarity AI, our ambition is that social and environmental impact is seen by investors and businesses as a key variable beyond purely financial values.”
Currently, many e-commerce companies use Clarity AI’s platform, which uses data from over 70,000 companies, 420,000 funds, and 400 local governments, to help reveal sustainable brands to consumers.
By using Amazon’s SageMaker machine learning service, Clarity AI aims to develop AI-based models that may also help clients avoid investing in companies or funds potentially engaged in greenwashing, or false sustainability claims.
Most investors and consumers currently base investments and purchases on companies’ ESG reports and other reporting frameworks, but the lack of unified reporting standards may make it difficult for interested parties to fully understand the scope of a company's ESG performance. According to a recent survey, most investors admit that corporate reporting on sustainability performance includes at least some level of unsupported claims.
Some efforts have been made to improve sustainability reporting with the creation of groups such as the Carbon Accounting Alliance, initiatives to better standardize ESG reporting, and technology that may help verify that corporations’ reports accurately reflect their sustainability efforts. Data-driven solutions such as those introduced by Clarity AI and AWS have been promoted as another, potentially more clear-cut form of accountability.
