The New Age Of GenAI: Conversational Interfaces Will Become Widespread In Climate Software

The New Age Of GenAI: Conversational Interfaces Will Become Widespread In Climate Software

As the popularity of generative AI (GenAI) continues to grow, climate tech vendors are incorporating the technology into their toolkits. Climate risk software provider Jupiter Intelligence became the most recent example – for now – launching a GenAI tool in June. Following the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in 2022, GenAI has increasingly been adopted by businesses to streamline tasks, such as email drafting or marketing activities, and by software vendors to provide guidance and analytics and support data collection and reporting.

ESG reporting and carbon management software vendors such as Benchmark Gensuite, Persefoni and Sweep have launched GenAI toolkits over the last two years to allow users to ask questions and streamline sustainability reporting. By using AI to extract key insights from large data sets, emissions and sustainability data can be made clearer and more accessible. Accordingly, customers can focus on applying insights and operationalizing their climate and sustainability programmes. Jupiter Intelligence’s JupiterAI, for example, helps customers in navigating their ClimateScore Global data sets and methodology documents.

Due partly to the complexity of reporting regulations such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), businesses are searching for additional guidance and support. Under ESRS E1, decision-makers will need to understand the materiality of climate risks to their business and conduct granular assessments to a level of detail that has not previously been mandated. This is compounded by having limited climate risk expertise in-house. Lack of internal expertise, and the limited size of climate-dedicated teams, is consistently cited as a significant obstacle for businesses in creating and implementing their climate strategy. The need for education and support is particularly critical for climate risk analysis as organizations must get to grips with climate models historically managed by academia, or natural catastrophe models utilized by insurance professionals.

With the expanding adoption of GenAI, we expect to see growing numbers of software firms developing a conversational interface for users to be able to generate actionable insights from their data, as well as developing further use cases to support clients.

For more information, see our AI Applied research and our recent webinar on Using AI To Accelerate Your Sustainability Strategy.