At the same time, individual financial services firms may encounter a risk of disconnect with these stakeholders, primarily due to challenges and questions around disparities between firms’ presentation of their sustainability products, and the accuracy of the ESG data that underlies those products.  

Meanwhile, firms seek to comply with increasing ESG regulations and standards. And they need to meet, and ideally exceed, internal targets for sustainability progress in their own operations. 

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Accordingly, the financial services industry is facing a complex constellation of challenges, with hurdles between the current state and the gaining of comprehensive ESG data insights—against a backdrop of confusion and intense competition.  

But once firms begin their data transformation journey, they’re increasingly well set to leverage data technology to drive meaningful value, from creating audit-ready ESG products to harnessing AI for advanced risk modeling. 

Positioning ESG data as a driver 

Microsoft knows firsthand the value of integrating ESG data with financial, operational, and other enterprise data. Without a connected and systemic view, firms lack holistic insight into equities, loans, or insured assets, leading to a competitive disadvantage. 

As we’ve worked over the last two decades to untangle and solve challenges at Microsoft in support of our own ESG data estate—and to drive on our sustainability commitments—we’ve regularly turned to experts in the field and endeavored to share our learnings. In taking solutions forward to our global customer base, we’ve seen that for financial services firms, the development of a comprehensive ESG data estate can advance speed to market as well as credibility of products. For example, Robeco, a Dutch international asset management organization, can now perform daily data updates for all its sustainable investing solutions—staying laser-focused on returns, but with audit-ready confidence and ESG transparency.  

Priorities for financial organizations translate to inroads in the development of an ESG data estate. For example:  

• Advanced data integration: Develop more sophisticated tools and systems to integrate ESG data seamlessly along with quality governance to inform comprehensive analyses and outcomes. 
• Sustainable and ESG investing and lending: Use data analytics to better identify and expand portfolio-level ESG assessments for risk and performance management.  
• Responsible allocation of transition capital: Help corporate clients achieve their sustainable transition goals through data-driven decision making. 
• Carbon credit markets: Support carbon trading initiatives with robust data management systems for tracking and reporting credits and trading activities.  
• Risk modeling modernization: Leverage AI capabilities to enhance risk modeling practices used in underwriting, pricing, and loan assessments.  

High-value initial steps toward ESG data readiness 

Just like with data security, developing an ESG data estate in a financial services firm doesn’t happen in a single effort. Instead, your firm can benefit from taking a customized approach based on your current data state, regulations, and data governance policy, and desired outcomes as you identify opportunities. 

Depending on the maturity of your existing data infrastructure, your organization may want to consider starting within one, or a mix, of these areas: 

Data gathering

• Develop a plan for integrating ESG data into your portfolio’s due diligence and risk analysis.
• Standardize a process for collecting and updating ESG data—from both internal and external sources. 

Data modernization

• Leverage digital capabilities to deliver new financial products to market.
• Enhance financial data compliance, governance, and security. 

Data insights  

• Implement comprehensive ESG training for your customers to support effective analysis and decision-making, with industry-specific components.
• Develop an AI-powered data system for accelerated ESG analysis tailored to your clients’ needs.  

Data action  

• Develop advanced ESG data systems to pinpoint data gaps and data accuracy risks.
• Align your decision-making and strategy to complete and accurate data. 

Advancing your sustainability journey with Microsoft AI-powered solutions 

We see enormous potential for financial services firms to tackle risks and capitalize on opportunities driven by sustainability, for themselves and their clients, and we believe comprehensive, harmonized, accessible data is the key.  

With cloud-based data capabilities, including Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, Microsoft Fabric, and our AI-powered data solutions, we can help you shift from siloed data and labor-intensive processes to streamlined management that results in timely ESG insights and transparent reporting out to stakeholders—all with Microsoft security and governance. 

Once firms gain comprehensive management and insights into their ESG data, the potential for new and enhanced client services quickly follows. For example, United States-based economics research firm Moody’s leverages Microsoft Fabric solutions, AI-powered insights, and Microsoft Security to enable their 14,000 global employees to drive innovation for clients. In the United Kingdom, the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) selectively deploys generative AI to augment their existing work in Microsoft Fabric with custom chatbots and agents copilots.  

Empowering the financial services industry for sustainability success  

We know that for us to do well, our customers and the world must also do well. Our mission is to empower every individual and organization on the planet to achieve more, by building technology that can deliver business value to our customers, and positive impact to the world. 

Wherever you are in your sustainability journey, we’re here to partner with you—delivering continuous innovation from our solutions teams and our global ecosystem of partners, as we expand our ESG data readiness capabilities to help meet your unique needs in a world that is shifting quickly.  

Explore ESG readiness for other industries

• Retail and consumer goods: Unlocking business value with data-driven sustainability for retail and consumer goods
• Manufacturing: Data is driving a more sustainable industrial transformation

¹ PwC, ESG-focused institutional investment seen soaring 84% to US$33.9 trillion in 2026, making up 21.5% of assets under management: PwC report, October 2022. 

² Stanford Graduate School of Business, The ESG Generation Gap: Millennials and Boomers Split on Their Investing Goals,November 2022. 

The post ESG data readiness drives value for financial services firms appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

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. 

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Data and AI capabilities to help you transform for the future using environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data intelligence

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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 Sustainability Blog.

By holistically tracking, analyzing, and sharing information for each facet of their value chain, retail and CG companies can meet this moment while also addressing regulatory requirements—by turning challenges around ESG data infrastructure and organizational culture into an opportunity to build business resilience.  

Starting by understanding your current ESG data management can be a helpful first step: Assess your ESG data readiness.  

New opportunities require holistic, accessible ESG data  

Taking ESG data out of silos and into a unified, accessible system can help retail and CG companies identify and act on opportunities to advance sustainability goals. Eckes-Granini, Europe’s largest fruit juice producer, embraces this strategy by using Microsoft solutions to increase supply chain transparency. By adopting this objective, data-driven supplier management technology, now almost 70% of Eckes-Granini’s juice ingredients come from sustainable sources—putting the company on track to achieving their goal of using 100% sustainable ingredients by 2030.  

Key emerging areas where ESG data insights can help retail and CG companies drive sustainability and efficiencies include: 

• Circularity: Recycling, recommerce, and reusing or repurposing materials help companies reduce reliance on net-new or single-use materials, to help reduce waste and carbon emissions.
• Sustainable material sourcing: Integrating recycled and low carbon materials into operations and final packaged products helps companies minimize overall environmental impact.
• Increased transparency: Companies can improve brand recognition and loyalty by providing greater ESG transparency—which can also help identify new products or lines of business.
• Evolved supply chain: Data and AI-powered technologies can help streamline supply chain, reduce emissions, and minimize waste, while pinpointing ways to boost efficiency and decarbonization.

Today’s roadblocks and tomorrow’s benefits  

As discussed in Driving Business Value with ESG Data Readiness, creating a robust ESG data estate can strengthen business resilience, by enabling teams to make informed decisions as markets shift and opportunities evolve.  

For retail and CG companies, this capability supports decision-making as they explore sustainability improvements, from upgrading equipment to increase energy efficiency, to investing in new low-carbon or recycled materials. It can also help companies advance ESG data tracking in supplier regions where nascent reporting standards can impede transparency, consistency, or granularity of ESG information. 

Retail and CG companies can also collaborate across the value chain to share ESG data that helps unlock shared efficiencies, innovation, and greater trust. For example, by using Microsoft solutions to leverage integrated data analysis, sustainability-driven Radish—a food-delivery startup in Montreal—shares data insights with its restaurant partners to offset supply challenges, reduce food waste, and even access government assistance grants.   

Data that delivers more than reporting compliance  

Leveraging ESG data can also help retail and CG companies explore options such as AI-powered waste reduction, product recommerce services, or innovative, eco-friendly packaging and products. German cosmetics company Beiersdorf took this approach by using Microsoft solutions to build a simulation tool to assess scope 3 emissions for products and packaging, transitioning the company from emissions guesswork to objective insights.  

The power of ESG data insights is also boosting sustainability and improving decision-making for global bakery giant Gruppo Bimbo. The company adopted Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to centralize emissions data across its operations—helping the company advance toward its sustainability targets for 2025, 2030, and 2050. And the Netherlands’ leading supermarket chain, Albert Hejin, developed an AI-powered solution in partnership with Microsoft to reduce food waste by dynamically adjusting prices on near-expiration items.  

Make ESG data work for you

To help unlock the value of ESG data, retailers and CG companies can benefit from setting up strong data collection and management systems:  

• Bridge the data gap: By investing in technologies that integrate ESG data across operations, companies can collect accurate and actionable information from all aspects of the value chain.
• Build trust through governance: Ensuring data accuracy is essential for both regulatory compliance and strategic decision-making, requiring strong governance and control practices around ESG data.
• Embed ESG into the company culture: Training and engagement programs can help integrate sustainability into a company’s daily operations—from executive leadership to frontline workers. And by enriching data with value-added insights from other departments, combined with natural language querying, more teams are empowered to make sustainability-informed business decisions.  

Following these steps—and the framework in the Leader’s Guide to Sustainable Business Transformation—can help you use ESG data to drive long-term success beyond reporting requirements, according to your unique business priorities. For example, industry-leading businesses like electronics retailer Kotsovolos-Dixons used Microsoft Solutions to create digital twins of its stores, reducing waste and boosting operational efficiency by 50%. Additionally, one of the United Kingdom’s largest food sellers, Co-op Group, adopted our hybrid cloud services to reduce its datacenter footprint to save £400,000 annually. 

Sustainability creates success

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Data and AI capabilities to help you transform for the future using environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data intelligence

Start your journey

To stay competitive and in compliance, sustainability has become a necessity for the retail and CG industries. But starting with small steps works: ESG data can serve as the foundation for transformation, and help you advance no matter where you are in your sustainability journey.  

We’re ready to partner with you, to help you use AI-powered data technology and Internet of Things (IoT) to begin to accelerate your progress. The growing set of capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability are designed to help companies leverage ESG insights to report on and reduce environmental impacts while driving growth well into the future.  

To gain a view of your ESG data across key areas, as well as personalized guidance on how to drive sustainability progress and add business value, complete our readiness assessment.

Explore ESG readiness for other industries

• Manufacturing: Data is driving a more sustainable industrial transformation
• Financial services: ESG data readiness drives value for financial services firms

¹ McKinsey & Company, How to prepare for a sustainable future along the value chain, January 20, 2022.

² PWC, Integrated ESG Data in Retail: Why and How.

The post Unlocking business value with data-driven sustainability for retail and consumer goods appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

As we gather for Microsoft Ignite 2024, we invite you to explore the latest advancements in AI and discover how these innovations can transform your business. With AI-powered agents, organizations can analyze vast amounts of data, adapt to changing environments, and execute complex processes, bringing efficiency and intelligence to your operations. Whether it’s automating customer service interactions, optimizing supply chain logistics, enhancing personalized shopping experiences, or driving sustainability efforts, the potential applications are vast and impactful.

Join us on this journey to unlock the potential of AI and pave the way for a more intelligent, connected, and sustainable world. Together, let’s embrace the future of innovation and drive exceptional value for our customers.

Innovating with new adapted AI models and agents

Adapted AI models are transforming industries by enabling new applications and driving business outcomes such as increased accuracy, enhanced efficiency, better decision-making, and improved customer experiences. These models are designed to meet specific industry needs and tasks, addressing unique challenges more accurately and effectively. By using customized AI for their needs, organizations can enhance their digital presence, improve customer engagement, and streamline operations. With a focus on trustworthy AI, which includes safety, security, and privacy, our AI solutions adhere to high standards of integrity and responsibility, offering a secure approach to advancing industry capabilities. These adapted AI models enable the creation of custom AI solutions within Azure AI Studio and can also be used to configure agents for specific industry scenarios in Microsoft Copilot Studio scenarios. 

We are collaborating with several partners across multiple industries on these adapted and fine-tuned AI models, which are available through the Azure AI model catalog, empowering organizations to build custom AI solutions to address their most pressing needs. Bayer, for instance, offers the E.L.Y. Crop Protection model to enhance sustainable crop protection in the agriculture sector. Cerence provides the CaLLM™ Edge model for in-vehicle digital assistant technology, while Rockwell Automation’s FT Optix Food & Beverage model supports asset troubleshooting in manufacturing. Saifr introduces models for regulatory compliance in financial institutions, and Siemens Digital Industries Software offers a copilot for NX X software leveraging an industry model to optimize the design process. Sight Machine’s Factory Namespace Manager standardizes factory data for AI readiness, and open-source models from Hugging Face are available for summarization and sentiment analysis of financial data. 

Microsoft also provides AI agents designed for various industry scenarios through Copilot Studio. These agents can be customized to meet the specific needs of different organizations. For example, retailers can use the Store Operations Agent to assist store associates, and manufacturers can utilize the Factory Operations Agent to enhance production efficiency. The new release of Agent Builder (preview) in Copilot Studio enables users to create agents directly in Business Chat and SharePoint by defining the agent’s purpose, configuring its knowledge base, and setting up starter prompts. With a user-friendly design requiring only low-code skills, Agent Builder allows integration of diverse data sources to customize agents with industry-specific knowledge and capabilities, improving their effectiveness in addressing key use cases for each industry. 

To learn more about the new adaptive AI models for Industry that are available in Azure AI model catalogue and directly through our partners, visit Azure AI model catalog.

Financial services

Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services are leading the generative AI revolution in financial services, empowering industry professionals to securely and easily incorporate rich industry data and specialty data sets into their everyday activities while providing enhanced security and compliance at the same time. Microsoft has dedicated itself to generating strong partner momentum across the financial services space, including through creating and offering the tools Microsoft partners need to drive innovation, mutual growth, and success both now and as the capabilities of generative AI continue to evolve. LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group), among others, has already built pioneering new solutions aligned to this initiative.

Built in collaboration with LSEG, Financial Meeting Prep (see the recent announcement using the preview name, Meeting Prep for Financial Services) aims to streamline client meeting preparation for investment banking professionals. Combining LSEG Workspace, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, the solution will consolidate important data, introduce organization-specific insights, easily refresh content as new data becomes available, and enhance relationship manager productivity and decision-making. General availability of Financial Meeting Prep is expected by the end of 2024.

Financial Insights Agent in Copilot Studio

Gathering insights from online sources and proprietary financial documents is crucial for making investment decisions, strategizing, and conducting assessments. However, finding the right data can be time-consuming for financial services professionals, and reviewing the vast amounts of relevant information is nearly impossible.

With the Financial Insights Agent, now available in Copilot Studio, financial services professionals can quickly and easily gather information from financial news and regulatory reporting websites. And because this agent comes ready-made and is easily customized agent, you don’t need advanced development skills to get started.

The Financial Insights Agent gives high-quality results and works best when integrated with the financial document analysis skill for agents (preview), available in Azure Marketplace, which makes it possible for users to gain info and insights from financial documents provided by their organization, such as analyst reports and other complex financial documents that are stored in-house—even when the data is found in complex financial tables, graphs, or charts. This skill not only works with the Financial Insights Agent, but it can also be integrated into custom agents. For example, Reflexivity has been integral in helping Microsoft understand challenges in the industry. Within their own platform, they use this skill for certain document flows, helping financial services professionals derive insights from both structured and unstructured data more efficiently so they can make informed decisions faster.

Financial Services landing zones

Microsoft has recently developed and is now ready to introduce a new Financial Services landing zone. Based on the Azure landing zone—a secure, scalable cloud foundation tailored for compliance needs—the Financial Services landing zone is an infrastructure-as-code solution that provides the baseline governance, resilience, security, automation, and prescriptive guidance that Microsoft industry partners and other financial services organizations need in order to comply with the industry’s strict, mission-critical regulations. As the Financial Services landing zone also provides financial services organizations of all kinds a robust and compliant cloud environment, the solution represents a powerful means to accelerate digital transformation initiatives.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry is experiencing a dynamic transformation, with opportunities for growth and innovation despite challenges like economic uncertainty and supply chain disruptions. Microsoft and its partners are at the forefront of this evolution, empowering manufacturers with cutting-edge solutions that help enable intelligent factories, resilient supply chains, and enhanced customer experiences.

Manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

During Hannover Messe 2024, we announced the preview of manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric. This solution integrates operational technology (OT) data, with information technology (IT) data, creating a comprehensive data foundation structured according to the ISA-95 information model.¹ This standardized approach enables manufacturers to break down data silos, enabling cross-domain insights, streamlined processes, and data-driven decision-making. Partner solutions from Sight Machine, Litmus, and Avanade further enhance these capabilities.

Sight Machine Factory Copilot on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing transforms your manufacturing execution systems (MES) data into the ISA-95 standard for consumption in manufacturing data solutions in Fabric, which can be surfaced through factory agent experiences to help address operational issues on the factory floor.

Litmus Edge Manager enables a robust hybrid edge-to-cloud infrastructure, streamlining real-time machine dashboards and facilitating advanced machine learning. Litmus and the manufacturing data solutions in Fabric unlocks unprecedented efficiency and innovation, seamlessly bridging the gap between edge and cloud.

Learn how to get started with manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and Factory Operations Agent.

Factory Operations Agent in Microsoft Azure AI

We’re excited to announce the public preview of the Factory Operations Agent in Azure AI, which empowers manufacturers to develop customized, AI-powered agents for frontline workers. These intelligent assistants leverage natural language processing and retrieval-augmented generation, making complex data analytics accessible for scenarios like root cause analysis, production loss reduction, continuous improvement, and asset maintenance. With the Factory Operations Agent, factory teams can intuitively interact with data, receive timely insights, and resolve issues more efficiently—ultimately enhancing productivity and empowering the workforce to drive operational excellence.

Avanade Manufacturing Copilot, powered by manufacturing data solutions in Fabric, helps customers to overcome OT-IT data accessibility and utilization challenges and leverage AI at-scale to make higher-quality products faster with less waste.

Learn how to get started with Factory Operations Agent in Azure AI (preview).

Factory Safety Agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio

The new Factory Safety Agent in Copilot Studio (preview) is focused on workplace safety. Factory Safety Agent provides organizations with a low code option to quickly develop a customized agent, grounded in occupational health and safety data. Whether using publicly available standards like Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or specific protocols of the organization, this agent can provide critical safety information, insights to factory workers, and streamline critical activities such as safety inspections or incident reporting to reduce risks and ultimately accidents.

Retail

As the retail industry adapts to new customer expectations and competitive pressures, Microsoft and its partners are providing tools for retailers that offer real-time insights, enhance customer engagement, and drive digital innovation.

Retail Data Solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Retail Data Solutions in Microsoft Fabric help retailers unify and standardize their data. This platform enables customers to integrate data from different systems and offers ready-to-use agents to speed up AI transformations. Currently in public preview, it includes four customizable features for retail:

• Retail Industry Data Model: Plan and design data solutions for governance, reporting, business intelligence, and analytics.
• Frequently Bought Together: Use insights to enhance upselling, shelf optimization, and store efficiency.
• Sitecore OrderCloud Connector: Standardize commerce data from Sitecore OrderCloud to gain actionable insights.
• Personalized Shopping Agent: Improve shopping experiences with tailored customer conversations.

Personalized Shopping Agent

The Personalized Shopping Agent can engage in natural language conversations to understand and respond to shoppers’ needs. It provides tailored recommendations based on the shopper’s specific requirements and preferences. Additionally, it can handle specific requests, such as finding matching items or suggesting outfits for specific occasions. The agent leverages Retail Data Solutions, using aggregated product catalogs, and AI orchestration tools to provide accurate and contextually relevant answers.   

Store Operations Agent

The Store Operations Agent revolutionizes how store associates handle daily tasks with its headless architecture that integrates into applications or websites. It offers ready-to-deploy plugins for:

• Product search or inventory search: Real-time access to product details and stock.
• Order details: Tracks order information down to the line level.
• Incident management: Resolves incidents using Copilot and ServiceNow.
• Task management: Integrates directly with tasking apps.
• Omni channel access: Provides natural language access to current prices, promotions, and information.

The agent integrates seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Commerce, and ServiceNow. These integrations can extend to other enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and applications with pre-built connectors and APIs. These features are continually updated, adding more plugins to help partners scale operations.

Partners can also utilize the Store Operations Agent alongside their own solutions to accelerate customer adoption. Accenture Avanade has launched a Clienteling copilot, which has Store Operations Agent embedded and assists store associates in managing daily tasks efficiently. It also offers a natural language query interface for store policies and procedures, enabling informed decision-making for store associates and managers.

Public sector

Microsoft is leading the way in helping government and regulated organizations address their compliance, security, and data sovereignty requirements while adopting modern digital technologies. With initiatives like Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty and generative AI, Microsoft offers comprehensive solutions tailored to diverse regulatory landscapes, enabling organizations to streamline their compliance processes and enhance their digital capabilities.

Citizen Services agent

Available in Copilot Studio, Citizen Services agent allows public sector organizations to create AI-powered agents using their public websites and information. The agent helps citizens navigate government services and information through a Q&A experience, providing answers from configured knowledge bases, such as responses about city plans, road closures, or service applications, offering citizens access to up-to-date information.

Get started with the Citizen Services agent in Copilot Studio.

Regulated Environment Management

Regulated Environment Management (REM) in Azure, currently in private preview, supports cloud adoption as part of Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty. REM simplifies the configuration, deployment and management of regulated environments through landing zones, policy and drift analysis. Starting November 2024, REM will shift to a subscription-level service, offering benefits like data isolation, regional boundaries, and group management of landing zone configurations. Transparency logs and the Landing Zone Account (LZA) simplify managing configurations and provide data residency. REM also includes a REST API for easier integration.

Request access in the REM private preview.  

Sustainability

With growing demands for disclosure requirements under regulatory directives like the European Union Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the pursuit of impactful initiatives such as decarbonization, and the increasing need for transparency in corporate sustainability claims, businesses are under pressure to demonstrate genuine commitment to sustainability. To address these challenges, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is introducing Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and enhanced reporting in Microsoft Sustainability Manager.

Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Now generally available, Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric enables customers to unify environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data with organizational data, fostering innovation, process changes, and simplified reporting. With Microsoft Fabric, businesses can create a standardized sustainability data lake for their ESG needs. Features include an extensible ESG data schema, pre-built notebooks for data transformations, data pipelines for various business systems (including Microsoft Sustainability Manager), and built-in dashboards for analyzing ESG topics.

OneLake in Fabric allows businesses to enhance sustainability by building analytical insights with AI and machine learning models and using Copilot agents for autonomous workflows. Learn more about Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric.

Partners like UST Global use Sustainability data solutions in Fabric to develop flexible ESG systems of record that align with sustainability goals. Leveraging Microsoft Fabric, they craft customizable solutions for unique ESG challenges and adapt as requirements evolve.

Sustainability data solutions in Fabric offers tools to manage ESG data complexities, improve data integration and accuracy, provide real-time insights, and support compliance. This platform helps meet regulatory and stakeholder expectations and drives effective sustainability efforts across organizations.

External reporting in Microsoft Sustainability Manager

Also in general availability, the new external reporting capabilities in Microsoft Sustainability Manager (formerly Project ESG Reporting) simplifies external reporting across various standards with AI-powered insights and recommendations, making it easier for organizations to prepare and manage disclosure reports. Users can seamlessly connect, organize, review, and report data according to global standards.

Whether used as a standalone solution through the Power Platform gallery or integrated within Microsoft Sustainability Manager, it supports custom frameworks, iXBRL compatibility through partners, and offers a workflow user interface (UI) for editing and approvals. These new capabilities reduce the complexities of compliance, helping businesses stay on top of their sustainability reporting.

Using Copilot Studio with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Copilot Studio is a key part of the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability toolkit, helping users create customized agents to meet sustainability and compliance goals. As compliance standards change, Copilot Studio uses large language models (LLM) to help organizations adapt quickly. It offers pre-built connectors for easy data integration, reducing the time and effort needed to manage diverse data sources and focus on actionable insights. Current features include the Sustainability Insights Agent for interacting with sustainability reports, with upcoming agents for estimating European Union Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) costs and setting goals. This tool, combined with our network of partners, helps organizations achieve their ESG goals by unifying data intelligence and streamlining sustainability management.

Shaping the future with AI

Join us on this journey to unlock the potential of AI and pave the way for a more intelligent, connected, and sustainable world. Together, let’s embrace the future of innovation and drive exceptional value for our customers. By leveraging the latest advancements in AI, we can transform industries, enhance productivity, and create meaningful experiences for everyone. Whether it’s through automating routine tasks, optimizing operations, or providing personalized services, the possibilities are endless. Let’s work together to harness the power of AI and make a lasting impact on our businesses and communities. 

Watch the Ignite 2024 sessions

Watch Accelerating industry partner growth in the age of AI with Kathleen Mitford and Satish Thomas and Delivering adapted AI models for industries with partners.

Financial Services

• Accelerate AI Innovation with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services 
• Empowering the financial services partner ecosystem with Generative AI

Manufacturing

• Democratize data-driven decision making across factory operations with AI

Retail

• Elevate the retail experience with the Personalized Shopping Agent 
• Empower the retail workforce with the Store Operations Agent 

Public Sector

• Accelerate Cloud Adoption with Software-Defined Sovereignty 
• Collaborating with partners for digital sovereignty in the cloud 
• Deploying AI with Sovereign controls

Sustainability

• Accelerating ESG progress with sustainability data solutions in Fabric 
• Sustainability reduction and calculation compliance simplified with Copilot Studio and Microsoft Sustainability Manager 
• Building solution practices for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability 
• Implementation best practices for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability 

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¹ https://www.isa.org/standards-and-publications/isa-standards/isa-95-standard

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Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Record, report, and reduce your environmental impacts using the power of data and AI.

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Tighten your emissions goals with what-if analysis—now generally available

Conducting what-if analysis in Sustainability Manager allows organizations to evaluate their current carbon emission trends against the projected effects of altering variables within their business practices. Put simply, companies can intelligently forecast the long-term effects of altering their practices on their emissions footprint. With this GA release, the what-if analysis capability is enhanced to help businesses advance toward their objectives more quickly.  

Organizations can now extend their forecast horizons longer, based on the amount of historical data incorporated, by utilizing the what-if analysis feature. Typically, the forecast horizon spans about half the duration of the historical data used. An organization with four years of historical data, for example, can expect to see a forecast of up to two years. This allows businesses to create more informed and strategic plans for reducing their carbon footprint. By estimating the long-term effects of different emission reduction strategies, companies can help identify actions to take toward meeting reporting requirements and enhancing their progress toward goals.  

With increased customizability, organizations can select specific fields to manipulate within forecasts, rather than being restricted to the default fields available in earlier versions. Fields can also be layered together to enable the prediction and comparison of different reduction strategies’ outcomes in a single view. Up to three forecasts can be layered to help identify optimal reduction opportunities. 

Figure 1. Customizable what-if analysis allows users to alter variables to deliver more precise insights. 

With customizable what-if analysis, organizations ultimately enable greater precision and flexibility in their sustainability efforts. They can make more informed decisions, tailored to specific needs and goals, and drive more targeted progress toward reporting and long-term sustainability objectives. Moreover, through intelligent forecasting, they can preempt potential issues and sharpen strategic planning to help save time and resources. 

Figure 2. With layered forecasting, organizations can estimate and compare the outcomes of different reduction strategies in a single view. 

Strengthen analysis and decision-making with intelligent insights

Building on the predictive capabilities of what-if analysis, intelligent insights in Microsoft Sustainability Manager further assists decision-making by enabling deep, AI-driven data analysis and actionable insights. The intelligent insights capability, also now generally available, helps organizations analyze complex data patterns and drive meaning from data to make more informed decisions. This feature helps identify data trends and gaps as well as hidden opportunities for efficiency, allowing businesses to optimize costs, form targeted strategies, and make better progress. 

Used with what-if analysis to simulate different scenarios, businesses can assess the potential impact of various decisions, evaluate the outcomes of different strategies before implementation, and understand potential risks and benefits. As a result, businesses can plan more effectively and avoid potential pitfalls. 

Overall, the intelligent insights capability provides businesses with a competitive edge by enabling them to make smarter, more data-driven decisions. By leveraging AI to help analyze complex data patterns, businesses can uncover valuable insights that drive better outcomes and support long-term success. Whether it’s optimizing operations, accelerating sustainability progress, or responding to market expectations, intelligent insights offer a wealth of benefits that can help transform the way businesses operate.

Tackle multiple reporting standards with Project ESG Reporting

Project ESG Reporting (preview) offers a collection of templates, frameworks, and directives that can be populated and reused for future reports, helping organizations streamline the reporting process. These tools are designed to support organizations in their sustainability reporting journeys, making it easier to track progress, identify areas for improvement, and communicate their sustainability efforts effectively. 

New SASB templates (preview) enable drafting responses to Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) Standards across a wide array of industries. Overseen by the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), SASB Standards facilitate reporting on industry-related sustainability risks and opportunities over short, medium, or long terms, across 77 industries. Get more information about the templates for SASB and other standards. 

Figure 3. Organizations can streamline the reporting process for SASB and other standards, using Project ESG Reporting (preview). 

Improve greenhouse gas calculations with DEFRA emission factors

Microsoft Sustainability Manager also now includes Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) 2023 and 2024 emission factors in the factor library. With DEFRA factors, organizations can calculate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from a range of activities, including energy use, water consumption, waste disposal, recycling, and transport activities.

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 Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability: Drive specific reduction and reporting targets with AI appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

Now, we’re sharing additional learnings—from our efforts and those of our global ecosystem of partners and customers, and from advice we’ve received from external sustainability experts—in the Leader’s Guide to Sustainable Business Transformation. The guide offers practical tips to help business leaders consider what steps can help their organizations build a culture and infrastructure around ESG data, and provides context for taking the Microsoft ESG Data Readiness Assessment.

For quick examples of industry-specific considerations addressed in the guide, see the chart below.

ESG Data Readiness Assessment

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Leveraging the Leader’s Guide

When we began our own sustainability journey, we learned that to make progress on our ESG goals we had to bring sustainability out of siloed reporting efforts and into the core of our business. The Leader’s Guide discusses approaches to this operational shift, including ways to facilitate cross-functional conversations within your organization around the value of harnessing ESG data.

The guide also shows how Microsoft customers in different industries are using sustainability solutions to transform their operations. For example, international forestry group Södra had been limited to a labor-intensive process—siloed within its sustainability unit—to answer routine inquiries about its environmental data. Since collaborating to adopt Microsoft Sustainability Manager in 2023, Södra’s IT and sustainability teams have been generating significant insights for stakeholders, including the organization’s estimate that its positive climate impact is equal to about one-fifth of Sweden’s reported carbon dioxide emissions.

We’re ready to partner with your organization so you can also use ESG data to uncover operational insights to support your sustainability progress.

How ESG data supports business resilience

As organizations worldwide try to predict and prepare for emerging ESG disclosure requirements, they also need to respond to expanding market expectations. Investors, consumers, and shareholders are tracking companies’ sustainability commitments, and they’re looking for products and solutions that champion those commitments.

Our customer King Steel, a Taiwan-based global shoe manufacturer, faced this situation when major brands like Nike and Adidas began expecting sustainable and recyclable products. To align with its customers, King Steel started collecting and digitizing its ESG data using Dynamics 365 and capabilities within Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. This shift to a digitized data estate not only enabled King Steel to deliver transparent data to demanding customers, it also helped the company uncover insights into materials and operations that resulted in more sustainable production, reduction of waste, and innovation of new customizable products.

By implementing a robust ESG data infrastructure, your organization can also respond to sustainability-driven market demands with speed and insights.

From commitments to solutions

Early in our journey, we quickly realized our environmental commitments necessitated better tools to manage the increasing number, size, and complexity of our ESG datasets. We also needed to unify siloed data and ensure traceability and transparency—to execute our plan to publicly self-disclose our ESG progress, and to prepare for the evolution of sustainability reporting requirements. Simultaneously, we wanted to use our ESG data to identify opportunities to drive sustainability efficiencies and business growth.

This led us to Microsoft Fabric and AI tools built on Microsoft Azure. By adopting these capabilities, we’ve now integrated our ESG, operational, and financial data, empowering our employees to access timely data intelligence so they can contribute ideas and innovate.

But to meet our ambitious sustainability commitments, we must also drive change across our value chain. In 2023, we estimated that 75% or more of our carbon footprint was coming from indirect, or Scope 3 emissions, which organizations accrue from suppliers. To address this, the Microsoft Procurement team needed customized ESG inquiries, granular data, and flexible, collaborative reporting. The team partnered with Microsoft engineers to add new capabilities to our data technologies, including low-code customization and self-service features to help our value-chain partners find ways to reduce their environmental impact.

Then we carried these robust solutions forward to our customers, so organizations like US farming powerhouse Land O’Lakes can access their ESG data for day-to-day decision-making. For example, the company relies on Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to collect and unify data on weather, soil, and irrigation—freeing Land O’Lakes data scientists to help optimize planting decisions. The Azure-based ESG data infrastructure also boosts the Land O’Lakes competitive stance by providing consumers with visibility into the organization’s farming practices and environmental outcomes.

Exploring industry-specific considerations

With the right tools, ESG data can support each industry’s unique set of goals, challenges, and opportunities.

Here’s a look at some of the issues our Leader’s Guide and ESG Assessment can help you start exploring:

Visit the Leader’s Guide for in-depth information and resources.

Next steps

As you rethink operations to support your organization’s sustainability progress, we’re ready to share our learnings and continuous innovation to help advance your ESG priorities, accelerate your growth, and partner for a shared sustainable future.

Dive deeper into ESG data readiness strategies for your industry:

• Retail and consumer goods
• Financial services
• Manufacturing

The post Driving business value with ESG data readiness appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

In this blog, we explore the capabilities of this management tool and how it helps simplify reporting on multiple levels. Features include a variety of user-friendly templates, workflow management, and extensibility that accelerate the reporting process and boost accuracy. In addition, we look at a new data trail capability in Microsoft Sustainability Manager that improves transparency in data flow and an alternate emissions feature that helps people accurately quantify emissions. Lastly, for game creators, we revisit the Xbox Developer Sustainability Toolkit, released in 2023, to see how it is helping pinpoint and reduce energy usage for gamers. 

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Simplify the complexities of ESG disclosure

ESG disclosure reporting can be a complex and challenging process for companies. For example, there is no global standardization in ESG reporting, which makes it difficult to know what metrics to report and how to structure disclosures. Organizations are facing challenges as they aim to report against numerous voluntary and regulatory reporting frameworks.  

Project ESG reporting (preview) solves these challenges by enabling customers to create, complete, and approve reports based on multiple ESG disclosure standards across quantitative and qualitative metrics. The solution offers templates, frameworks, and directives that can be populated and subsequently re-used for future reports, reducing the overall reporting process for years to come. The templates can be customized with flexible data input options—from numeric to rich text—to build a comprehensive report and provide accurate insight into an organization’s ESG performance. Customers also have the option to bring in their own templates. Additionally, they can use collaboration and approval workflows to enhance data quality and consistency.  

The solution focuses on multiple areas that simplify the challenges inherent in reporting, across industries. This includes reducing complexity, enhancing efficiency, and providing greater transparency.

Key features include:   

1. Variety of standard templates. To save our customers time and effort, we included a range of ESG standard and framework templates:
   • 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  
   • Numerous Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) templates 
2. Microsoft Sustainability Manager integration for company profile and CSRD data points  
3. Workflow UI for task management and content approval   
4. Disclosure generation in Excel  
5. Extensibility for custom template creation

Explore our collaborative end-to-end ESG reporting solution.

Follow the workflow of data with Microsoft Sustainability Manager to make better decisions

Sustainability data helps company leaders make informed decisions about sustainability with their apps. To maximize the value of that data, we’ve given Microsoft Sustainability Manager data trail capabilities. This feature covers the entire data lifecycle—from ingestion to reconciliation—providing a complete representation of the data flow. Capabilities include a comprehensive preparation report providing the data trail across different time periods and organizational hierarchies. 

Features include: 

• Understanding how data moves and changes in the app (such as who is responsible for the data, data quality, and the outcome of using data) 
• Visibility into each stage of the data journey, delivering a clear, end-to-end view of sustainability in data flow, transformations, and calculations
• Streamlining data access, traceability, and auditability  

Having a data trail helps companies more easily handle the constantly changing regulatory requirements for data traceability and auditability. For auditors, investors, and stakeholders, it also builds trust. 

Learn more about generating a data trail report.

Create separate emissions versions specific to reporting standards or accounting methods

The regulatory landscape is complicated and continues to evolve. The alternate emissions feature in the Microsoft Sustainability Manager calculations engine empowers customers to accurately quantify their emissions using diverse calculation methodologies. The tool generates alternative emission reports tailored to the requirements of different regulatory bodies or regional reporting standards. Users leverage the same activity data, tailoring emission calculations to specific emission scopes and classifications. This can enhance operational efficiency and mitigate risks associated with non-compliance or inaccurate reporting.

The feature’s flexibility simplifies maintaining compliance with regional or industry-specific reporting standards and variations and ever-evolving regulations. Users can configure multiple emission calculation methodologies for each emission category (Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3) and its underlying activity data. That includes the ability to choose destination or classification of emissions along with the output activity category within the calculation model. Such capabilities enable the generation of parallel emission reports for different regulatory bodies, regional standards, and customer requests. Users will also be able to filter emission records based on approach or calculation methodology and visualize the alternate results according to methodology or purpose.  

Learn more about calculating emissions for different standards (preview).

Get the latest factor library updates 

Microsoft Sustainability Manager has added new emission factors to the factor library that you can seamlessly import. They are: 

• National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) database: Microsoft Sustainability Manager integrates with the NGER database, enabling users to access accurate and up-to-date emission factors. These factors are essential for calculating greenhouse gas emissions associated with various activities, products, and processes.  

• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) factors for 2024: The EPA regularly updates emission factors based on scientific research and industry trends. Microsoft Sustainability Manager has automatically incorporated the latest EPA factors for 2024, ensuring accuracy and compliance with regulatory standards. 

Encourage game creators to create sustainability goals

Reducing the impact of gaming on the environment requires a collaborative effort. Working closely with studio partners, we’ve done that with the Xbox Sustainability Toolkit. To date, we’ve already seen great success with games like Halo Infinite, Fortnite, and Call of Duty.  

Our game creator stories show that identifying and implementing energy efficiency opportunities in game development doesn’t have to be expensive or time intensive. The results can reduce console energy consumption, carbon emissions, and in-home electricity costs for gamers. The energy optimizations help game creators achieve sustainability goals without disrupting players. Visit Microsoft Game Dev Docs to learn more about our partner collaborations and the toolkit.  

We’ll continue to add to the Xbox Sustainability Toolkit as we expand our number of studio partners. We’ll also continue to contribute and participate in the United Nations Playing for the Planet Alliance to support sustainable game design.  

To learn more, visit Gaming Sustainability. 

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 Streamline ESG disclosures with new and expanded reporting solutions appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

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In this blog, we explain how creating scorecards and goals empowers you to curate sustainability metrics and track against your organization’s key business objectives. We also share other recent updates to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability designed to help you manage, track, report, and gain better insight into your sustainability data. 

Use scorecards and goals to achieve your sustainability objectives

Sustainability reporting can be a complex process. Sustainability Manager includes a new capability that simplifies the process, making it more accessible and manageable for you to communicate your organization’s sustainability achievements. With scorecards and goals, you can curate your organization’s sustainability metrics and track them against your organization’s business objectives. 

Create a scorecard, which you can use to chart your organization’s sustainability metrics, encapsulate them within a scorecard, and designate an owner to guide its advancement. 

Create goals, the benchmark of your organization’s sustainability trajectory, which can be seamlessly integrated with the scorecards. These goals, whether entered manually or derived from interconnected data streams, provide a dynamic framework for sustainability targets, adaptable to the shifting tides of your organization’s needs. 

Using the scorecards and goals feature, you can mark goals as aligning to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), giving your organization the ability to highlight the scientific rigor and global recognition of its sustainability efforts. By including a baseline year, the goal-setting process deepens, offering a historical perspective from which you can measure and assess progress. Finally, the dual capability of manual updates or automated system tracking enables you to not only set but actively pursue and achieve your organization’s sustainability goals.  

The scorecards and goals capability transcends the mere establishment of targets, fostering a culture of engagement and accountability. It provides a centralized platform for setting, monitoring, and updating sustainability goals, which is crucial for accurate disclosure reporting. With the ability to connect goals to data sources, you can ensure that your organization’s reporting is data-driven and reflects real-time progress towards its sustainability targets. This feature simplifies the complex process of sustainability reporting, making it more accessible and manageable for organizations of all sizes to communicate their sustainability achievements transparently to stakeholders.  

Calculate emissions using IEA factors within Sustainability Manager 

Multinational organizations can now calculate emissions using International Energy Agency (IEA) emission factors within Sustainability Manager, with some restrictions as governed by IEA. Using the IEA factors can help you understand your organization’s carbon footprint and develop strategies to reduce emissions, as well as help with regulatory compliance, risk management, and cost reduction. 

The IEA factors library is available to download from Microsoft Cloud Solution Center. The IEA emission factors are available to use alongside all other emission factor libraries within Sustainability Manager. This feature is available within Sustainability Manager Premium.

Learn how to calculate emissions with the IEA emissions feature. 

Create and associate meter entities with a facility within Sustainability Manager 

For Scope 1 and Scope 2 emission categories, customers collect utility consumption data from utility providers through bills and, in some cases, through real-time devices like meters. The consumption reported in utility bills and real-time devices are recorded through utility meters (per collection device configuration). 

Now deprecated, Sustainability Manager previously included an optional meter text attribute for purchased energy and stationary combustion. However, since the consumption is recorded at a facility level and the meter is the device used to record this consumption for each facility, the meter must be associated with a facility within Sustainability Manager. 

You can now create and associate multiple utility meters (entities) with the facility entity in Sustainability Manager. This will enable you to track and report energy consumption for emissions calculations, as well as water usage at a facility level within your organization. 

Note that reports by meter is a future enhancement. In the meantime, you can use custom reports to add meter-based pivot views. 

Transfer data connections across deployments 

Sustainability Manger includes advanced ingestion capabilities. A connection is made of several parts:   

• The data source connectivity specifications  
• Mode of ingestion such as Power Query, Excel, or from a custom data provider  
• Mapping of source shape to the Sustainability Manager data model  
• Execution context, such as scheduling  

Enterprises need repeatable, verifiable processes across deployments; so, once a connection is specified, it can be transferred across deployments or environments. Now, environment administrators can use application lifecycle management (ALM) with Microsoft Power Platform to transfer connections across environments.   

Learn more about how to copy connections from one environment to another. 

Gain insights into your organization’s sustainability progress with Microsoft Copilot Studio templates 

The Sustainability Insights Copilot template (preview) was recently added to Copilot Studio. The template enables you to get insights and see data about your organization’s sustainability goals and progress and can be tailored to suit your organization’s specific needs. Information can be publicly shared in the form of reports, documents, and records. For example, a company’s sales and marketing professionals might be required to respond to queries from customers about the company’s sustainability progress on various sustainability fronts like measuring across environmental metrics, social and governance stats and indexes, energy meters, pollution indexes, and biodiversity impact.  

You can create and deploy a Sustainability Insights Copilot template as you would for any other Copilot template in Copilot Studio. 

Once deployed, your copilot is ready to field questions.  

You can configure the template with more sources of knowledge and other system of records, leveraging connectors to respond to related queries better.  

Enhanced Scope 3 categories now generally available in Sustainability Manager 

We’re excited to announce that Sustainability Manager has successfully completed the verification process for several Scope 3 categories of the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol. The following categories are now generally available:  

• Category 3: Fuel-and energy-related activities  
• Category 10: Processing of sold products  
• Category 11: Use of sold products  
• Category 14: Franchises  
• Category 15: Investments 

This update spans across various features, including import, activity data, calculations, and documentation, ensuring a seamless user experience.  

The verification process was comprehensive, involving a rigorous assessment and validation of data, methodologies, and calculations related to these Scope 3 categories. Independent experts conducted a thorough review to ensure accuracy, consistency, and compliance with industry standards.  

We’re committed to providing you with reliable and transparent tools to manage your sustainability efforts. The general availability of these enhanced Scope 3 categories marks a significant milestone in our journey towards empowering organizations to achieve their environmental goals. 

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 June 2024.

Want to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability? Sign up for news and updates. 

The post Simplify reporting with real-time insight into your sustainability progress appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

To address this growing need, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview) can help organizations take sustainability data in any format, organize, and normalize the data for sustainability regulatory reporting. This quantitative data reporting approach is complemented by a joint solution from Accenture and Avanade that leverages generative AI to provide qualitative insights. This enables organizations to manage workflows associated with multiple sustainability reporting frameworks globally, including CSRD, Global Report Initiative (GRI), and the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). Organizations can optimize both quantitative data from Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solutions and qualitative data with Accenture and Avanade’s generative AI-powered solution. 

The solution integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Sustainability Manager, offering a comprehensive platform for managing sustainability key performance indicators (KPIs) across different frameworks. The solution’s collaborative features, generative AI-enhanced insights, and streamlined data integration can help organizations simplify compliance-related processes. Meanwhile, the improved richness of its sustainability reporting enables organizations to take more effective actions to achieve their ESG targets.  

Sustainability data solutions in Fabric

Unique capabilities that provide prebuilt and preconfigured Fabric resources

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Navigate the complexities of reporting frameworks

All ESG reporting frameworks carry their own complexities. However, the CSRD has been top of mind in 2024 for organizations in and outside of the European Union as they begin to gather, analyze, and report the required data. This is no simple task—the CSRD encompasses 12 standards and 82 reporting requirements, which amounts to approximately 500 KPIs and over 10,000 underlying data points. In addition to managing this large array of ESG data, companies face other significant challenges associated with CSRD compliance and data management including reporting on the entire value chain versus only on their own organization. The evolving nature of sustainability criteria and metrics further complicates the reporting process. 

Navigating the intricacies of a multitude of reporting frameworks and intricate regulations necessitates extensive data gathering and assimilation. The process of ESG reporting often engages various departments and resources within an organization, introducing its own set of risks and costs. The more manual a process, the more opportunities there are for errors to occur, and the complexities of each reporting framework require time, diligence, and accuracy. A proficient solution can help simplify the process and effectively aid in the generation of accurate reports with fewer resources required. 

Accenture and Avanade’s generative AI-powered solution allows users to select from different reporting frameworks and adapts to the specific requirements of the chosen framework, displaying relevant categories and reporting structures. Users can access the breadth and depth of their data and translate it into the necessary reporting frameworks. This flexibility is crucial for organizations that are subject to multiple reporting obligations or need to adhere to international standards beyond local mandates. 

Streamlining data management using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service

Accenture and Avanade’s solution addresses the dual challenges of qualitative and quantitative data in sustainability reporting, utilizing Azure OpenAI for enhancing its reporting capabilities, especially for qualitative data input. Using Azure OpenAI to create an AI assistant, Accenture and Avanade’s solution offers a unified platform for sustainability reporting, simplifying the process of compiling CSRD reports, making it easier for users to interact with data and generate reports quickly.  

• Qualitative data management: Leveraging Azure OpenAI integration, Accenture and Avanade’s solution assists in drafting responses to qualitative questions, such as detailing a company’s sustainability policies, practices, and goals. This AI assistant ensures that responses are not only in keeping with reporting standards but also reflective of best practices and forward-thinking sustainability strategies.  
• Quantitative data management: The integration of Microsoft Sustainability Manager allows for the automatic import of calculated quantitative metrics. This means that insights or recommendations provided by Accenture and Avanade’s solution is informed by the data in the user’s ESG platform. The AI assistant enables identification of trends and patterns in both qualitative and quantitative data sources, aiding in a more holistic analysis.   

An enhanced collaborative workflow  

One of the biggest pain points that companies have related to ESG reporting is managing the approval workflow with multiple process and approval steps. It’s important to have a trail of accountability, which depending on organization size, can exist across several departments and users. Accenture and Avanade’s solution enables organizations to assign responsibility and accountability, thereby streamlining the process of preparing the report and its associated approval processes.   

Importantly, team members can work on the same sections of the report simultaneously and the platform maintains comprehensive audit trails of all changes made to the report. This transparency is vital for accountability, enabling team leaders to monitor progress and ensure that all contributions align. 

Learn more about sustainability solutions

By facilitating clear communication, structured workflows, and shared access to data in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, Accenture and Avanade’s generative AI-powered solution enables teams to work together toward their sustainability reporting goals. 

To learn more about Accenture and Avanade’s generative AI-powered solution and how it can be customized for your industry and region, register for a complimentary workshop.  

The post Leverage AI to simplify CSRD reporting   appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.