At San Francisco Climate Week, Watershed, the sustainability AI platform, launched new products and programs to help sustainability teams maximize AI’s potential to accelerate the climate economy.
Watershed announced the launch of Watershed agents, including agents for data cleaning and analysis, to automate manual sustainability tasks that take an average of five months. Across test customers, Watershed’s data cleaning agents have cut time to actionable data by 80%. One company completed a 5-hour data cleaning project in 20 minutes, lowering time needed by 93% and finishing the job 15x faster.
Also Read: AiThority Interview with Glenn Jocher, Founder & CEO, Ultralytics
Watershed agents can execute complex workflows to produce disclosure-ready data and strategic insights, giving sustainability teams a quicker path to impact. Using agents, sustainability teams can:
- Upload and process utility bills in seconds, going from paper or PDFs to organized data 7x faster than manual processes.
- Identify emissions hotspots and see suggested decarbonization actions across businesses and value chains.
- Automatically reformat any file from messy data into structured files that handle unit conversions, date formats, country codes, and more.
- Ask any question about their data and get transparently documented answers to guide strategy.
- Produce a good first draft for any ESG report, including quantitative metrics and qualitative answers based on their unique business data—then track changes through the editing process.
- Analyze the footprint of any product, decomposing the product into a detailed product carbon footprint to inform design and procurement decisions.
The launch of Watershed agents builds on a broader series of Watershed AI releases. Last year, Watershed announced Product Footprints, the most advanced AI-powered lifecycle analysis on the market, and introduced AI PDF scanning to accelerate data ingestion. These agents have reduced data ingestion time for Watershed customers by 87% or more, with one customer processing a full year of utility bills in 30 minutes. And last month, Watershed expanded the platform to include AI-accelerated reporting for any ESG metric.
All of this adds up to a new era for corporate sustainability. Once bogged down by spreadsheets, sustainability teams can now delegate data-heavy tasks to agents, and spend more of their time pursuing decarbonization goals.
“Watershed agents are like data geeks sitting within our team that know our data inside and out,” said Emma Bayliss-Chan, head of climate strategy at Royal Mail. “We can simply speak to them in plain language terms and say: ‘Hey, I noticed our emissions went up this quarter—could you take a closer look into what the key drivers were?’ And they’ll come back to us with information a lot faster than it would have taken to manually sift through all the data.”
“The agent is helping me save about 12 weeks per year, which means I’ve now got time to work with our manufacturing and engineering teams to help on decarbonization strategy and energy efficiency projects across our sites,” said Christian Boothby, sustainability manager at Smiths Group.
Watershed has spent years developing contextual, purpose-built sustainability AI that meets the challenge and rigor of modern corporate sustainability. Watershed AI is built with these core elements:
- A strong data foundation: Watershed agents leverage the most comprehensive sustainability databases on the market to transform and understand customer data, producing a complete, single source of truth for all ESG metrics.
- Embedded sustainability intelligence: Watershed agents are encoded with Watershed’s expertise in ESG data, sustainability best practices, climate science, and underlying databases.
- Safeguards and transparency: Multi-agent model, data lineage and changelogs, and hallucination checks minimize risk for high-stakes tasks like reporting.
- Customer co-development: Watershed AI is built in collaboration with Watershed customers, drawing on over 100 customer tests.
Sustainability AI has major decarbonization potential, but sustainability teams are lagging in adoption: according to Watershed’s annual State of Corporate Sustainability Report, 43% of sustainability practitioners reported using AI for their work vs. 88% of corporate employees overall. To help close this gap, Watershed is launching a first-of-its-kind accelerator for sustainability leaders to become AI experts. The Watershed AI Fellowship is an eight-week intensive, cohort-based program open to Watershed customers. Fellowship participants will connect with Watershed experts, learn from each other, and share progress to move from AI experimentation to leadership. Applications are open now, and the first cohort will be announced in May.
“The goal is simple: help sustainability teams spend less time on data and more time driving decarbonization,” said Watershed co-founder Taylor Francis. “Watershed agents give teams more leverage, so they can move faster on the work that matters most. The Watershed AI Fellowship helps leaders build the skills to put these tools to work.”
Watershed is the sustainability AI platform. Companies like Airbnb, Carlyle Group, FedEx, Visa, and Dr. Martens use Watershed to manage climate and ESG data, produce audit-ready metrics for voluntary and regulatory reporting including CSRD, and drive real decarbonization. Watershed is the platform of choice for companies seeking to reduce emissions; meet customer, investor and regulatory requirements; and modernize their sustainability programs. Watershed customers also have exclusive access to a marketplace of pre-vetted, high-quality carbon projects and groundbreaking virtual power purchase agreements.
Also Read: The Infrastructure War Behind the AI Boom
[To share your insights with us, please write to psen@itechseries.com]
Comments are closed.