About Microsoft for Sustainability
Microsoft for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress and business growth. This is achieved by bringing together a set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities across the Microsoft Cloud portfolio, and solutions from a global ecosystem of partners.
Microsoft for Sustainability enables organizations:
Gain transparency and insights to manage their environmental footprint
Embed sustainability through the organization and value chain
Make strategic business investments that drive value.
Sustainability is central to Microsoft's business. Microsoft focuses on optimizing its own operations to building a community of customers and partners who work together to advance their sustainability ambitions. These collaborations enable delivery of dedicated sustainability solutions, and investments in climate equity and innovation.
Microsoft is committed to driving transformation to build the world that every person and organization on the planet can thrive. Microsoft is the recognized leader and trusted partner to help organizations advance sustainability, reduce costs, build resilience, and drive innovation with groundbreaking technologies for sustainability. The global network of partners and customers trust Microsoft’s comprehensive platform, advanced tools, and industry-leading security. These features enable organizations to adapt to changing business needs.
Sustainability in the AI era
Microsoft for Sustainability is the first of Microsoft's horizontal industry clouds that can be used across all other industries. These industries include retail and consumer goods, financial services, telecommunications and media, healthcare, industrials and manufacturing, automotive and transportation, and energy and resources.
Many of these industries are expected to see the most significant changes due to AI integration. AI is central to sustainability solutions, unlocking three game-changing abilities to help accelerate net zero:
Measure, predict, and optimize complex systems.
Accelerate the development of sustainability solutions.
Empower the sustainability workforce.
For many organizations, Sustainability is among the top societal priorities. As for implementing sustainability measures, 76% of organizations moved past the exploration stage, but only 17% have advanced sustainability programs in place.
The top technical challenges with moving to a more sustainable technology infrastructure and getting insights from their data include:
Using data analytics to understand which projects have the biggest impact on sustainability
Adopting technology and tools to manage the sustainability work end-to-end
Implementing existing sustainability initiatives
Using AI tools to find ways to improve sustainability efforts across their organizations
Updating existing sustainability data estates
Organizations are moving beyond viewing sustainability as a moral imperative and a reporting necessity and are increasingly recognizing it as an enabler for business growth. Microsoft is committed to helping organizations thrive in a changing world, with trusted data and AI solutions for sustainability. AI has a significant impact on environmental sustainability. Most organizations believe that AI has a net positive effect, but others expect the result to be mixed or negative and are assessing the opportunities and challenges presented by AI. Organizations can advance their business more sustainably with a technology partner that they can count on to support them through the stages of their journey.
Microsoft offers a full breadth of trusted data and AI solutions, along with an ambitious commitment to sustainability. All these help organizations operate responsibly and thrive in an ever-changing world.
Priority scenarios
Microsoft for Sustainability is a comprehensive suite of cloud-based services and platforms that help organizations accelerate business and sustainability goals. Microsoft for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate progress in sustainability while also driving business growth. It brings together a range of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities across the Microsoft cloud portfolio and solutions from our global ecosystem of partners.
Microsoft for Sustainability helps organizations to:
Create efficiencies that help organizations to create efficiencies and drive innovation.
Build resilience by identifying opportunities to replace tools, systems, or activities with cleaner options and add business value.
Innovate for growth by exploring and delivering sustainability innovations and new lines of business while advancing your sustainability targets.
Advance the sustainability of AI as Microsoft is deeply invested in increasing the focus for advancing the sustainability of cloud and AI.
Key capabilities
Microsoft for Sustainability is built on Microsoft Azure and powered by Microsoft Power Platform, including Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI. This platform enables customers or partners to extend core capabilities quickly with custom industry vertical, horizontal, or geo-based solutions.
Following are the capabilities of Microsoft for Sustainability:
Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric enables organizations to centralize and standardize data in a comprehensive ESG data estate, ready for advanced analytics and reporting.
Microsoft for Sustainability data model streamlines data ingestion, integration, calculations, and reporting.
Microsoft Sustainability Manager enables organizations to record, report, and reduce their environmental impact across their operations and value chain.
Emissions impact dashboard provides customers with transparency into the emissions data related to their use of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.
Sustainability reporting capabilities like CSRD template in Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager help customers track required actions and document evidence for their reporting and compliance initiatives.
Partner solutions seamlessly connect into Sustainability Manager. You can view these solutions in Microsoft AppSource.