Sustainable AI – Realizing End-to-End Supply Chain Opportunities

In our blog Sustainable AI – Solving the “Double Materiality” Challenge, we discussed the regulatory requirements that companies are facing in their data management starting this year. These challenges are particularly strong in supply chain management. In the EU, the Supply Chain Law (Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive) requires companies to ensure compliance with human rights and environmental standards. Globally, companies are being asked to account not only for their own greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but for emissions throughout their supply chains.

Supply chains and logistics have a significant impact on environmental emissions. For most companies, supply chain emissions (Scope 3 emissions) account for more than 70% of their total carbon footprint. For suppliers, the CDP reports that supply chain emissions are 26 times higher than their own operational emissions (Scope 1+2). For retailers, the ratio is as high as 92. This shows how long and complex supply chains have become.

Improving the management of this complexity with sustainable AI platforms can be a game-changer, because it can increase efficiency, reduce costs and improving customer satisfaction. A prerequisite for such gains, however, is that data becomes available at all levels of the supply chain, and that organizations begin to coordinate and optimize product lifecycles "from the cradle to the grave."

In our Whitepaper “Sustainable AI for Enterprise Transformation, Innovation and Growth”, we show how the development and implementation of Sustainable AI platforms can become a driving force for enterprise transformation and fostering sustainable growth. It shows how AI, especially generative AI, can integrate with existing management systems to improve prediction, optimization, and planning across multiple business functions. It enables data-driven decision-making and streamlines complex sustainability initiatives across departments and value chains.

To achieve such integration, systems modernization by moving business functions to the cloud is as important as effective data management that supports seamless and secure data sharing with supply chain partners. Fujitsu had therefore partnered with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s Partnership for Carbon Transparency (PACT) to implement the world’s first program to enable business-to-business data integration for product carbon footprint (PCF) information. It succeeded in effectively visualizing CO2 emissions throughout its supply chain with partner companies.