News

Microsoft Puts Copilot AI to Work for Sustainability Management

• By David Ramel
• 02/13/2024

Microsoft is previewing new AI technology for its cloud sustainability initiative, introducing new data and AI solutions including a Copilot to help guide decision-making and reporting.

These solutions and the company's latest "Copilot" AI assistant -- called Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager -- join a raft of preview tech available in the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. It's described by the company as a set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities provided by Microsoft and its global partners to help organizations accelerate sustainability progress and business growth.

The company wraps up those ESG capabilities into its Microsoft Fabric offering, an all-in-one enterprise analytics solution covering everything from data movement to data science, real-time analytics and business intelligence.

"With sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview), you can analyze your organization's environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data together with your other enterprise data to inform more holistic decisions and better-targeted outcomes," the company said in a post today (Feb. 13). "Gather, harmonize, and transform sustainability data into meaningful, actionable insights, and use advanced analytics and powerful AI to help you prepare data for analysis, regulatory reporting, and AI-driven innovation."

Another Feb. 13 post describes the capabilities of the new AI Copilot tasked with improving sustainability interactions.

"With centrally managed data and Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, now in preview, organizations can use powerful generative AI and natural language queries to gain faster lines of sight into and answers out of data," Microsoft said. The company said that when asked questions in natural human language, the Copilot sustainability tool -- trained on Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data schemas -- will work across that cloud data for use cases including:

• Quickly analyze environmental data and surface reduction opportunities in areas like carbon and water use, saving work and time.
• Talk to sustainability data — ask questions and retrieve answers quickly.
• Draft sustainability preparatory reports, reducing time and freeing up resources to focus on other priorities.

Other preview tech, called "intelligent insights in Microsoft Sustainability Manager," provides organizations with an integrated and interactive AI model to enable deeper analysis of calculated emissions data. It reportedly helps users:

• See where their data needs cleaning or where more complete data is needed.
• Scan the organization's data to identify both short- and long-term reduction opportunities.
• Fine-tune decisions based on historical trends, seasonality and data anomalies.

The company summarized preview sustainability offerings thusly:

• ESG data estate (preview) helps you centralize and standardize ESG data from your disparate data sources to compute, analyze, and disclose ESG metrics for various regulatory reporting and analytics requirements.
• Microsoft Azure emissions insights (preview) enable you to report and analyze your Microsoft Azure usage-related emissions data at subscription and resource levels.
• Environmental metrics and analytics (preview) help you generate custom reports, metrics, and analytics insights across carbon, water, and waste by connecting to your data in Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
• Social and governance metrics and reports (preview) provide insights, dashboards, and metrics to support your needs across various sustainability directives.

Microsoft offers an "Essentials" Microsoft Sustainability Manager plan and a "Premium" plan that can be compared here.

The company on Feb. 13 broadcast a free digital event that shows how Microsoft data and AI solutions can support organizational sustainability journeys, available here.