With Sydney World Tour only one week away, we’re excited to connect and collaborate at Salesforce’s biggest regional event and we thought this would be a great time to reflect on the progress of the last twelve months and share some highlights.
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2023 was a year where sustainability featured much more prominently in the mainstream than previously. At The Big Zero we’re seeing an exponential increase in the number of organisations realising the importance of sustainability. Many are also realising the scale of the challenge. Salesforce’s three releases since last World Tour were a rapid development in enterprise software. More importantly, these changes have enabled organisations to better understand their sustainability goals. Here are three examples that we know will feature in our conversations next week.
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Rapid Advances in AI and Data
A very common theme we hear from our customers is that there is a need for better information awareness. For data to be useful it needs to inform, and when data informs, it can create increased knowledge within an organisation. This can manifest in many ways, but some examples include:
What initiatives should the organisation focus on?
Which are the biggest challenges that can be immediately tackled?
How will the organisation know that progress is being made?
Which stakeholders will be critical to influence?
These types of questions could equally apply to capital allocation, financial investments or business process improvement - all areas in which AI is already established. We expect to share and discuss the increasing use of AI in helping to analyse and inform businesses in their sustainability transformations.
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With Salesforce announcing very big strides in AI + Data + CRM, expect to hear a lot about Insights & Analytics, and easier data ingestion.
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Financial Disclosures
Aotearoa New Zealand’s already made advanced progress on financial disclosures from XRB. This coupled with Australia’s Treasurer, The Hon. Dr Jim Chalmers MP, announcement that similarly aligned standards will be implemented in 2024 are putting increased pressure on existing processes and data collection methods. With climate and sustainability disclosures now part of corporate reporting, we’re seeing a hunger within executive groups to understand these measures more intimately. It is also driving several other discussions, including:
How to our ambitions align to our actions?
What information needs to be presented to investors?
How will we do this at scale?
What information will we need from suppliers?
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The latest releases of Net Zero Cloud have made big strides in automation and compilation of these reports, with the Disclosure & Compliance Hub forming a central feature to achieving better outcomes.
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Operationalising Sustainability
To really shift the dial on sustainability, requires changes in the way we do things, and organisations are the engine room for this change. A transition to a more sustainable future requires a combination of better reporting and operations that are more sustainable. With Salesforce powering so many organisations, and their operations, we’re seeing tighter integration between the sustainability platforms and these other operational systems.
As with the other topics, we’re being asked many questions that include:
How will we collect information from our operations teams?
What data can be collected about our assets?
How will we know that our initiative is reaching its goals?
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Connecting everything, automating anything and empowering everyone with AI offers a huge opportunity to accelerate change.
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We’re looking forward to meeting our colleagues at Salesforce, but most importantly, discussing how sustainability can be truly embedded and made central to organisation's strategies and operations.
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See you all next week!
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