Sustainability started in the boardroom — a strategy function, a reporting obligation, a signal
of corporate intent. That era is ending. According to IDC, by 2027, 80% of sustainability
services engagements will focus primarily on operationalizing sustainability strategy, not
defining it. The question is no longer what a company stands for. It’s whether they have the
systems to execute at scale.
That shift is most visible where energy intensity and operational risk are highest — in
manufacturing, chemicals, supply chain, utilities, and other industries where performance,
compliance, and safety are measured daily. In these environments, sustainability data isn’t a
reporting input. It’s an operational asset. Improving performance, managing risk, and
lowering costs are the use cases that matter — and they all run on connected data.
We see it clearly on our own platform. 80% of the use cases deployed by our customers
today are operational sustainability — connecting the systems of record that drive real
performance outcomes. That’s not where we expected to be. It’s where our customers took
us. And the next wave is already forming: new operational data sources — IoT, supply chain,
logistics, energy — unlocking use cases that weren’t possible when sustainability data lived
in silos.
The future of sustainability isn’t a better report. It’s a better operation. The data
foundation that makes that possible is the work being done right now.
