ESGnie creates its magic by automating fragmented data

Making sense of data is something that Majid Hasan and Jiale Tan, co-founders of ESGnie, specialise in. Their mission is to bring highly intelligent and accurate automation to complex and fragmented data processes in sustainability.

Sustainability data is complex because data often lies in unstructured format (PDFs, HTML, Excel, Powerpoints). The unstandardised way that people communicate for various metrics, and the informationally demanding nature of data requires considerable reading of sustainability materials to be aware of various sustainability frameworks, risks, and opportunities. Enter the genie to create its magic – where ESGnie works with external and internal organisational data – to clean up the mess and present data in valuable formats.

When ESGnie was started in 2021, the technology underpinning the company had already been in the making by tech guru, Hasan, for 4 years. It has since received keen attention from global tech leaders. In 2022, it won seven industry innovation accolades and was recently invited to participate in Singapore MICE Forum’s (SMF) inaugural MICE Sustainability Innovation Marketplace, organised by the Singapore Association of Convention & Exhibition Organisers & Suppliers (SACEOS).

The company which has made its foray into the financial world and a large UN-linked entity, is also part of Accenture’s Fintech Innovation Lap 2023. The Lab is a highly competitive programme that helps early to growth-stage enterprise technology companies refine and test their value proposition with the help of top financial service firms.

ESGnie is now a confident advocate of supporting faster, critical decision-making with data-driven information that helps organisations boost their data workflow productivity by 100 to 1,000 times. The platform helps companies build valuable knowledge-bases of sustainability information that can be used to improve sustainability planning, strategies, and decision-making.

Sorting out external and internal data

The platform aids companies which are looking to external sources of information to gather market intelligence, either to do benchmarking against other companies’ sustainability practices, to research sustainability-related trends, or to extract key data information for internal decision-making.

Said Tan: “This is useful in situations where you want to gather intelligence either to prospect new customers that are aligned with your sustainability theme/focus, or in some M&A considerations where sustainability factors are impacting valuations.

“With external data, our customers can choose their criteria of information (eg companies, and metrics or topics of choice), and ESGnie, through intelligent automation, would execute this for them, providing them with a dataset ready of their choosing where they can generate analysis easily with natural language queries (eg free form text query to ask specific business questions or to correlate sustainability data with financial data).”

The platform also sorts out internal organisation data such as operational, utility, bills, and supplier data where the information is unstructured.

Feedback from hotels

Said Tan: “This is the case for one large hotelier's head of sustainability, who shared that they had over 100 branches for their hotels. In order to begin any useful analysis of their sustainability data to combine with external intelligence, consolidating data across these individual branches of hotels was a huge challenge.

“The two challenges were that data lies in unstructured PDF format and does not fit into a specific uniform format and this issue is magnified 100 times across 100 different branches. The head of sustainability shared that our intelligent automation will solve these two problems - whereby he can gather data across all 100 plus branches in its existing format and leverage our machine learning, Natural Language Processing methods (to extract and organise the data in a comparable format), also allowing ease of any downstream analysis for the business, and reporting needs seamlessly,” said Tan.

By providing intelligent automation to resolve this, it allows organisations to ingest data in different formats, and convert them into a much more standardised form for analyses. Once the data is standardised in a central place, in the next step, ESGnie can synthesise internal business information with external sustainability frameworks, sustainability targets of peers, and best practices in the industry, to help meeting planners identify material sustainability issues, and devise effective sustainability and de-carbonisation roadmaps.

Helping planners with ESG reporting frameworks

Regulation for sustainability considerations is dependent on factors such as geography, industry, and investor expectations, and because it is also dynamic and evolving, AI will be crucial to help companies to keep track of changing regulatory and disclosure requirements, said Tan.

“Our mission is to simplify and streamline the complexity around this process; and we recognise that every organisation has different considerations and needs, therefore our solution is built for flexibility, allowing our customers to choose or customise the taxonomy of interest.

“We have built a knowledge base of all major ESG taxonomies, including SFDR, SASB, CDP, TCFD, with more taxonomies being added continuously. Customers can use these taxonomies to pull out the relevant information from their messy and unstructured documents, and tag it to the ESG taxonomies of their choice. This tagged information can then be used to generate sustainability reports using our generative AI models that can convert structured sustainability data into sustainability reports.

“We are currently part of Singapore Tourism Accelerator and are speaking to companies in the MICE industry. We plan to continue our efforts via industry partners and events such as the SMF,” said Tan.