Insights
A new industry survey of 1,000 senior leaders showed an interesting result.
In 2024, 53% of leaders said their sustainability data wasn’t reliable enough to guide strategy. By 2026, that number had climbed to 79%. Two more years of CSRD preparation, board attention and investment, and confidence in the numbers fell rather than rose.
A lot of it comes down to ownership. 45% of companies still keep ESG data inside a single sustainability team. Even where responsibility is shared across departments, nobody is fully sure who’s actually accountable. Sustainability managers report the most cross-functional involvement of any role, yet the least confidence that ownership is clearly defined.
AI has moved into the gap quickly. 79% of leaders say AI adoption has increased their sustainability investment. The most common use cases are data collection, data calculation and analysis, and decision-making and strategy.
Governance, however, is lagging behind adoption. Only 40% of businesses have a formal corporate AI governance framework, and only 39% have clear policies on AI use and accountability. This means that organisations are using AI to make fast decisions based on data that still isn’t fully reliable.
The cost of ignoring sustainability is already hitting the P&L. 94% of the 1,000 senior leaders surveyed have experienced financial loss from climate-related supply chain disruption in the past 2 years. 30% of CEOs said their business has absorbed losses above $1 million as a direct result. This is also due to a data infrastructure gap.
But this also means that sustainability remains a critical business priority. To be resilient in the future, 85% of organisations agree they must transform for a low-carbon economy. And 86% of them see transformation as a growth opportunity rather than an expense.
Above all, there’s a governance question. Two teams reporting the same metric should be measuring it the same way, and anyone should be able to say with confidence where a number came from and who’s accountable for it.
Without that, no platform, however capable, can close the trust gap this report describes. A lot of organisations have bought the tooling and put in the reporting hours, without first doing the harder work of deciding who owns each number and how it should be measured consistently across the business.
The solution starts with clear ownership and connected sustainability data: knowing who owns each number, how it was calculated, and where it came from. With that foundation in place, audits and board reporting become easier and more reliable.
We think about resilience in terms of anticipating disruption early enough to act on it with confidence. That confidence depends on trusted data across the value chain. This is how sustainability becomes a genuine driver of business value.
AI can accelerate the process, but it cannot fix fragmented data or unclear ownership. A strong governance framework must come first, making sustainability data actionable and embedding it in business decisions.
Read the full report: Sustainability in Action 2026 – Sweep
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