Artificial intelligence for sustainability evaluations

S&P has the world’s largest database of assessments of the sustainability of companies’ practices and business models. Over 10,000 companies around the world are assessed each year.

This is done on the one hand by issuing industry-specific questionnaires with structured and unstructured questions, which is the most productive aspect of this method. Company reports and publicly available information are also compiled and analyzed on a regular basis.

Our solutions

Machine-Learning

ti&m has trained a range of machine learning models, which are now capable of comparing businesses' statements and responses with company reports and other sources. These models undertake repetitive tasks for analysts and significantly reduce the time needed to complete assessments.

PoC

for two specific types of questions: Finding relevant information in documents and evaluating responses from the “Material Issues” category, such as “Executive Compensation”.

Front-end / Back-end

solution for visualizing documents, incl. displaying the relevant text passages for different categories.

Globale Search

of all relevant documents referring to the company to be assessed.

Data Processing Pipeline & Integration

for extracting text from documents into the existing S&P application using OCR.

Management of machine learning models

to create and train new models for specific categories.

Technical implementation

of software as microservice architecture

Our approach

Use case definitions were developed collaboratively in a creative workshop on artificial intelligence (AI). At the same time, a PoC (Proof of Concept) was developed through an iterative process. Main components: Training the AI models to undertake actual testing. Converting the PoC into a productive application with a user interface, incl. deployment in the S&P environment (Kubernetes cluster). Integration into the customer’s process and target applications and internalization of deployment.

Shared goals

Supporting the team of analysts in their day-to-day work with a view to scaling. Specialists should not be preoccupied with information gathering but should be able to focus on analyzing content. The data generated in this way should support further models and assessment processes at a later date. Gaining experience in the use of intelligent algorithms and applying them effectively.

Challenges

Training NLP models

for the specific domain without excessive data volumes.

Data

The process first had to be adjusted so as to enable the analysts to generate structured data that could then serve as the ground truth for the models.

Approaches

The many different question types (documents/quantitative responses/timelines/free text) mean that different models and approaches are required.

Priority

Prioritization was based on the time-saving potential for each question type.

Collaboration

The project was launched in collaboration with the Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA) department of RobecoSAM (2019), and was later taken over by and integrated into S&P Global (2020/21).

Sustainability assessments with AI