Sustainability Insights

Publisher: Microsoft

The Sustainability Insights Copilot template enables users to easily get insights and data about their company's sustainability goals and progress. It also enables users to compare their company's sustainability efforts year over year and to that of other organizations, while also providing general knowledge around sustainability.

Note

Templates are currently available in English only. Additionally, templates should be limited to internal use within your organization.

Watch this video to get an overview of how to use the Sustainability Insights copilot:

Prerequisites 

• Copilot Studio Account

• Source of information on Sustainability progress (for example, internal documents, websites)

• Optional: Pointers to other organizations' public sources on sustainability for comparison

Capabilities 

You can easily configure and tailor this template to suit the needs of your organization. For demonstration purposes, the template comes preconfigured to three Microsoft knowledge sources—the Microsoft's Sustainability website, Corporate Responsibility website, and Sustainability Reports website. You can also add your template to other data sources, such as from a peer organization in your industry, to benchmark your organization's sustainability efforts.

1. On your copilot's Overview page, replace knowledge sources to pointers of your organization's sources on sustainability. These sources can include sustainability reports (including multiple years of reporting), corporate responsibility portals, or any other relevant information.

2. (Optional): Add more sources of sustainability information from industry peers, or any other organization with which you wish to benchmark performance. You're free to choose whatever names you like for these knowledge sources.

   Note

   For best results, this knowledge source will have overlapping data points and similar information as to your organization's source in order to perform effective comparisons.

Use cases 

The specific use cases and questions that can be addressed are dependent on the knowledge source utilized. However, the template was designed to:

• Answer questions about sustainability progress and efforts.

  Sample prompts include queries like "What is our total greenhouse gas emissions?", "What is our scope 1 emissions", and "Who is our Chief Sustainability Officer?"

• Compare year over year results.

  Queries can include, "What were our greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 compared to 2022?"

• Benchmark with other organizations.

  Users can also ask questions such as, "How do our Scope 1 emissions compare to that of [other organization]?"

  Note

  A copilot built from this template might ask if you want to compare reports across two companies or compare reports year-over-year for a single company. The answer to this question helps the copilot distinguish between use case #2 and use case #3. There are built-in quick replies to help the user with responses.

Configure the Compare topic to benchmark with other organizations

This template has a predefined pattern for comparing data across different companies from their respective data sources.

• Organizational variables can be set in the Conversation Start topic with the company's name (for example, your company and the company you want to compare/benchmark with – whether it be an industry peer, supplier, or anything else).

  • Variables: OrganizationName (Maker's company), OrganizationToCompare (Company for comparison purposes)

  • These variables are used both in prompts and as part of LLM (large language model) queries to ensure the data being retrieved across data sources is for that particular company.

• As previously mentioned, knowledge sources need to be configured for both OrganizationName and OrganizationToCompare.

• There's a three-step pattern that performs the comparison.

  1. Retrieve sustainability data in question for OrganizationName [CompareQuery1].

  2. Retrieve sustainability data in question for OrganizationToCompare [CompareQuery2].

  3. Mark the retrieved datasets as Custom Data and perform a comparison between them, returning the result to the user.

Note

This pattern results in an effective way to produce comparison results. That said, it is important to note the ability to compare specific data points is only as good as the data sources provided. If an OrganizationToCompare does not list their Scope 1 emissions for a particular year while OrganizationName does, then doing such a comparison will not work.

Example: Inquiring about fugitive emissions

Example: Inquiring about what Microsoft is doing about sustainability

Example: Inquiring who is Microsoft's chief sustainability officer

Extension opportunities 

You can configure this template with more sources of knowledge to answer related queries, and you can integrate the template with or without systems of record including using prebuilt connectors provided by the platform.

Limitations 

AI-generated content can have mistakes, so don't forget to make sure it's accurate and appropriate. Review the Supplemental Terms.