AI for Sustainability

Sustainability Capability Exercise Sample

This sample shows how the book connects sustainability analysis with a practical management decision. Chapter 14 asks readers to prepare a capability-building plan and budget, then examine the assumptions behind their choices.

A Capability-Building Plan and Budget

Three to five hours. Individual or small-group submission. Deliverable: a five-to-six-page capability-building plan, with an indicative budget, addressed to a chief executive.

Step 1: Scope the company and its obligations. Choose a company and state its disclosure and assurance obligations, which determine the capability floor it must reach. Note its size, because size shapes the build-versus-buy balance.

Step 2: Apply the build-versus-buy framework. For Wave 1, Wave 2, and Wave 3, specify what the company should buy, what it must configure, and what it must build and govern internally, with reasons. Identify where the company should resist the temptation to build.

Step 3: Specify the talent. Identify the talent profiles the plan requires, especially the AI-fluent sustainability professionals, and state which should be hired and which developed internally. Be realistic about the scarcity of the hybrid profile.

Step 4: Structure the budget. Build an indicative budget across subscriptions, configuration, governance, talent, and change management, weighted as the framework suggests. State the share going to change management explicitly.

Step 5: Address the supply chain. Specify how the company will enable the suppliers its Scope 3 depends on to provide data, given that many cannot build capability. Recommend the shared tools, requirements, or support the company should provide.

Step 6: Submit. A five-to-six-page plan with an indicative budget and at least four referenced sources, including the company's disclosures and credible analysis of the vendor market and talent supply. Distinguish your recommendations from sourced facts, and label vendor claims as such.

Discussion questions

1. The chapter argues a chief sustainability officer's capability decisions differ fundamentally from a chief technology officer's. Identify the difference you find most consequential, and how getting it wrong would harm a capability-building program.

2. Apply the build-versus-buy framework to a specific capability, such as Scope 3 supplier engagement. What should be bought, configured, and built internally, and how would your answer change for a smaller company?

3. The chapter argues that for Wave 2, the configuration, not the purchase, is the capability. Describe what configuring a generative reporting tool to a company's obligations actually involves, and what happens if it is skipped.

4. Change management, not technology, is said to determine whether capability delivers value. Design the change-management plan you would fund alongside a new AI tool in a sustainability function, and estimate its share of the budget.

5. The Indian size gradient leaves the MSME unable to build capability. Whose responsibility is it to enable MSME participation, the vendors, the large customers, or the government, and what is the most effective intervention?

6. The chapter says a large company's capability-building must extend to its supply chain because its Scope 3 depends on it. Design a realistic way a large company could enable its smaller suppliers to provide emissions data.

7. The chapter recommends reframing the function's budget from compliance overhead to capability investment. Construct the business case a chief sustainability officer would make to a chief financial officer to justify the reframing.

The framework behind the exercise

The Build-Versus-Buy Decision Across the Three Waves supports the choice of what to procure, configure, build and govern internally. Read the complete framework, its application and the chapter’s cases in the sample chapter.