For chartered accountant Neil Wolstenholme and his friend, solutions architect Richard Nicholson, it was clear that the environmental, social and governance (ESG) model for sustainability reporting was broken. Having read ‘Doughnut Economics’ by Kate Raworth – which proposes a visual framework for sustainable development – the two of them, along with chartered accountant Lily Wolstenholme and engineer Neil Ellis, decided to create a tool that would encourage real change from corporations. 

The solution they developed was a UK AI startup called ekointelligence, offering what is essentially a sustainability assurance tool. It builds an historical impact profile for a company, using advanced behaviour analysis techniques to review company reports and statements against this impact. It then delivers an assessment on the quality and veracity of their disclosures – in other words, a greenwashing detection tool.

Ekointelligence has been trained on more than 70,000 documents so far, including company reports, third-party investigations and other information relating to a company’s environmental performance. It has also been trained on various environmental standards and frameworks, including the Sustainable Development Goals, Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and International Sustainability Standards Board standards. 

“If you’ve got a particular environmental framework you want to work in, we can map to that particular model preference, using this as a basis to analyse current – and soon predict future – corporate behaviour,” says Nicholson.

What you end up with when using the tool is a comprehensive review that compares company statements of all kinds, including all press releases and leadership statements, highlighting the consistency and quality of those statements and disclosures. It delivers this within 24 hours. “It’s providing you with a complete eco profile of an organisation in a way that would take you months to do by hand,” says Neil Wolstenholme. “There’s an audit trail, so you can see exactly the source of information and you can assess the validity of that as well.”

The development of the tool is an iterative process, Nicholson explains. They used a number of AI training techniques to create context and extract meaning from relevant regulatory documents. EkoIntelligence engineers review the outputs to assess their quality and then fine tune the models and internal knowledge representations to improve results. “It’s an iterative ‘human-in-the-loop’ process with output context defined by ESG and greenwashing regulations,” says Nicholson. “It’s the North Star that w’'re following for our regulatory report analysis.”

To improve checks and balances, a different large language model (LLM) checks the sources and output statements are limited to information contained in the original sources, which helps minimise the risk of hallucination. 

“Hallucinations were a problem right at the start,” says Nicholson. “We could get it to generate any garbage when we first started the process. It’s one of things about LLMs: it can be a very blunt tool and it can go very wrong if you’re not careful.”

It helps to have a specific use for the AI that you’re using, with clear objectives, Nicholson advises. “We’re very lucky because we know exactly what problem set we’re working on. When you’re in very fluid environments with broad context and constant change, you might want to leave AI adoption until you’ve actually identified immutable problem sets within your problem domain.”

EkoIntelligence has been created for the auditors’ community, alongside investors, public sector procurement teams and business owners and boards looking to assess their organisation’s footprint and disclosure quality. “Chief executives and boards like it because it gives them an honest appraisal of how they’re doing,” says Lily Wolstenholme. “It gives them an objective view of how the company is perceived, which you don’t always get from internally generated reports.”

The team is also looking to increase the number of auditors and assurers using the tool. “It can give them a full 360º view of what a company's done and what the’re saying,” says Neil Wolstenholme. “They can use that to provide better assurance of ESG statements.”

Ekointelligence recently received a grant from Turing Innovation Catalyst in Manchester, supported by Innovate UK. This has given the company the means to accelerate and further refine the ekoIntelligence platform. 

“We’re constantly looking to improve, to change behaviour,” says Neil Wolstenholme. “This is an ongoing process. It’s going to take quite a long time to change the mindset of corporations, but this is a huge global opportunity. We’re hoping that we can have a big impact.”