You may have seen the recent TV ad with Matthew McConaughey sitting at an outdoors restaurant table in the rain. The ad is for Salesforce’s new offering Agentforce, which according to their word salad of marketing jargon press release – probably written by an AI bot – is “a groundbreaking suite of autonomous AI agents that augment employees and handle tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce, driving unprecedented efficiency and customer satisfaction.” The ad below from my LinkedIn feed (just an image – don’t try to make the video play) offers more clarity than the gobbledygook press release:
Agentforce is an enabler of commerce – it doesn’t extract raw materials, transport, process, manufacture or sell raw materials, energy or products. The ad indicates Agentforce helps users be more efficient/aggressive/predictive in pushing their customers to buy more things and stuff. But that requires more extracted raw materials, more manufacturing and more shipping – all with more GHG emissions. This would seemingly conflict with Salesforce’s Climate Action Plan, right? After all, Salesforce is seen as an industry leader and exemplar in terms of climate programs.
Well – no. Salesforce’s climate plan is limited to its own emissions:
“We are actively working to reduce our absolute emissions by 50% by 2030 by operationalizing carbon reduction programs across four key areas of our business, including infrastructure, business travel, real estate, and supply chain. Find out more in our Stakeholder Impact Report.”
In reading the Stakeholder Impact Report, “supply chain” means just direct suppliers. Customers are mentioned only in terms of “leverag[ing] our technology to empower” them with “with a complete, actionable view of their carbon emissions data” and “in their mission-driven work to promote ocean health, collect ocean data, tackle plastic pollution, and advance ocean literacy.” So encouraging/enabling their customers’ increased GHG emissions (what Agentforce does) is outside Salesforce’s Climate Action Plan.
I’m not criticizing the company here. Instead, this example highlights the complexity (or tension) that can exist between growing business and managing climate risk/commitments. There is a delicate balance between potentially disparate needs of executives, investors, sustainability departments and communications (Agentforce may want to consider softening the overt “buy more stuff and things” messaging – or find climate-related benefits to customers).
ESG/sustainability leaders, staff and advisors – you must stay in touch with new business initiatives and be thoughtful about how to “enforce” sustainability aspects of the new business. At times, that could mean taking a firm stand against the business activity itself, encouraging alternatives – or it may mean ensuring external communications about the new business don’t contain (or imply) inconsistencies with the company’s overall sustainability goals/targets. At the same time, you may find that the company’s overall sustainability goals/targets may need to be reworked either to fit the new business, or because they simply need updating.
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Photo credit: monticellllo – stock.adobe.com
