IBM announced this morning that it has acquired Australian startup I sent to add to your ESG (environmental, sustainability and governance) offering package to help measure environmental impact across the supply chain.
The companies did not share the terms of the acquisition, but with Envizi Big Blue you get a platform to measure, manage and optimize a client’s environmental sustainability efforts. In other words, it’s taking a data-centric approach to the problem, just as it did when it was building Watson Health in 2016, a division it’s reportedly trying to sell at the moment.
Kareem Yusuf, general manager of IBM AI Applications, said companies need data to generate insights, and that’s what his company is getting with Envizi.
“Envizi’s software provides companies with a single source of truth for analyzing and understanding emissions data across the entire landscape of their business operations and dramatically accelerates IBM’s growing arsenal of AI technologies to help companies create operations and more sustainable supply chains,” Yusuf said in a statement. declaration.
Envizi CEO and co-founder David Solsky sees this as a way to scale the company by taking advantage of IBM’s global presence, a typical argument for a company being swallowed up by a much larger one. “Today does not mark the end of an era, nor the beginning of a new one. Rather, it is a transition to a framework that will allow us to scale at an unprecedented rate and help our customers globally accelerate progress towards their sustainability commitments,” Solsky wrote. in a post on the company’s blog announcing the business.
IBM sees Envizi as an AI-driven software to add to its existing suite of products that include the IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite, IBM Maximo asset management solutions and IBM Sterling supply chain solutions. The latter uses IBM’s blockchain for sourcing and traceability along the supply chain, which can improve security or traceability.
It’s worth noting that while the company continues to pursue AI-powered solutions, this time it hasn’t named its ESG efforts Watson, as it did with the healthcare initiative six years ago. Perhaps IBM has decided the Watson brand lost some of its luster over the years and failed to attach the name to all of the company’s AI-driven solutions.
The company notes that it is using these same software tools internally to help drive its own sustainability efforts as it works to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.