AI’s Future Runs Through Sustainability

The useful part

With more than 1,500 events across the city running alongside the UN General Assembly, the event was hailed as the biggest Climate Week yet. Delegates arrived feeling three pressures that had been building all year: an energy price shock, a summer of climate disasters, and a fast-growing argument about the resources artificial intelligence consumes. What came out of the week was a clearer picture of where sustainability now sits in business: inside the numbers that decide whether companies grow, stall, or get stopped.

How it works

• That is why SAP and Jupiter Intelligence came together this week, connecting Jupiter's physical climate risk intelligence with SAP's enterprise data and reporting foundation.
• The issue that will decide AI's path is not capability, which is already abundant, but whether the people who host AI, power it, and work alongside it keep agreeing to it.
• Every data center needs a community willing to have it, and every rollout needs a workforce willing to adopt it.
• "The question for sustainability leaders is no longer how to manage AI's impact.
• It's how to shape where AI investment goes," said Sophia Mendelsohn, chief sustainability and commercial officer at SAP.

What to take from it

The direction of travel is climate risk that informs where companies invest, protect, and build. Instead of checking whether every product is compliant, companies can ask which products are at risk, why, and what design or supplier change would fix it. In 2025, SAP reviewed 860 AI use cases against its AI ethics principles and escalated 44% as high-risk for senior review.

Example or evidence

• Sustainability is back, on different terms For a few years, sustainability seemed to be slipping down the corporate agenda.
• UN Climate Chief Simon Stiell put the cost of energy shortages linked to the Iran war at more than $100 billion in higher fuel prices for American consumers alone.
• Miliband urged governments to treat climate and nature loss as a matter of national security.
• Clean power is increasingly an argument for independence and competitiveness.

Details worth keeping

Last week suggested it is returning, but not in the form it left. Iceland's Prime Minister Kristrún Frostadóttir described resilience as a foundation laid well before the storm arrives. By Thursday, the General Assembly had approved its first declaration on sea-level rise, aimed at replacing fragmented initiatives with sustained, coordinated, and properly funded action.

Related coverage

• Forrester: AI's rapid growth is colliding with real-world limits on energy, water, and infrastructure.
• Businessgreen: Institute of Sustainability and Environmental Professionals (ISEP) publishes guiding principles for 'responsible' use of artificial intelligence within the corporate sustainability sector
• Fastcompany: AI may be the future—but the data centers powering it are already putting unprecedented pressure on the present.
• Thehindubusinessline: The adoption and consumption of AI will keep increasing dramatically year on year, says Manish Prasad, President & Managing Director - SAP Indian Subcontinent, SAP India