From fragmented data to instant expertise: how the CSO scaled sales and sustainability support with watsonx
IBM’s Chief Sustainability Office (CSO) sits at the center of the company’s most critical sustainability data - the information that underpins environmental objectives, helps sellers win trust with clients, and enables compliance. Over time, inquiries for this data have grown in volume and complexity. Expectations grew for more detailed and customized responses, which were increasingly time-consuming when completed through the existing process.
Without a centralized system, the team lacked visibility into emerging trends, had limited capacity to scale support, and struggled to prioritize high value opportunities. Sellers often worked from fragmented or outdated information, requiring specialists to spend considerable time tracking down answers, slowing responses and limiting IBM’s ability to act on insights from the field. For a function increasingly essential to IBM’s credibility and operational rigor, this distributed approach created avoidable friction and added strain. Recognizing the need for a more modern and scalable model, the organization turned to AI to transform how sustainability expertise was accessed and applied.
To modernize how sustainability expertise was accessed across the organization, IBM developed AskSustainability—an AI-powered agent designed to act as an institutional expert. The agent automates responses to routine inquiries and provides instant access to sustainability data such as operational metrics, corporate policies, or client-specific product carbon footprints, offering trusted, accurate responses rather than requiring a user to search across fragmented systems with potentially outdated metrics.
AskSustainability lets sellers respond to client needs with greater speed and accuracy. And when deeper expertise is required, the agent connects users directly to the right subject matter specialists, ensuring that human insight is applied where it creates the most value, but skipping any time wasted on trying to find the right expert.
AskSustainability is built on IBM® watsonx.ai®, which powers the agent’s language understanding and retrieval of accurate information, and IBM® watsonx Orchestrate®, which automates workflows by determining the next best action based on the user’s intent. Together, these capabilities bring 50 previously separate data sources into a single conversational experience. This consolidation has significantly reduced repetitive work and freed CSO specialists to focus on higher-value strategic tasks.
The introduction of AskSustainability delivered an immediate lift in speed, consistency, and operational efficiency across the sustainability workflow. Automated responses were generated by the AI Agent in seconds, significantly reducing overall response cycle times. In the first four months of launch, the solution influenced an estimated $50 million in sales pipeline, demonstrating how quickly AI-enabled insights can translate into business value when embedded at the point of need.
The solution also integrated seamlessly for users into IBM’s strategic agent hubs—AskSales, AskIBM, and Slack, making data-driven insights accessible wherever teams work. By providing natural language access to SME knowledge, AskSustainability has significantly cut down on the manual effort required to respond to these types of inquiries. Within four months of launch, the solution had already supported an estimated $50 million in potential revenue, revealing the broader value creation potential that intelligent sustainability insights can drive as adoption expands. Together, these outcomes position IBM to evolve its sustainability operations at scale, helping the organization to meet rising expectations with greater intelligence, speed, and precision.
The Chief Sustainability Office drives IBM’s approach to sustainability by applying the company’s strengths in AI, Quantum, and Hybrid Cloud. The team focuses on advancing sustainability across IBM’s operations, supply chain, products, and services, while working closely with groups inside and outside the company to address broader sustainability challenges. Guided by a commitment to embed sustainability into every aspect of IBM’s work and innovation, the office plays a central role in shaping how sustainability is defined and realized across the organization.
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Examples presented as illustrative only. Actual results will vary based on client configurations and conditions and, therefore, generally expected results cannot be provided.