Provenance launches first AI tool Sustainability Navigator to give marketers tailored sustainability recommendations

Data-led guidance mitigates risk of greenwashing, plugs marketing's sustainability skills gap and drives competitive advantage.‍

20.09.23 London - Provenance, the platform that validates and amplifies sustainability credentials, today launches Sustainability Navigator. This new AI-powered tool enables brands and marketers to access tailored sustainability guidance in order to assess and develop their sustainability strategy and messaging, identify areas for competitive advantage and reduce the risk of greenwashing.

Underpinned by a robust knowledge graph* with over 1.7M data points, Sustainability Navigator is a first-of-its-kind ‘recommendation engine’. It delivers bespoke sustainability advice tailored to the unique needs of each business based on consumer, market and regulatory insights.

When businesses build sustainability strategies today, it’s hard for them to clearly identify the commercial needs (What are our customers looking for? What are the market benchmarks?) and regulatory needs (Where is our biggest impact? How can we avoid greenwashing?). 

The Sustainability Navigator gives businesses tailored market, consumer and regulatory insights in one place, so that they can build strategies which address both commercial and regulatory needs.

The tool also speaks directly to marketing’s sustainability skills gap, which according to research from Kantar, is a concern for more than 35% of marketers. 

The same research found that 43% of companies have now added sustainability as a KPI for marketing departments - the Sustainability Navigator equips marketers with the data needed to plug that gap, and reach these sustainability KPIs.

Sustainability Navigator addresses key challenges by allowing brands to:

• Understand how effectively their existing sustainability credentials appeal to consumers, comply with regulation and compare with the market, so that they can identify gaps as well as brand differentiation opportunities.
• Build a custom roadmap – shared by marketing and sustainability – that enables them to collaborate on a shared strategy, meet commercial expectations and improve their performance in areas of sustainability that are most relevant to their business.

Sarah Pirrie, Global Marketing Director at Umberto Giannini, praised the Sustainability Navigator saying: “A big part of my role is about finding opportunities to move forwards in terms of sustainability, whilst also differentiating our company in the sector, and connecting with our customers. Sustainability Navigator helps me with this by organising all our sustainability efforts in one place, then overlays extra insights around consumer trends, and the scale of effort to achieve a Proof Point**.”

Flo Glendenning, VP of Product & Sustainability at The Nue Co adds: “The first thing a brand should do when trying to create a sustainability narrative is build a roadmap. Provenance’s tool is fantastic.”

Alex Rahin, CPTO at Provenance has two decades of product and technology experience in data and AI, and led the development of Sustainability Navigator. He said: “Provenance’s technology is revolutionising sustainability communications, fuelled by a growing body of data as businesses invest in ESG across their value chains. This includes everything from product-level certifications, attributes and ingredients to broader regulation, supply chain initiatives and consumer preferences. We’re able to give marketers unprecedented and unparalleled insights to help them assess and communicate their sustainability claims with integrity, whilst meeting commercial KPIs.”

Jessi Baker, Founder at Provenance said: “A decade ago, Provenance pioneered the use of Web3 for integrity in sustainability claims, and today we’re continuing to drive progress in this space, led by Alex and his team with the launch of Sustainability Navigator. Amidst rapidly changing environments for brands, we’re helping to close the knowledge gap  and ensure that marketers feel empowered to communicate their sustainability claims both effectively and authentically to protect consumer interests as well as their brand’s reputation and commercial interests.”

Watch this video to see Sustainability Navigator in action. For a personalised demo, please get in touch.
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*A knowledge graph is a type of data structure used to represent information in a way that's easy for both machines and humans to understand. It's essentially a network of entities — objects, events, concepts, or any other pieces of information — and their interrelations. The resulting graph is especially useful in fields like AI and NLP (Natural Language Processing - think ChatGPT and Large Language Models or LLMs), where understanding the relationships between different pieces of information is crucial. It allows for complex querying and can reveal deeper insights about the data. 

** A technology developed by Provenance to help businesses communicate with integrity. Proof Points enable businesses (of any size and location) to prove a statement of impact in a way that has integrity and can easily be shared with buyers and shoppers. A Proof Point can be linked to a business (including brands or facilities) or a product (including ingredients or packaging). They enable a consistent, comparable information presentation with robust, multi-layered evidence that’s tamperproof, timestamped, and easy to validate.

Proof Points are clickable sustainability claims about a brand or a product. Using technology, they connect what brands say (e.g. Organic Ingredients, Widely Recyclable Packaging or Renewable Energy) to real evidence or independent verification. Proof Points embed seamlessly onto ecommerce product pages to give shoppers at-a-glance peace of mind, as well as the ability to click through to see more information and the proof behind the claim.