Powering the Sustainability Era

The Apiday Manifesto

We believe businesses across the world are at a pivotal moment as we enter in an era of conscious capitalism. This fundamental change of paradigm can be condensed to a simple statement: economic activity impacts our environment.

Over the past decades, technology and focus have primarily been placed on enabling higher productivity within companies to unlock faster growth and achieve higher profit margins.

During that period of time, the impact of global business activity on both society and the environment was never a real matter of concern.

Today, this illusory quest for unconstrained growth is coming to an end as companies across the world realize that in order to sustain their economic activity in the long run, an active management of their environmental and social impact is fast becoming critical.

At Apiday, we believe a new class of corporate sustainability reporting tools is needed to support this shift towards conscious economic growth. Our mission is to democratize sustainability reporting and impact management to help companies think forward and build more resilient businesses.

War of the Worlds

Walk into any board room today, whether in a young startup or a large corporate, and you will be struck by how sophisticated business executives are when it comes to analyzing the financials of their company. Weekly business forecasts are underpinned by granular assumptions, crafty financial engineering is used to design innovative capital structures, and each financial ratio is scrutinized with implacable rigor.

Ask these executives why and they will all give you the same answer: the business environment has become very complex, so large amounts of data are required to make optimal strategic decisions.

Financial metrics have indeed long been considered the primary indicators to focus on in order to assess the health of a business and its long term prospects. From the lectures given to students at universities to the very software the industry would use, efforts and expertise have until now mostly been channeled into tracking and optimizing financial metrics.

In comparison, extra-financial indicators, i.e. sustainability metrics, seemed completely irrelevant business variables.

And yet, the very products and services these companies sell today ultimately rely on (limited) resources produced by the earth and transformed by the human beings that work in these companies.

This fundamental correlation between long-term business prospects and sustainability factors is fast becoming apparent in the wake of the many changes happening as we write this manifesto. Extreme weather events disrupting global supply chains, shifting workers’ expectations in a post-pandemic world, growing consumer backlash on ill-governed corporates: all these phenomenons are pushing corporate leaders to realize that the equation has changed.

New variables must now be considered in order to accurately plan for the future.

In addition to the rapid pace at which the global economic landscape undergoes these profound transformations, their very scale is also striking. Literally every business on the planet will be impacted, which is unprecedented since the rise of the Internet in the early 2000s.

As Nobel Peace Prize recipient Al Gore puts it, “The sustainability revolution has the magnitude of the agricultural and industrial revolutions but the speed of the digital revolution”.

To navigate in these new uncharted waters, business executives need a whole new cartography that financial reporting alone cannot provide. They must weave together various datasets, both financial and non-financial, to get the full picture of where their business stands and where it should be headed.

Yet, one is struck by how unequipped companies are today to understand where their key extra-financial risks lie and how they can best capture the new opportunities brought by the sustainability revolution.

This need for sustainability data is one that technology has long overlooked. To the exception of a handful of large corporates using legacy extra-financial reporting tools, most businesses today remain underserved, still awaiting a proper toolset.

The Central Role of Data

Today, the greatest challenge faced by sustainability professionals can be summed up in a single word: data. Identifying, collecting and analyzing sustainability data is the biggest roadblock to integrated corporate reporting.

Behind sustainability reporting lies a hidden data ecosystem that spans the entire organization. It is one of great complexity, made of hundreds of miscellaneous corporate documents and with roots in each company department.

Laying out data acquisition pipelines directly into each of these departments to collect primary raw sustainability data is a major undertaking that requires a very robust and disciplined approach to data collection and analysis.

Previous generations of sustainability software played a great role in helping early movers pioneer extra-financial reporting, but all have neglected the central role of data. Legacy tools missed at least three essential aspects of sustainability performance measurement:

🧮 Data Diversity

As opposed to financial reporting, which largely relies on quantitative data imported directly from an accounting database, extra-financial reporting springs from heterogeneous data sources containing both qualitative and quantitative information.

Each company department has its own protocols when it comes to storing or sharing intelligence. Employee contracts, energy bills or governance charters all differ in format and structure, reflecting different ways to label and marshal information.

Processing this prodigious wealth of content is a massive endeavor. It requires an ability to rapidly and thoroughly scan through each single data source to pinpoint the relevant information.

🤝️ Unconscious Teamwork

The breadth of datasources outlined above is a mere reflection of the wide-ranging nexus of stakeholders involved in their creation.

Inside any organization, employees continuously generate new sustainability data without even realizing it. When an HR rep creates a new entry in the employee database, she effectively updates the company’s gender diversity stats. When a salesperson logs in a new travel expense, she changes the overall carbon footprint of the company.

Even outside the immediate perimeter of the company, there is a constant flow of extra-financial data stemming from suppliers, customers or any other person interacting with the company.

The implementation of a sustainability measurement system is dependent on a large number of internal and external non-experts who are as diverse as they are distributed. Having the ability to quickly reach teammates, suppliers or customers remotely is paramount, especially in post-pandemic times.

🌿 Impact Improvement

In the world of sustainability, measurement and improvement go hand in hand. As the saying goes, “you can’t change what you don’t measure”. This is the leitmotiv of all sustainability tools: helping companies measure what they ultimately wish to improve.

But enabling extra-financial reporting is not enough. Companies need guidance on the “change” part too. Because most of them are just getting started on their sustainability journey, they haven’t yet acquired the knowledge needed to autonomously translate KPIs into actionable improvement plans.

Sustainability data is only useful to the extent that executives can leverage it to better inform their decisions. It is critical for sustainability software to go beyond mere reporting and to bolster companies’ efforts in building a more resilient business model.

In that sense, impact improvement is the ultimate purpose of sustainability software.

For all these reasons, it is our belief that growing corporate sustainability efforts must be supported by a new breed of tool. One that enables large-scale data collection, unlocks company-wide collaboration between teams, and above all one that empowers companies to become proactive in their sustainability journey.

Sustainability Game Changers

To cater to the vast majority of underserved companies that lack internal know-how, sustainability tools have to embrace a whole new ethos.

At Apiday, we want to spearhead this new generation of software, building upon three distinct innovations:

⚙️ Automation replaces Manual Entries

We believe that for most people involved in corporate sustainability, manual data entries are one of their greatest pain points, one Apiday relieves by using modern data science techniques to scale and automate the extraction of sustainability across hundreds of company documents.

• Apiday bets on a unique combination of machine learning capabilities and in-house consultants to take the hefty work of collecting and extracting sustainability data off the hands of users.
• Apiday favors the ergonomics of a document-based interface over the countless manual data entry fields of traditional sustainability software.
• Apiday is building the largest database of sustainability KPIs to package the collective intelligence of sustainability thought leaders and fasten the preparation of any kind of sustainability reporting.

🤝️ Collaboration replaces Endless Emails

We believe collaborating with all stakeholders is key to the successful implementation of a company-wide sustainability reporting system.

• Apiday features unlimited URL link sharing for document upload requests, to let teammates from all departments directly add relevant data sources to the company’s sustainability database.
• Apiday bets on a web app infrastructure allowing anyone, anywhere, to connect and participate without an install or a powerful computer.
• Apiday brings together project management and comment capabilities, to ensure users interact seamlessly with Apiday’s own team of experts and meet their deadlines.

🔓 Open Knowledge replaces External Help

We think that tomorrow’s sustainability software will have to become much more content-packed and educational than their predecessors.

• Apiday unlocks autonomous and continuous impact improvement with its AI-powered action plan builder, which identifies priority actions based on a maturity assessment across key sustainability topics.
• Apiday allows users to build their own sustainability policies and toolkit without the expensive intervention of external lawyers or consultants, by guiding them every step of the way like a virtual companion.
• Apiday is embedding instant and unlimited access to its team of sustainability experts to empower users to become more autonomous in their sustainability day-to-day work.

What Lies Ahead

In the wake of the sustainability revolution, companies will have to rapidly undergo significant changes in the way they operate, by learning how to leverage a new category of data to better inform their long-term business decisions. And as we saw at the onset of the digital revolution in the early 2000s, organizations that will factor in this systemic change in time will fare better than those who won’t.

At Apiday, this fascinating and unique period in time triggers an essential interrogation: “How can we empower any organization to hop on the sustainability bandwagon?”

For us, building the new generation of sustainability management software is our direct answer to this question. Our conviction is that data-centric tools are an ideal match with the inherent requirements of extra-financial impact measurement.

As a new software age is opening up — one of AI-powered, collaborative, and educative tools — we could not be more excited to help shape this new momentum.

The Founders