How Workiva Accelerated Sustainability Reporting With Responsible AI

Unlocking Efficiency: How AI Shaped Workiva’s Sustainability Management

At Workiva, sustainability is a core part of our strategic focus. Our 2024 Sustainability Report highlights progress across innovation, people and philanthropy, and sustainability efforts, while showcasing how Workiva AI streamlines our reporting process. By integrating Workiva AI into our Sustainability Management solution, we produced a 54-page report in under three and a half months. This was 30% faster than previous years, despite involving over 90 employees and multiple review stages.

More than 35 metrics in the report received limited assurance from a third-party data provider, ensuring data credibility. Jill Klindt, Chief Financial Officer and Executive Chair of the Sustainability Task Force, emphasizes that finance, sustainability, audit, risk, and legal teams are leading the adoption of secure and responsible AI. This approach modernizes workflows, boosts productivity, and reinforces investor trust.

How We Increased Efficiency in Sustainability Reporting

Using Workiva AI gave us practical improvements in five key areas of the sustainability report creation:

• Benchmark peer activity: We analyzed public sustainability reports from peer tech companies to extract relevant data and themes like waste, water, and biodiversity. Our Global Sustainability team refined this information for comparative insights. Recent surveys show 64% of sustainability professionals use AI to quickly assess disclosure data for benchmarking.
• Develop new targets: AI helped draft and align sustainability targets focused on impact.
• Assess alignment with UN SDGs: We rapidly evaluated how our efforts align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
• Draft disclosures: AI streamlined the creation of disclosures, ensuring compliance with voluntary frameworks and emerging regulations.
• Generate data-driven insights: AI analyzed datasets within the platform to guide narrative development by summarizing information, identifying gaps, and suggesting improvements. This freed up our team to focus on storytelling.

While AI accelerated many tasks, human insight remained essential. It allowed us to prioritize education with our sustainability governance groups and engage more deeply in environmental initiatives supporting our 2040 net-zero goal. We also carefully chose AI platforms that prioritize sustainable cloud computing, renewable energy, and data center efficiency to minimize environmental impact.

Best Practices for Maximizing Generative AI

From our experience, the following practices helped us get the most from generative AI:

• Integration is key: Having AI built into our data and reporting tools improved confidence and allowed quick verification of AI-generated content against sensitive data.
• Prompting matters: Iterating on prompts using a prompt library helped us refine queries and get better results faster.
• Tailor tone and language: AI adapts messaging for different audiences and channels, saving time when shifting between investor updates, social media, and internal communications. It also ensures consistency by drawing directly from trusted source content.
• Continuous learning: Staying connected with peers and AI experts sparks new ideas. The more you engage with AI, the better it learns your context and delivers personalized support.

For those interested in responsible AI use, an upcoming webinar titled Responsible AI: Lessons for 2025 offers valuable insights.

Our 2024 Sustainability Report not only reflects our commitment but also illustrates how Workiva AI supports efficient and responsible reporting. We encourage organizations to explore how AI can enhance their sustainability efforts.