For years, sustainability and procurement teams have focused on measurement. Companies now have more emissions data than ever before. The next step is to do something with this data and empower suppliers to take meaningful decarbonization action.
But as companies are under growing pressure to show measurable progress against Scope 3 targets, suppliers find themselves overwhelmed with requests, under-resourced, and often unsure of what to do with information once they receive it.
This is the gap that Green Project and Giki set out to solve.
Most supplier engagement programs follow the same pattern: ask suppliers for their emissions data, calculate a footprint, and share the results. But action rarely follows—at least not automatically.
Suppliers face four major barriers to turning measurement into meaningful momentum:
Barrier number one is that suppliers simply don’t know what to do next. A footprint is not a roadmap; suppliers often receive emissions data without clear guidance on which potential initiatives are most relevant, impactful, or achievable for their specific business.
Even highly motivated suppliers may fail to act without answers to questions like:
Even if a supplier knows what to do next, they may not have the resources to put it into action. Across the long tail of supply chains, sustainability responsibilities are often added onto procurement, finance, operations, or facilities roles that already have full workloads.
The result is that already-busy people or teams are asked to become climate experts overnight, while still completing their existing workloads.
Suppliers may be inundated with questionnaires, surveys, reporting frameworks, and other customer sustainability requests. Many engagement programs unintentionally create more administrative work for already overburdened teams.
At some point, fatigue sets in and participation drops off.
Some sustainability tools provide suppliers with broad lists of sustainability initiatives, but decarbonization is far from one-size-fits-all. An action that makes sense for a manufacturer in Germany may not apply to a professional services firm in Singapore.
Recommendations need to reflect a given supplier's geography, sector, emissions profile, operational maturity, and resources in order to feel realistic. But that level of personalization has historically only been achievable for a buyer's top strategic suppliers. The next several thousand, where the majority of emissions actually sit, are typically left with a footprint and no plan.
As AI becomes more embedded across sustainability software, many companies are rushing to layer generative AI onto their products. But the challenge is not simply generating ideas, but knowing which recommendations are credible, relevant, realistic, and backed by expertise.
An AI model can produce suggestions quickly, but effective supplier decarbonization requires a deeply validated understanding of:
While AI-generated suggestions on their own can be generic, inconsistent, or difficult to operationalize, AI becomes a highly powerful tool when combined with trusted, structured decarbonization intelligence.
Green Project partnered with Giki because they have built one of the deepest and most operationally proven decarbonization action libraries available today.
Their database contains more than 750 decarbonization actions, developed and refined over years of work in supplier engagement, climate education, and sustainability implementation.
Importantly, the actions and data schema have been carefully structured and tested over time by sustainability experts, including leadership with deep roots in the climate disclosure ecosystem, including one of the earliest employees at CDP.
This partnership combines:
Together, Green Project and Giki have launched an AI-powered decarbonization agent within the Green Project platform which combines:
The result is a tailored shortlist of highly relevant actions for each supplier, whether you have 100 or 10,000.
Instead of asking suppliers to complete another lengthy questionnaire, Green Project’s AI agent handles much of the screening and contextual analysis automatically. Suppliers receive personalized recommendations without the additional administrative burden:
This reduces supplier fatigue while making supplier action materially more achievable at scale.
But recommendations alone are not enough. One of the reasons we partnered with Giki is their experience supporting implementation through supplier training, workshops, and behavioral engagement programs.
Suppliers can receive support with:
This implementation layer is critical because the hardest part of decarbonization is often organizational alignment rather than identifying opportunities.
Over time, this ecosystem will expand further through implementation partners and sustainable finance pathways that help suppliers move from recommendations to funded execution.
The sustainability market is moving from measurement toward action. While carbon accounting remains foundational, companies are increasingly asking (and being asked) harder questions:
Because ultimately, the goal is not simply to measure emissions more accurately, but to help suppliers reduce them.
Learn more about how Green Project and Giki help suppliers take meaningful decarbonization action.
