Sustainability actions speak louder, says Oracle study

When it comes to sustainability, how much action is actually taken, given the efforts announced today? While organizations continue to make sustainability announcements and find ways to reduce their carbon emissions, the reality is, that people are fed up with the lack of progress society is making toward sustainability and social initiatives.

According to the No Planet B study by Oracle and Pamela Rucker, CIO Advisor and Instructor for Harvard Professional Development, people want businesses to turn talk into action, and believe technology can help businesses succeed where people have failed. The study involved more than 11,000 consumers and business leaders across 15 countries, including  500 from Singapore.  

The statistics from Singapore show an increasing demand for businesses to step up sustainability and social efforts. In fact, 97% believe sustainability and social factors are more important than ever with 95% also believing that society has not made enough progress.

About half of the respondents attribute the lack of progress to people being too busy with other priorities with 39% believing people are just too lazy or selfish to help save the planet. 53% also believe businesses can make more meaningful changes on sustainability and social factors than individuals or governments alone.

Interestingly, 92% believe businesses would make more progress towards sustainability and social goals with the help of AI, and 62% even believe bots will succeed where humans have failed. For business leaders, they are aware that sustainability efforts are critical to corporate success and even trust bots over humans alone to drive sustainability and social efforts.

As such, 97% of business leaders would trust a bot over a human to make sustainability and social decisions. They believe bots are better at predicting future outcomes based on metrics/past performance, collecting different types of data without error, and making rational, unbiased decisions.

At the same time, business leaders also believe people are still essential to the success of sustainability and social initiatives and believe people are better at educating others on the information needed to make decisions, implementing changes based on feedback from stakeholders, and making context-informed strategic decisions.

Sustainability actions lauded

Another interesting highlight from the survey showed that people will cut ties with businesses that don’t take action on sustainability and social initiatives. Simply put, businesses need to prioritize sustainability and social issues and rethink how they use technology to make an impact, or risk facing major consequences.

The report also showed that if organizations can clearly demonstrate the progress they are making on environmental and social issues, people would be more willing to pay a premium for their products and services, work for them, and invest in their companies. Business leaders understand the importance and urgency with 95% believing sustainability and societal metrics should be used to inform traditional business metrics. 93% also want to increase their investment in sustainability.

For Pamela Rucker, CIO Advisor and Instructor for Harvard Professional Development, the events of the past two years have put sustainability and social initiatives under the microscope and people are demanding material change. While there are challenges to tackling these issues, Rucker pointed out that businesses have an immense opportunity to change the world for the better.

“The results show that people are more likely to do business with and work for organizations that act responsibly toward our society and the environment. This is an opportune moment. While thinking has evolved, technology has as well, and it can play a key role in overcoming many of the obstacles that have held progress back,” added Rucker.

Juergen Lindner, senior vice president, and CMO, Global Marketing SaaS at Oracle also commented that while business leaders understand the importance, they often have the erroneous assumption that they need to prioritize either profits or sustainability.

“The truth is this is not a zero-sum game. The technology that can eliminate all the obstacles to ESG efforts is now available, and organizations that get this right can not only support their communities and the environment, but also realize significant revenue gains, cost savings, and other benefits that impact the bottom line,” said Linder.

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