ESG Compliance Intelligence Platform

We ran a paid four-week discovery, then designed the full platform and a costed, phased delivery plan. Everything sits inside the client's existing Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant: no new vendor, no new licence for phase one, no data leaving the EU boundary.

Layer 1: intelligence, every document read once

All scanned documents and evidence files are OCR'd with Azure Document Intelligence, the full repository processed with Microsoft Fabric, indexed in Azure AI Search, and answered by Azure OpenAI grounded only in the client's own documents, in three languages.

Five AI assistants in Microsoft Teams:

Layer 2: operations, from job titles to named owners

• AI task extraction. Every task in the 70 documents is extracted with its source clause, domain, asset, owner, frequency, deadline logic, required evidence and status, with a confidence score so uncertain items are reviewed first. The ESG team validates them in domain workshops, and titles are mapped to named people.
• Reminders that cannot be missed. Teams and email at 14, 7 and 1 days before, automatic escalation to the line manager on the deadline, daily escalation after it.
• Evidence and audit trail. Every uploaded file is linked to the task and IFC commitment it proves, and every action is timestamped against a named person.
• Five automated workflows: task reminder, deadline escalation, evidence upload alert, task assignment, training acknowledgement.
• Structured data collection. One monthly form per asset replaces email, and one submission feeds both ESG and accounting.
• Training hub. A training library and register where a calendar event plus form acknowledgement creates an IFC-grade training record.

Layer 3: insight, dashboards and the lender report

• Five Power BI dashboards: task completion, training compliance, data collection, KPI performance (energy, water, waste, GHG) and action-plan status linked to IFC covenants.
• IFC report pre-screening. The draft monitoring report is checked for wording an ESG language model reads as negative or ambiguous, with clearer, dated, evidence-backed phrasing suggested. The aim is a report that reflects actual performance accurately, never one that hides an issue.
• Governance. Role-based access through Entra ID, and an AI governance policy and data processing agreement as go-live conditions. All registers are schema-documented and ready for the group's ERP rollout.

Sequenced for proof, not faith

A working AI assistant in front of the team in week four, before the larger build. Two costed phases with explicit acceptance criteria, including a 30-question benchmark in three languages the assistant has to pass at 80% or better before go-live.

Technology

All figures below are projected from the discovery and the delivery plan.

• 70 documents and 2,400+ files turned into one living task register with named owners, deadlines and evidence.
• No deadline missed silently, and escalation documented instead of walked to a desk.
• The three-month IFC report replaced by a pre-populated draft reviewed in days.
• A complete, timestamped audit trail for the lender.
• All on technology the client already licenses, with a modest monthly cloud running cost.

The risk most teams miss

An ESG management system that is not operational drifts out of compliance quietly. The gap only shows when the annual report is due, and by then it is a covenant conversation.