AI Can Measure How ESG Really Impacts the Bottom Line

Recently, the two of us put four widely available large language models to work on ExxonMobil’s public disclosures. The goal was not to produce another ESG score, and it was not to single out ExxonMobil. It was to test whether AI could do something sustainability analysis has long struggled to do at scale: take the environmental and social issues a company itself discloses as financially relevant, map them to specific income-statement, balance-sheet, and cash-flow line items, and estimate how strong or weak performance on each would affect the company’s value. One of us had done this kind of analysis by hand before. It took about 100 hours. With AI, the same core work took roughly an hour; parts of it were done in minutes.