WWF & D ONE: Accelerating Sustainability Assessments & Ratings with GenAI

Joël Ineichen

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) is one of the largest environmental organizations in the world. With its more than 5 million members worldwide, WWF is actively committed to a healthy and vibrant planet in more than 100 countries. To achieve this goal, WWF is also committed to systemic transformation, especially in education, politics, finance and markets.

Based on its unique position based on credibility and trust, WWF Switzerland creates and publishes various kinds of assessments and ratings on a regular basis. In addition, they also validate respectively challenge reports and claims related to sustainability. For instance, to create transparency in a specific industry and its players, regarding their sustainability practices and standards.

We have helped WWF Switzerland to streamline these kinds of activities from several weeks to days and reduce the effort from extensive hours of manual work to a fraction of the effort and cost, while improving the consistency and quality of the assessment. With this innovative solution, WWF Switzerland is able to increase its activities around assessment, ratings or validations significantly and create transparency in areas which were not possible before, due to limited resources.

“Assessify empowers our teams to focus on strategic decision-making rather than manual data processing. It’s a great example of how AI can enhance impact in the sustainability space.” - says Attila Steinegger, Head of Digital Transformation & Data at WWF

The challenge

WWF Switzerland regularly undertakes the task of creating comprehensive assessments and ratings across a variety of industries, evaluating different market players, standards, and practices. These assessments involve extensive questionnaires and sustainability indicators to ensure a thorough evaluation. However, the process is highly resource-intensive, requiring significant time and effort for data collection, processing, and analysis. Due to the depth and breadth of information needed, assessments can take weeks to complete and depend heavily on the availability of a limited pool of experts and resources.

The solution

Together, WWF Switzerland and D ONE developed a unified web platform to automate their process with GenAI. It enables content experts to analyze sustainability-related documents, classify indicators, and perform reviews with AI. Built with Django, it offers full user control and auditability throughout the assessment lifecycle.

What this means: A full draft response is created by AI, then the human experts check the responses and correct where necessary, removing a majority of the time they previously spent on routine tasks.

WWF model
Fig. 1: High-level view of the data platform, its capabilities and processes that drive value creation (courtesy of D ONE).

The solution integrates Azure Document Intelligence for extraction, Azure OpenAI for intelligent classification, and Azure Cognitive Search for indexing and retrieval. Deployed on Azure App Services with PostgreSQL and Blob Storage, the platform ensures scalability, secure access, and structured collaboration among multiple stakeholders.

“This project shows how modern technology can serve humanity at accelerating impact. GenAI has become our catalyst for change, empowering experts to focus on insight and strategy, instead of routine. Together with WWF, we’ve turned complexity into clarity and trust.” - says Joël Ineichen, Business Unit Manager at D ONE

The benefits at a glance

“One of the key benefits of this solution is its ability to automate complex assessments and ratings at scale—without compromising quality. It’s a leap forward in how we use data an AI to drive our digital transformation journey and strengthen our data-driven approach.” - Attila Steinegger, Head of Digital Transformation & Data at WWF

  • Time to Market: Reduction of time to market from weeks or even months to several days or weeks

  • Efficiency: Reduction of effort and efficiency gains of up to 50% through automation

  • Reliability & Consistency: Consistent and comparable outputs strengthen trust with partners and stakeholder

  • Scalability: Extendibility of the platform to all other kind of sustainability assessment work and across the global WWF network

Take-away

“Assessify marks an important milestone in the digital transformation journey at WWF, especially in strengthening a more data-driven approach.” says Attila Steinegger of WWF. “By leveraging AI, they’ve streamlined complex processes and unlocked new levels of efficiency and transparency.”

We think their GenAI solution sets a new benchmark for data-driven sustainability: fast, scalable and effective.

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