Amazon and Clarity AI Advance Sustainable Investing at Scale

Leading sustainability technology platform, Clarity AI, uses AWS’s generative AI, machine learning, and analytics capabilities to measure sustainability and social impact of companies and funds

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced that Clarity AI, a leading technology company that delivers environmental and social insights to ensure that companies and consumers invest and purchase sustainably, is all in on AWS. Clarity AI’s platform analyzes millions of data points to help investors track, measure, and optimize the social and sustainability impact of their investment portfolios and comply with regulatory reporting. These insights empower 150 million shoppers to purchase from sustainable brands and help investors direct more than $30 trillion in funds toward companies that produce positive environmental impacts.

“Generative AI has the potential to transform every application, business, and industry, and Clarity AI is a great example of how this technology can deliver important benefits for business, society, and the planet, helping the world make more sustainable investments and purchase decisions”

“AWS provides the cloud services, flexibility, and scale we need to be a data-driven company, to unlock the power of AI, and to deliver critical sustainability insights to investors, consumers, and organizations making key decisions that impact our planet and its inhabitants each and every day,” said Ángel Agudo, board director and senior vice president of Product at Clarity AI. “At Clarity AI, our ambition is that social and environmental impact is seen by investors and businesses as a key variable beyond purely financial values.”

Clarity AI runs its mission-critical platforms on AWS and uses AWS generative artificial intelligence (generative AI), machine learning (ML), and analytics capabilities to provide sustainability analysis tools for investing, corporate research, benchmarking, consumer ecommerce purchasing, and regulatory reporting. Using Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service to build, train, and deploy ML models, Amazon SageMaker Studio, a development environment for ML, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) GPU instances, Clarity AI trains up to 7 billion parameterlarge language models (LLMs) and natural language processing (NLP) models. These models detect, manage, and classify millions of unstructured data points from sustainability reports, financial reports, earnings calls, and research documents. Clarity AI then uses this data to pinpoint which companies might be impacted by a specific news event and determine the level of environmental severity. This unbiased information is then shared with investors, researchers, and consumers to help them make sustainable investing and purchasing decisions.

Leveraging cloud capabilities from AWS, Clarity AI’s sustainability technology platform provides clear and objective data on more than 70,000 companies, 420,000 funds, and 400 local governments. Ecommerce companies use the company’s environmental analysis of electronics, fashion and apparel, groceries and household brands, and health and beauty companies to visually identify sustainable brands to shoppers. Clarity AI’s platform integrates with existing ecommerce environments to display badges that recognize a brand’s sustainability performance, allowing environmentally conscious shoppers to reward sustainable practices through their purchases.

Today’s investors and consumers base investment and purchase decisions on reporting frameworks—such as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reports—that disclose information about an organization’s environmental impact. Investors use the data in these reports to track a company’s environmental and societal impact, but it can be challenging to validate ESG performance data because of the lack of unified reporting standards, evolving ESG regulations, and fragmented data.

Clarity AI developed generative AI models on AWS using Amazon SageMaker to uncover new data points that help clients avoid investing in companies or funds that are engaged in greenwashing or harmful environmental practices. Using NLP models, Clarity AI extracts information, identifies problems, and evaluates the importance of environmental issues. Amazon QuickSight, AWS’s business intelligence service, enables Clarity AI to present findings using modern, interactive dashboards, reports, embedded analytics, and natural language queries. Internally, Clarity AI uses a generative AI–powered chatbot that runs on AWS to handle inquiries from prospective clients, increasing the efficiency of their product specialist team.

The company also relies on AWS to manage security, improve governance, and maintain regulatory compliance. Clarity AI is using Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service that continuously monitors AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity, and AWS WAF as a web firewall to protect against common web exploits and bots that can affect availability and compromise security. AWS security and compliance services have contributed to Clarity AI’s granting of ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certifications.

Moving forward, Clarity AI plans to expand its use of AWS generative AI and machine learning services such as Amazon Bedrock, a service that makes multiple foundation models available via an API, to harness innovative technologies, help them streamline their model development process, and strengthen their inference capabilities.

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“Generative AI has the potential to transform every application, business, and industry, and Clarity AI is a great example of how this technology can deliver important benefits for business, society, and the planet, helping the world make more sustainable investments and purchase decisions,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president of Sales, Marketing, and Global Services at AWS. “Working with customers like Clarity AI, we believe that choice and security are the winning combination that will help organizations make the most of generative AI to reimagine experiences for customers.”