Second place AIM Hackathon: Trustpilot for ESG – Detecting Greenwashing with AI 🌱

 Authors: Mark Drozdov, Artur Sogomonyan and Ilya Belov

Mark Drozdov, Artur Sogomonyan, and Ilya Belov proudly secured second place at the AIM Hackathon 2024! Their project addressed the critical issue of greenwashing, with an ambitious goal to create a scalable tool that detects misleading sustainability claims in ESG reports. Leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Large Language Models (LLMs), they took a meaningful step toward enhancing transparency in corporate sustainability practices.

Why greenwashing?

Greenwashing is a widespread problem. Companies often claim to be “sustainable” or “eco-friendly” without proper evidence. The developed solution aims to automatically detect greenwashing by analyzing ESG reports and assigning a trustworthiness score.

 

Key Types of Greenwashing To Detect:

  • Z1 Hidden Alternative Costs (Compromises)

  • Z2 Lack of Evidence in Communicating Marketing Activities

  • Z3 Lack of Accuracy

  • Z4 Lack of Transmission into Real Product Features

  • Z5 Lesser Evil

    The team focused on these five because they’re easily detectable in text. They found clear examples of each in H&M’s 2021 Sustainability Report, previously flagged by the Changing Markets Foundation for greenwashing.
     

How RAG Works:

  1. Document Upload: Users upload an ESG report, and the system extracts and cleans the text.

  2. Retrieval: RAG pulls relevant examples from our dataset, which contains pre-labeled greenwashing examples.

  3. Generation & Detection: The AI compares the new report to the retrieved examples and categorizes potential greenwashing.

  4. Highlighting & Scoring: The system highlights greenwashing sections and assigns a trustworthiness score.

  5. Continuous Improvement: With every new report uploaded, the system learns and improves.

Advantages and Future Improvements:

This tool can be used by investors, NGOs, auditors, and consumers to hold companies accountable for their sustainability claims. As more reports are uploaded, the system becomes smarter. Future improvements will include better fraud detection by integrating news and historical data.

At the end of the day, sustainability and digitalization can go hand in hand, and this tool will help us push towards a shared goal of making the world a better place.🌍✨

Blog 11/5/24

AIM Hackathon 2024: Sustainability Meets LLMs

Focusing on impactful AI applications, participants addressed key issues like greenwashing detection, ESG report relevance mapping, and compliance with the European Green Deal.
Blog 10/29/24

Third Place - AIM Hackathon 2024: The Venturers

ESG reports are often filled with vague statements, obscuring key facts investors need. This team created an AI prototype that analyzes these reports sentence-by-sentence, categorizing content to produce a "relevance map".
Blog 11/4/24

SAM Wins First Prize at AIM Hackathon

The winning team of the AIM Hackathon, nexus. Group AI, developed SAM, an AI-powered ESG reporting platform designed to help companies streamline their sustainability compliance.
Referenz 4/13/23

Modern user interface and mobile access for all employees

The user interface is based on Open UI5, an open source library for the user interface provided by SAP. The design principles are based on SAP Fiori, which ensures uniform user guidance for various software applications at Fraport.
Blog 8/11/22

Part 1: TIMETOACT Logistics Hackathon - Behind the Scenes

A look behind the scenes of our Hackathon on Sustainable Logistic Simulation in May 2022. This was a hybrid event, running on-site in Vienna and remotely. Participants from 12 countries developed smart agents to control cargo delivery truck fleets in a simulated Europe.

Wissen 8/30/24

LLM-Benchmarks August 2024

Instead of our general LLM benchmarks, we present the first benchmark of different AI architectures in August.
Sustainability. Wir unterstützen Sie dabei, Ihre Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie zu entwickeln und umzusetzen.
Service

Sustainability

We support you in developing and implementing your sustainability strategy.
Kompetenz

Green IT: Your Status Quo Assessment for Sustainable IT

Sustainability in IT means using resources efficiently, reducing energy consumption, maximizing the lifespan of devices, and minimizing environmental impact at the end of their lifecycle. These actions help improve a company's carbon footprint, minimize compliance risks, and reduce costs in the long run.
Unternehmen 1/19/23

Sustainability in the TIMETOACT GROUP

Sustainability is one of the big topics of our time and we also want to get involved and face up to our responsibility as TIMETOACT GROUP. Find out everything about our sustainability activities here.
Lösung 3/16/23

CloudRun - Bring containerized apps to the cloud!

Improve scalability, efficiency, and save costs with our CloudRun services. We help you seamlessly deploy your application, including automated deployments and faster development cycles. Benefit from a scalable and cost-effective solution that seamlessly integrates with Google's CI/CD services.
Blog 2/3/25

ChatGPT & Co: LLM Benchmarks for January

Find out which large language models outperformed in the January 2025 benchmarks. Stay informed on the latest AI developments and performance metrics.
Headerbild zu IBM Watson Assistant
Technologie

IBM Watson Assistant

Watson Assistant identifies intention in requests that can be received via multiple channels. Watson Assistant is trained based on real-live requests and can understand the context and intent of the query based on the acting AI. Extensive search queries are routed to Watson Discovery and seamlessly embedded into the search result.
Blog 6/27/23

Boosting speed of scikit-learn regression algorithms

The purpose of this blog post is to investigate the performance and prediction speed behavior of popular regression algorithms, i.e. models that predict numerical values based on a set of input variables.
Kompetenz

Governance & Operational Excellence

Digitalization inevitably leads to business processes changing and roles and responsibilities being redistributed. At the same time, new legal requirements, regulations and standards need to be met.
Blog 7/22/24

Let's build an Enterprise AI Assistant

Let’s take the basic principles of building AI assistants for a spin with a product case that we worked on: using AI to support enterprise sales pipeline.
Schulung 6/2/23

Practice-oriented training for Google Workspace and GCP

Improve your skills in Google Workspace and GCP with our hands-on training courses. Optimize your workflows and increase your performance.
Training

Jira Automation (Cloud)

Over the course of the Jira Automation training participants will learn how to reduce project complexity through well-designed automations. With automation in Jira Cloud, you can create automation rules based on dozens of triggers, increasing the value of Jira and empowering your entire team to manage process consistency and productivity.
Wissen 4/14/23

General Data Protection Regulation of idea management

Walldorf-based dacuro GmbH provides the external data protection officer for companies, helps with the fulfillment of documentation obligations and advises on all aspects of data protection. Fulfilling the requirements of the GDPR without blocking everyday life is the claim of dacuro GmbH. The team of lawyers and IT specialists provides support for all GDPR challenges, whether they are of a legal or technical nature.
Blog 10/4/24

Open-sourcing 4 solutions from the Enterprise RAG Challenge

Our RAG competition is a friendly challenge different AI Assistants competed in answering questions based on the annual reports of public companies.

Blog 1/7/25

ChatGPT & Co: LLM Benchmarks for December

Find out which large language models outperformed in the December 2024 benchmarks. Stay informed on the latest AI developments and performance metrics.

Bleiben Sie mit dem TIMETOACT GROUP Newsletter auf dem Laufenden!