WATERSHED
Q. PLEASE INTRODUCE YOURSELF AND YOUR ROLE
» Hi, I’ m Yubing Zhang. I lead AI products at Watershed. My job is to take the messy reality of sustainability work, including data scattered across finance systems, utility bills and supply chains, and build AI-powered workflows that help companies get to trusted answers faster, with the right safeguards for audit and compliance – and that ultimately steer them towards real decarbonisation opportunities.
Q. PLEASE INTRODUCE WATERSHED
» Watershed is a sustainability AI platform that helps companies measure, report and reduce their environmental impact. We work with many of the world’ s largest and most complex organisations, and the through-line is always the same: sustainability is a data problem and a change-management problem. Our platform brings together operational data, ESG data and emissions data in one place, applies rigorous climate methodologies, and then turns that into action, from credible reporting to targeted decarbonisation plans.
Q. HOW CAN AI BE USED FOR SUSTAINABILITY?
» Sustainability is a sophisticated, mission-critical discipline that drives business value and guards against risk. Companies are using sustainability data to identify operational inefficiencies, spot risk in their supply chain and earn a competitive advantage in customer deals.
“Generic models can be impressive, but they do not come with built-in sustainability judgment, nor the evaluation scaffolding needed for this domain”
Yubing Zhang Head of AI Products Watershed
With the right tools, sustainability practitioners can do all of the above while building an ironclad case for sustainability as a value driver. Instead, they’ re spending 90 % of their time mired in data collection, data cleaning and report drafting. By the time they get the numbers that can show value or inform sustainable decision-making, those numbers are nearly a year old, and the window for action is closing.
Purpose-built sustainability AI is changing this equation. Built with climate science, rigorous quality control, and a domain-specific data foundation, sustainability AI can solve corporate sustainability’ s thorniest problems. It can make difficult tasks simple, and impossible tasks possible. It can flip the ratio, so sustainability practitioners spend 90 % of their time on decarbonisation.
82 May 2026