At Nordic Business Forum 2026 I sat under a conference screen the size of a house. Paul Polman, who ran Unilever from 2009 to 2019, was on stage. Behind him, the purpose story from those years: three goals, a wall of coloured squares, and a shareholder value figure at the end. The room liked it. I liked it too, in 2019.
In 2021 a good part of my work was sustainability in cloud environments. How much energy a workload draws, where it runs, what a region choice does to the footprint of a system. The subject has changed shape since then. The argument on that screen has not, and that is the problem with it.
The question changed shape
In 2019 sustainability was a story a company chose to tell. Companies mapped their work to the seventeen goals, printed the squares on the annual report, and moved on. The mapping was cheap, so everyone did it, and it stopped meaning much.
Then it became law. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive turned the story into audited numbers on a fixed schedule. In 2025 the EU stopped the clock for most companies, and the Omnibus package narrowed who reports directly. A mid-market company in the Nordics is now, most likely, outside the direct duty.
That is not the end of it. The companies still inside the duty are your customers, your lender and your largest supplier. They need numbers from their value chain, and the value chain is you. The duty left the statute and moved into the purchasing questionnaire. There is no directive to read, only a deadline on somebody else’s letterhead.
What did not change
The numbers are still nobody’s. That was true in 2019 and it is true now. Ask a leadership team what the company’s energy use was last quarter and watch what happens. Someone remembers a spreadsheet. Someone else remembers a consultant’s report from two years ago. The figure exists, in a sense, and nobody can produce it on the day it is asked for.
The board that asked what the company is doing about AI is about to ask this. Not from conviction, and not from a slide at a conference. A customer will ask them, and the board will pass it down. Both questions arrive the same way. Both fail the same way.
Purpose is not a mechanism
The story on that screen has one weakness. It runs from purpose to performance and asks you to believe the arrow. A company chose to do good, and value followed. Maybe it did. A board cannot oversee an arrow. It can oversee a number, a date and a name.
So skip the arrow. Treat sustainability the way a board should treat AI. A problem with a name, a number in your CFO’s units, a definition of solved, and a date in the minutes. The number is the difference. It is not a goal, it is a measurement. Tonnes, kilowatt hours, litres, percent of spend with a supplier who can answer the same question. Kept as a record with a date on every line, not as a one-off report.
Nothing in that requires a purpose statement. A company can hold its numbers without believing anything in particular. It cannot answer a customer without them.
One more class of number, in the same place
Here is the part that matters to us. The record a company needs for the sustainability question is the record it already needs for everything else. The same ledger. The same rule that nothing goes in without a source and a date. The same person answerable for it.
We build a system that holds a company’s numbers, decisions and plans in one place and keeps them current. The AI question was the first reason to have one. Sustainability is the second, and it is a cleaner case, because the numbers are physical. A kilowatt hour does not depend on who is in the room.
When the questionnaire arrives, the answer should be a query, not a search party. That is the whole difference between a company that can account for what it does and one that reconstructs it every time.
What AI costs is now the same question
There is a third question, and it folds the first two together. AI runs on electricity, and the amount is no longer small. The International Energy Agency published its first full account of data centre demand in 2025, and boards have started reading it.
The board that funded AI work last year will ask what it draws, where it runs, and whether the number is in the same record as the rest. Region choice, model choice, how much of the day a system sits idle. Those were my questions in 2021, in a different job. They are the same questions now, and the answer belongs in the ledger next to the gains the work produced.
We host in the European Union and can say which region. That is the kind of answer a board can check. A commitment is not.
Take the second question to the next meeting
Do not wait for the questionnaire. Pick one physical number the company will be asked for within a year. Energy, most likely, or a supplier figure. Find out who holds it today and how long it takes to produce. Put that time in the minutes.
Then decide where the number will live from now on, with a date and a source on every line. Write down who answers for it. A year from now, the answer should not depend on a spreadsheet someone remembers.
The board is not really asking about sustainability. It is asking, again, whether the company can account for what it does.