Welcome to ESG Glass AI!

Overview
‍Hello, welcome to ESG Glass, an ESG data analytics company dedicated to providing clarity to business sustainability. Stemming from academic research, we employ cutting-edge data analytics through AI, NLP, ML, and social network analysis for actionable sustainability insights. Through a suite of easy-to-use products, we hope to usher in a technological paradigm for business sustainability.

What is ESG?
‍ESG. You might have heard this word in the news, but what is it really? ESG—or environmental social governance—is a metric to measure how socially responsible a company. To do this, rating agencies measure relevant subcategories across these three dimensions. Examples include pollution, diversity, energy use, board structures, etc. ESG aims to bridge the disconnect between company goals and actions in contributing to the global sustainability agenda.

While ESG sounds great in theory, there are many issues with it in practice that hinder adoption. This is largely due to a lack of standardization in ESG evaluation. Since ESG rating agencies use self-reported company filings, it allows some organizations to “greenwash” by portraying themselves in an artificially positive light. As such, this leads to inconsistent evaluation because it is hard to determine true corporate social responsibility.

Even amongst different ESG raters (i.e., MSCI, S&P Global, Sustainalytics), there is heavy disagreement. For example, according to an MIT study, the average correlation among the 6 most prominent rating agencies is only 0.54. This pales in comparison to financial ratings, which have a correlation of 0.99.

Our History
‍The seeds were first planted when I began conducting research at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence in 2021. Under the guidance of Dr. Gloor, I learned about new data science methodologies, and how you can leverage social networks to gain key insights into topics. Passionate about sustainable finance, I wanted to apply these lessons by creating a data-driven social network ESG evaluation system. Through crowdsourced data, executives could receive more concrete guidance on sustainability while getting proxies for the ESG health of their firm.

After conducting countless iterations, reading dozens of papers, and undergoing hours of debugging, we were able to create a working, proof-of-concept prototype for the system. Motivated by positive impact, we published the work at an international conference, where I presented to researchers from Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, University of Bamberg, etc.

This conference enabled us to receive impactful feedback on our research, which we incorporated to improve the system. It also encouraged us to take it to the next level to ensure more people could benefit from the work.

ESG Glass
‍As a startup, ESG Glass is dedicated to translating academic developments into real-world ESG products. Through our suite of web products, we hope to address the aggregate confusion prevalent in the ESG space. This can help us enter a new tech-driven paradigm of business sustainability.