IT Sustainability Think Tank: What enterprises must do to make sustainability work in 2026

The year the conversation grew up

If 2024 was the year when businesses spoke about sustainability with renewed urgency, 2025 has been the year that they started to speak about it differently. The language has become more grounded, less rhetorical.

Senior IT and business leaders are talking in terms of data quality, interoperability, and assurance. They are less interested in sweeping pledges and more concerned with the actual mechanics of delivery.

That change in tone reflects a broader reality. The easing of some regulatory pressures, such as the reduction in scope of the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the US administration’s rollback of its own net zero legislation, did not dampen demand for credible sustainability action; it simply changed where the pressure came from.

It’s now lenders, investors, and customers who are enforcing higher standards through contracts and capital access rather than regulators alone. Organisations are expected to produce ‘investor-grade’ sustainability data that can withstand the same scrutiny as financial reporting.

This shift has made sustainability inseparable from competitiveness. CIOs and technology directors increasingly find themselves responsible for providing the infrastructure that allows their organisations to measure, manage, and verify their environmental impact. The conversation is no longer simply about corporate social responsibility. It is about systems resilience, supply-chain viability, and digital readiness for a low-carbon economy.

From dashboards to decisions

Nowhere has the shift been more visible than in the way in which technology itself is being deployed. Over the past year, enterprises have begun to connect sustainability data with operational systems in a far more integrated way.

What started out as a compliance function is evolving into a source of intelligence that can shape day-to-day decision-making – a trend TechMarketView has seen developing since it began tracking the market, with the Q4 2022 Sustainability Technology Activity Index.

Fast-forward to 2025, and the Index research found that analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and geospatial technologies are increasingly being combined into single platforms capable of providing “climate intelligence” – unified views of how assets, operations, and supply chains interact with environmental factors.

These developments reflect a new mindset: sustainability information is most valuable not when it’s simply reported, but when it’s acted upon.

In practice, that has meant AI being used to optimise production schedules and energy use; data integration platforms connecting emissions data directly with procurement and logistics; and the rise of digital twins for infrastructure and manufacturing facilities that allow organisations to simulate and adjust environmental impacts before they occur.

It’s not just heavy industry either - local authorities have also started to play a significant role in piloting these technologies – particularly in areas such as water management, transport, and waste.

However, the demand for AI services (which rely on large-scale datacentre infrastructure for both model training and operations) in sustainability use cases highlights the “sustainable AI paradox” – the fact that the very systems being deployed to solve climate challenges are themselves energy and water-intensive – and so it’s imperative that any sustainability solution deploying the tech demonstrates clear net environmental benefits.

And this can be challenging when supposedly green IT harbours dirty secrets, with emissions and resource data either provided at too higher level to be usefu. Or not provided at all.

These examples show how sustainability has begun to infiltrate the everyday operations of organisations rather than remaining a discrete reporting exercise. The result is a more credible, data-driven approach to sustainability management (notwithstanding those concerns about the environmental impact of AI-powered data services themselves) and a growing recognition that IT strategy is becoming intertwined with climate strategy.

Signs of progress

For all the uncertainty of global politics, 2025 did deliver some tangible progress. The quality of sustainability data has improved markedly, with more organisations pursuing assurance-ready systems and recognising the need for traceability from source to statement.

Many are now treating sustainability data with the same governance as financial data, building internal controls and seeking independent validation.

Procurement also took a step forward, with a notable increase in ‘lifecycle thinking’ as organisations start to consider the embodied carbon of hardware, the emissions from cloud workloads, and the impacts of disposal or repurposing when making their buying decisions.

Public Sector buyers, in particular, will soon find themselves needing to incorporate such metrics into tender requirements, as digital waste tracking regulation comes into effect in April 2026, with the government’s Carbon Budget and Growth Delivery Plan both building on existing waste sector transformation initiatives, and promising a Circular Economy Strategy for England “in the coming months”.

Perhaps most encouragingly, the year saw smaller enterprises start to catch up, with simplified sustainability platforms giving SMEs a practical route into reporting and participation in data exchanges that were once the preserve of large corporates. This widening of the ecosystem is vital, because sustainability is not achieved in isolation - it’s a network effect (and everybody ends up as somebody else’s Scope 3).

Persistent gaps and hard lessons

Despite progress, there remains a gap between ambition and execution, with the challenge no longer being one of awareness; rather it’s a question of integration. Many organisations still treat sustainability as a project rather than a process, resulting in a patchwork of disconnected data sources and initiatives that struggle to scale.

When systems do not talk to each other, sustainability performance cannot easily be measured - let alone improved.

Skills shortages compound the problem. The intersection between technology, business, and sustainability expertise remains thinly populated, with organisations competing for a limited pool of talent able to translate environmental objectives into digital architectures (and vice versa).

Data from the Index has shown that where in-house capability is lacking, reliance on external consultancy persists; useful in the short term, but insufficient for long-term maturity.

Economic conditions have added another layer of difficulty too. For many CIOs, sustainability initiatives had to compete with immediate cost pressures, and those that succeeded were often framed as efficiency plays: projects that reduced waste or energy consumption whilst also saving money.

The lesson here is that sustainability is most resilient when it aligns with business value (and benefits are articulated in CFO-friendly terms).

Lastly, regulatory fragmentation remains and poses a particular problem to multinational organisations.

Divergent reporting regimes – the EU’s CSRD, the UK’s International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB)-aligned standards, and the evolving Sustainability Disclosure Requirements – mean that technology systems must accommodate multiple frameworks simultaneously. Enterprises that invested early in modular, configurable software architectures are now better equipped to handle this complexity; those that didn’t will find 2026 to be a challenging year.

Building the systems of sustainability

The direction of travel for sustainability as a discipline is that it’s becoming systemic, with sustainability management increasingly resembling Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in terms of integrated platforms tracking environmental performance across the business in real time to feed directly into operational decision-making.

To reach that stage, however, organisations will need to strengthen three foundations:

• Interoperability: Environmental data must be able to move freely between systems, suppliers, and regulators. Over the next year, expect to see increased focus on shared data standards and APIs that support automated reporting and assurance. Those who build interoperability now will save themselves costly retrofits later.

• Outcomes over compliance: The most advanced organisations are already shifting away from treating sustainability as a disclosure requirement and towards continuous performance improvement. Real-time monitoring, automated verification, and the integration of sustainability metrics into business KPIs will become the markers of maturity. Assurance, once an end-of-year process, will move towards continuous validation as data systems mature.

• Skills: Technology can provide the platforms, but people must interpret, prioritise, and act on the data they provide. Organisations that succeed will invest in cross-functional literacy, developing teams that understand both environmental data and digital infrastructure.

Looking ahead to the ‘operational decade’

What 2025 has revealed most clearly is that we are now entering the ‘operational decade’ of sustainability. The easy wins have been claimed; the next gains will come from integration, automation, and behavioural change (and technology is crucial to all three).

The year’s most important realisation may be that sustainability and digital transformation are now inseparable, with the same systems that deliver efficiency, transparency, and resilience also being those that enable progress towards net zero.

In this respect, the sustainability agenda should no longer be considered as a separate workstream; instead, it can be the test of whether holistic transformation strategies are truly fit for a wider perspective of purpose.

As we move into 2026, enterprises will be judged less on the promises they make and more on the systems they build and (ultimately) on the difference they deliver.

The organisations that thrive will be those that embed sustainability into their operations so thoroughly that it becomes invisible… not a statement of intent, but a normal condition of doing business.