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Artículo
25 nov 2025
Findings from the third annual Kyndryl Global Sustainability Barometer study, conducted in collaboration with Microsoft, are conclusive: organizations must align their business and sustainability strategies to innovate and succeed. Those who fail to make the shift from mere regulatory compliance to active stewardship risk falling behind in a world that is running out of time to adapt.
Among the key determinations:
→ Embedding sustainability into core business strategies helps drive innovation, cost savings and resilience
→ Sustainability helps deliver financial results through operational efficiency, customer retention and the creation of new market opportunities
→ Early adopters applying AI to sustainability report measurable cost savings
Here, Kyndryl Senior Vice President for Global Citizenship and Sustainability Faith Taylor goes behind the numbers.
How is technology helping to enable sustainability?
Faith Taylor: Technology has always played an important role in business strategy, and in the global digital economy that role has become more prominent. If organizations want to modernize by infusing AI into their operations, they must have reliable data — and part of that process involves managing the data related to sustainability. So, we now have a situation in which forward-thinking companies — those we refer to as integration-focused organizations in the study — are leading in sustainability because of their ability to use AI to take proactive approaches to environmental stewardship. Instead of making decisions reacting solely to emerging regulations, integration-focused organizations are becoming proactive.
I see a growing intent to move from retrospective AI applications to predictive ones among our customers. They are increasingly looking for solutions that would help them avoid high energy usage or emissions. It’s about optimizing operations by prevention, not reaction. We’ve developed the Kyndryl Sustainability Advisor on this premise. It forecasts IT infrastructure emissions, suggests improvements for energy reductions and can employ AI to execute improvements.
Agentic AI — systems that can autonomously reason, plan and execute complex tasks — takes predictive sustainability solutions to the next level. With its ability to improve decision making through continuous learning, agentic AI helps organizations become more resilient and responsive.
That’s how advanced technical capabilities — intelligently applied — are enabling the type of proactive, data-driven decision making that helps people connect strategy with operations more effectively.
How do organizations overcome the struggle to embed sustainability?
Taylor: Moving from intention to action can be really complicated, and many organizations lack the required capabilities to advance. But the decision to move forward is no longer optional. As our study indicates, an organization’s sustainability capability has a direct impact on business performance.
Clear strategic alignment is the most important factor in the success of organizational sustainability programs. Misaligned priorities can lead to siloed operations and missed opportunities for innovation, revenue generation and long-term value creation. That’s why sustainability should be a core component of every organization’s business agenda.
Technology can play a crucial role in driving organizational synergy. An organization-wide, AI-powered data foundation can enable more collaboration across teams and functions to help empower faster and better decision making.
Kyndryl supports customers by providing sound governance and data management across a variety of operational systems. This helps our customers produce transparent, auditable sustainability disclosure reports, and enables them to apply AI to help reduce their environmental impact.
How does a focus on sustainability affect the ROI of AI?
Taylor: Applying AI to sustainability issues helps enable a closed-loop system in which strategy and execution complement each other. By moving to an active posture, organizations can use AI to automate complex, multi-step procedures, monitor data streams to identify inefficiencies, and then take preventive measures in real time. When enterprises take these steps, they begin to see the types of positive results that have attracted AI investment in the first place.
Our study indicates that an average of 60% of integration-focused organizations are realizing benefits from their technology-enabled sustainability investments. These benefits include operational efficiency, customer retention and new market opportunities in addition to regulatory compliance and enhanced brand value — all solid contributors to positive ROI.
Ultimately, embedding sustainability into business strategy helps organizations become more resilient, innovative, and profitable. So it’s time for us to regard sustainability as a key growth factor, in addition to its importance to environmental stewardship. And as our latest research indicates, agentic and predictive AI can be valuable partners as people develop creative approaches to preserving our environment while enabling productivity and growth.
