HFS Highlight: Atos turns CSR into sustainability services as the market demands a green recovery from COVID-19

At the beginning of 2020, we predicted that sustainability services would begin evolving from a fragmented and undefined market towards a more thriving ecosystem. The behavior of traditional sustainability players like Accenture, EY, KPMG, and others, initially proved us right. Then COVID struck—causing a slowdown of activity. But what quickly became apparent is that both enterprises and governments either couldn’t or shouldn’t go back to normal; in sustainability terms, this means a “green recovery”. We’ve been calling for some time for providers not commonly associated with blue-sky consulting to turn corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts into the sustainability services enterprise leaders need; as the longstanding sustainability providers keep pressing the accelerator, Atos is one of several new entrants following this path. By acquiring sustainability consultancy EcoAct, Atos is developing its capability to take clients through the whole decarbonization journey from design and consulting through to implementation—and doing so with the holistic narrative needed to see eye-to-eye with CEOs’ ever-increasing drive for sustainability.

Atos is striving to create and mold its own ecosystem of sustainability services.

Atos’ Decarbonization Centre of Excellence Centre (DCoE) will bring in EcoAct’s 160 climate experts along on its journey from decarbonizing itself as an enterprise, to helping clients do the same.

Over the past 18 months, existing clients have increasingly been asking for help in their net-zero journeys; this is coming directly from business leaders—with sustainability now cemented as a CEO and enterprise-wide mandate. Nourdine Bihmane, Head of Decarbonization Business Line and Head of Growing Markets at Atos commented: “We found that in many early design thinking sessions, sustainability and net-zero are increasingly becoming key discussions and we have won several new projects from this opportunity.” The mindset of executives around sustainability has so often been a barrier—it’s been an either-or assumption that going green must be expensive—but now there’s money on the table to decarbonize, and it extends throughout both IT and core business processes.

With the backing of Atos’ CEO, the DCoE will take internal know-how and existing client projects to articulate a more concrete portfolio of sustainability services—while also baking sustainability into existing services. Atos’ sees sustainability services as an end-to-end offering throughout the value chain HFS has previously considered to cover from strategic or more technical “boutique” consulting, through to implementation and managed services such as environmental, social, and governance (ESG) monitoring, reporting, and auditing.

Sustainability services are branching out of both technology and simple efficiency projects.

Many of Atos’ sustainability engagements started with simple consulting contracts. But now the opportunity to execute recommendations is increasingly being realized in both digital and business process projects—that often didn’t start with a sustainability mandate.

Atos is supporting a shipping giant to build a platform monitoring real-time shipments globally to optimize routes and save fuel consumption. Under regulatory pressure and high operations costs, the project started with cost savings in mind—but was therein driven through the design and consulting phases by a focus on the obvious win-win of decarbonization and fuel (i.e. cost) savings. A cost-saving mindset remains for many—and the pandemic is increasing this pressure—but integrated digital solutions are increasingly producing faster ROIs to prove that the business case for sustainability solutions is real.

Another example was TransnetBW, which operates the electricity transmission grid in the German state of Baden-Württemberg—for which Atos designed and is currently building and implementing a platform to help aggregate the production and buying of renewable energy. The B2B marketplace contains several stakeholders looking to accelerate renewable energy adoption in Germany; Atos won an initial advisory deal and is now on board for the execution phase too. Here we see another high-level view for rethinking and decarbonizing a whole system, with simultaneous goals of sustainability and improving costs via smarter energy utilization. We covered a similar case in Sweden through a Microsoft and Vattenfall partnership.

Atos was missing “top of stack” climate expertise; EcoAct compliments Atos’ technology, services, and desire to shape the sustainability services ecosystem.  

Before acquiring EcoAct, Atos was strong on the advisory and services side (despite not having the strongest brand image for consulting) of decarbonizing companies’ digital footprints—but it needed climate expertise, including messaging and vision, to reach the CEO agenda and fully address the enterprise-wide approach that real sustainability demands.

The combination of EcoAct’s existing reputation and startup mentality compliments Atos’ portfolio by adding the holistic narrative that c-suites need—and also allows Atos to help clients with carbon offsetting. Atos’ DCoE proposes a one-stop-shop for customers—taking them from advice to execution to mitigation and finally offsetting. It’s worth noting that offsetting should be the last resort and something that should be reduced over time with a preference for eliminating emissions—rather than just paying for the privilege of ignoring them. The European Union (EU) is also pushing genuine decarbonization, rather than offsetting, and for companies to rethink business processes from the design phase.

In their green recoveries, clients are focusing on the environmental aspect within the sustainability trifecta of environment, social, and governance (ESG)—and that’s exactly the business Atos is going after with EcoAct. Atos will also look to leverage existing emerging technology expertise to decarbonize processes: while digital comes with an environmental footprint of its own, combinations of artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT) sensors, digital twin simulations, and much more, have long been put forward as essential to the world’s efforts in combating climate change.

Beyond EcoAct, Atos is partnering with several smaller partners in the value chain. It’s aiming for a more disruptive approach to building and molding the sustainability services ecosystem—in part through its recently launched startup program SCALER.

The Bottom Line: Businesses are seeing the opportunity of a green recovery. Much like the pandemic has given new context to digital—it has given consumers and CEOs alike a new context and care for the planet. The smart providers are meeting this demand and not allowing their clients to fall back into old change-averse mindsets and sole focus on cost.