The EU's omnibus procedure has initially reduced the regulatory pressure surrounding ESG for many medium-sized companies. But those who postpone the issue are wasting potential: well-thought-out ESG data management creates transparency, strengthens stakeholder confidence and lays the foundation for digital resilience. It is also a prerequisite for the effective use of artificial intelligence. In times of geopolitical and technological upheaval, ESG is thus becoming a central building block for digital sustainability.
In many companies, ESG (environmental, social, governance) is still seen as a mandatory programme – another reporting item that has to be dealt with for regulatory purposes. However, many fail to recognise that sustainability is not a reporting project. It is a strategic investment in future viability and resilience.
What lies behind these turbulent times? Pressure is mounting in the recessionary German economy. What would be a crisis for large corporations would be a life-threatening disaster for many small and medium-sized enterprises. This is because they often lack what corporations have built up over many years: redundancy, infrastructure, and in-house communication and IT expertise.
Digital resilience – the underestimated strategic element
Digital resilience means not only being able to respond to digital disruptions, but also being prepared for crises and actively managing them. This is not just about cyber security in the narrow sense, but about building a resilient, flexible and sovereign digital ecosystem under sustainable conditions. This is precisely where the blind spot of many medium-sized organisations lies.
While corporations diversify their risks, combine multiple providers and maintain their own infrastructures, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) stick with a system environment that has often been in place for decades, occasionally receiving an expensive licence upgrade here and there – for reasons of efficiency, cost discipline or convenience. But the 90s are over, the tide is turning, and efficiency does not equal resilience. Why is more resilience needed at this point? And what does ESG have to do with it?
Digital sovereignty and ESG are not competing matters, but two sides of the same coin
1. The impact of geopolitics is drawing nearer
Digital sovereignty is not an EU buzzword debate, but a tangible geopolitical issue. Ursula von der Leyen recently had no real negotiating options and had to humbly agree to 15% tariffs, with US technology being one of many instruments of power. Those who rely on US services must play along – or suddenly lose access. The pressure to become more independent, not only technologically but also geopolitically and ethically, is growing. This is currently evident in the discussion about DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) guidelines, which has just been sparked in the US.
Serious ESG communication requires companies to not only be economically resilient, but also to consider the ethical, social and environmental impacts of their (digital) infrastructure. However, digital independence does not mean avoiding US technologies across the board. Rather, it is about knowing critical paths and building targeted alternatives. Hybrid strategies can also create resilience, for example by combining US services with European open source or cloud providers.
2. Systemic risks due to multiple resource shortages
Energy shortages, skills shortages, supply problems: all of these also affect IT systems. Resilient companies therefore plan for redundancies, failover systems such as dark sites and local alternatives so that they can respond flexibly. But ESG responsibility goes beyond simple contingency strategies. Companies that optimise the energy consumption of their IT systems and choose more sustainable technologies not only strengthen their resilience, but also act in an environmentally conscious manner. And there is an urgent need for action here, because the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is changing everything – starting with the electricity bill! Energy-efficient technologies and the use of renewable energies in the IT sector are increasingly becoming a social value and an important ESG criterion. Quick test question: Do you know whether your website is powered by green electricity?
3. Artificial intelligence is changing digital access
ChatGPT & Co. are fundamentally changing search in particular. AI provides answers directly – without clicking on the website. Those who do not communicate in a technically clean, structured and authoritative or recognised manner will become digitally invisible. If you want to remain findable, you don't have to be louder, but more readable for AI. The competition for visibility has shifted here – and with it the rules of the game. What can medium-sized companies in particular do here?
- Structured data and semantic markup:
KI benötigt klar strukturierte Daten, um Inhalte zu verstehen. Webseiten-Verantwortliche sollten H2/H3-Überschriften, Aufzählungen und strukturierte Datenmarkups (wie Schema.org) verwenden, um Inhalte für KI-Systeme zugänglich zu machen. - Question-and-answer formats (Q&As):
Communications departments should ideally design content in such a way that it directly answers typical user questions. A well-structured Q&A page helps ensure that content appears in AI-generated responses. The answer to the question posed to ChatGPT, "Why should I invest in company XY?", should ideally reflect the pre-formulated answer on the company's own Q&A page. The ESG elements of the equity story should be emphasised! The same applies to questions on sustainability matters, such as what measures the company is taking to protect the climate. - E-E-A-T principle:
AI evaluates content based on experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Organisations should substantiate their expertise and trustworthiness through external sources and transparent author profiles. ESG facts or articles could, for example, appear regularly in well-visited blogs or on press partners' websites. - Use versatile content formats:
AI prefers different content formats such as videos, infographics and interactive content. Companies should therefore feel free to use multimedia formats much more often in order to reach a broader target group. Reach is still the key issue here! And that's hardly achievable with a 20 MB PDF in A4 format hidden as a download link in the depths of a company website. - Optimise technical performance:
An accessible website with fast loading times and a mobile-friendly design not only saves a lot of energy and improves the user experience, but also massively boosts visibility in AI systems. A clean code base ensures that content is classified as reliable and relevant by AI.
"If you want to remain digitally discoverable, you don't have to be louder, you have to be more readable for AI."
Thorsten Greiten, Managing Partner at NetFederation
Visibility, reach and relevance through ESG data
Companies that cleanly prepare their ESG data, structure processes, consistently map key figures and use digital formats not only strengthen transparency towards stakeholders, but also their technological capabilities.
What does that mean in concrete terms? Anyone setting up ESG reporting today – whether to comply with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), for investor and customer enquiries about specific ESG data, or for internal supply chain management – must consolidate data sources, create interfaces, network system architectures, formulate semantically clean content, and establish automated reporting processes. These building blocks form the foundations that are also crucial for the use of AI. In other words, those who can do ESG are automatically a step closer to the strategic challenge of "AI readiness"!
This is because AI systems – whether chatbots, analysis tools or generative language models – need structured, accessible, machine-readable and contextualised data. They benefit from consistently maintained information architectures, clean metadata, taxonomic clarity and logically structured content. All of this comes about when companies prepare their ESG content in a digitally sophisticated manner – for example, in the form of digital sustainability reports, Q&As, interactive dashboards or modular reporting systems.
Organisations that view sustainability not only as a compliance task but also as a lever for digitalisation are creating a robust data and system basis that will enable them to use AI efficiently in the future – whether for automated reports, intelligent risk assessments or dialogue-oriented communication. ESG thus becomes a springboard into the AI future – not as an end in itself, but as an integral part of a resilient, adaptive organisation.
Author: Thorsten Greiten
Thorsten Greiten (51) studied business administration with a focus on taxation and business informatics at the University of Mannheim. He is Managing Partner at NetFederation – part of team neusta group and responsible for the area of digital financial communication. Since 2022, he has been a lecturer in the "Digital Investor Relations" lecture series in the Department of Digital Business and Innovation at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences.
