The 130-year-old global energy technology company builds on years of sustainability reporting to meet growing global regulation, strengthen its internal capabilities—and delivers results that impress even external consultants.
Landis+Gyr's Head of ESG, Cecilia Silva-Wagner, needed to scale the company's sustainability reporting to meet growing regulatory, customer, and investor demands across a global business serving more than 2,000 customers. As reporting requirements grew, the team needed a more intuitive solution that made its data easier to analyze and its calculations more transparent. In 2025, Landis+Gyr moved to Watershed—and used it to complete its first comprehensive CDP submission, with results that impressed even its external consultants.
Challenge
As sustainability reporting requirements expanded across multiple jurisdictions, Landis+Gyr needed a more scalable, intuitive and transparent reporting solution. Opaque pricing discouraged the team from digging into its data, the interface made it difficult to extract reports and provided limited transparency, and manual work consumed time better spent on strategy.
Solution
Silva-Wagner moved the team to Watershed for more intuitive data management, built-in climate expertise, and support for reporting across multiple frameworks, including CDP. The platform's collaboration tools also let the lean sustainability team distribute work across the organization.
Results
Challenge
Landis+Gyr, a leading provider of global energy technology solutions, was founded in Switzerland in 1896, and has grown into a global operation that produces software and hardware, serving over 2,000 customers worldwide. That longevity—operating for over 130 years—speaks to a company built on long-term thinking. "We did not get to where we are today on the basis of short-term decisions," says Cecilia Silva-Wagner, Landis+Gyr's Head of ESG. "We have done so by building resiliency through the years and evolving to maintain our relevance in the market."
When Silva-Wagner joined in 2021, she was hired to build a global sustainability function and take the company’s sustainability program, including its reporting, to the next level.
"Our organization sensed that regulation was starting to move faster and would lead to reporting requirements that needed to be managed across many jurisdictions," she says. She spent her first year establishing the company's sustainability strategy, developing a materiality assessment, and identifying priority issues with stakeholders across the business.
The following year brought a regulatory whirlwind. Landis+Gyr had produced an annual sustainability report since 2015 and measured its carbon footprint since 2007, but emerging frameworks and uncertainty about which standards would prevail required a new level of preparation.
Regulatory pressure wasn't the only driver. Customers and investors were asking for more. "Many of our customers are state or government-owned utilities, so we began to see heightened interest in regulations from them," Silva-Wagner says. "And as a publicly listed company on the Swiss stock exchange, investors began showing interest in this data, too."
Solution
The company already had an ESG reporting system, but after using it for several years, Silva-Wagner was convinced the team could do better. Key pain points included slow customer service and an opaque pricing model that charged separately for essentials like emissions factor updates.
"Our system was not as holistic as we needed it to be, and because of how we were billed for services, we saw a decrease in enthusiasm to dig deeper into our data," she says. "For things that are critical, like emissions factors, if we wanted to update them, we had to pay for them separately. That just wasn't scalable as we began to enhance the quality of our carbon footprint calculations in response to increasing requirements."
The interface was complicated, with little visualization. Getting reports out of the system was so difficult that the team rarely did. It was also difficult to trace calculations back to the underlying methodologies and assumptions, leaving the team with what often felt like a “black box”. As reporting expectations increased, the team needed a solution that offered greater transparency and made it easier to analyze data, generate reports, and share insights across the organization.
As requirements strengthened across multiple jurisdictions, the team was managing its reporting but not efficiently. "It required a lot of manual work," says Silva-Wagner. "After struggling with our existing tool for several years, we decided to move to a platform that could support our growing needs and help us improve our carbon footprinting."
The team evaluated the market and chose Watershed. "With Watershed, our work feels more intuitive and lets us slice the data in different ways," says Silva-Wagner. "Plus, with our shared Google Cloud strategic partnership, there were synergies that made it a no-brainer."
Given Landis+Gyr’s role in energy management, climate change and energy-related topics are important elements of the company’s sustainability agenda. "For us, what was impressive about Watershed was the knowledge that's built into the tool and team—going with a partner that had this level of expertise was a must," Silva-Wagner says.
Once on the platform, the team was impressed by the proactive support. "[The] invitations to webinars and sessions where important deadlines get flagged, where product updates are shared—that helps us stay on top of what we do, especially as requirements keep evolving," she says.
Collaboration became easier, too. The team could assign tasks and distribute work with stakeholders across the organization directly inside the platform. "This affects almost every sustainability function," explains Silva-Wagner. "We are typically very lean teams without the luxury of a lot of resources, so we have to rely on others in the organization. With Watershed, this collaboration is quite easy."
Results
Landis+Gyr's primary use case for Watershed is collecting data for its annual sustainability report, but as the team explored the platform, they found it could support reporting under multiple frameworks—including CDP (formerly known as the Carbon Disclosure Project).
"Historically, we were using our old tool as a data repository from which we had to extract data and put it into the report," Silva-Wagner says. "We weren't doing as much analysis as we could."
The 2026 CDP submission was the team's first comprehensive one. Silva-Wagner led the process, coordinating inputs from across the organization. For a lean sustainability team, managing a questionnaire as extensive as CDP can be a significant undertaking. But Watershed's AI assistant helped streamline the process by providing auto-populated figures and draft answers, saving hours of manual data entry.
"I really love the AI assistant," Silva-Wagner says. "Even if I realized a number might not be pulled right, it was a huge help to have a starting point already."
For its first comprehensive, scored CDP submission, Landis+Gyr combined its growing internal reporting capabilities with Watershed’s platform and specialist support from external sustainability consultants. Watershed helped Silva-Wagner prepare draft responses, calculate figures, and coordinate inputs across the organization, while the consultants provided quality assurance and specialist advice. Together, this enabled the team to prepare a comprehensive submission efficiently and with a high degree of confidence.
The prior year, Landis+Gyr had submitted a CDP questionnaire during an unscored period. Consultants gave that submission a mock score of D. For 2026, they estimate at least a B—with final scoring expected November 18.
"It was a very positive experience. Watershed helped us build our internal knowledge and take greater ownership of the CDP process. Going forward, we expect the platform and our external experts to play complementary roles, with consultant support focused on selected strategic and technical topics that require separate work outside the tool”.
Beyond CDP, Watershed has changed how the sustainability team works with the rest of the organization. Assigning tasks, sharing deadlines, and rolling out information inside the platform is far easier than with their previous system.
The transparency has also impressed auditors. Watershed's change log makes it clear who has accessed and modified data—useful for both day-to-day accountability and formal audits. "Our external auditor said this week that Watershed had been a great improvement," Silva-Wagner says. "It would make handing over the account between auditors easier. It's easy to visualize and follow threads."
Silva-Wagner sees AI as a tool to augment expertise, not replace it. Rather than simply accepting the first answer from Watershed's AI assistant, she reprompts multiple times, iterating until she reaches the quality she wants. For her, that's a feature—a key step in not just getting to the right answer, but deepening her understanding along the way.
"It was so powerful and gave such great insights, especially when it found a gap in the data," she says. "It would guide me through the steps and logic of how to address it. It was a very engaging exercise to have a sparring partner along the way."
The team is already planning to extend its use of AI to other reporting standards, including GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) and California climate disclosures. GRI requires qualitative explanations—an area where Silva-Wagner sees AI helping the team strengthen responses, identify gaps, and work more efficiently.
"With CDP, we were starting from scratch," she says. "With GRI, we have a solid foundation. I'm excited to see how AI can help us build on it."
Silva-Wagner is optimistic about what's next—for Landis+Gyr's sustainability program and for the field more broadly.
"With time and the new tools becoming available—such as AI—it should be possible to quantify the positive impact of our products in a way that's more robust than what we can do today," she says. "That's complex right now. It requires a lot of assumptions. But I'm confident that it will get easier, and it should give us a stronger basis for demonstrating our product’s contribution to the energy transition."
She's also thinking about the potential for platforms to connect sustainability teams across organizations. "Sustainability issues are complex, intricate problems that involve various players," she says. "It's impossible to singlehandedly address them. I'm excited about how, in the future, we'll start using these tools to pool our efforts and tackle climate change and other sustainability challenges in a more efficient way."