Watershed agents aren't a single feature—they're woven into every stage of sustainability teams’ workflows, from ingesting raw data to reporting to building Product carbon footprints (PCFs) and driving lower-carbon product design.
Sustainability teams often want to know where to start or how to best leverage AI. To answer that, here are real examples across industries of Watershed customers saving time and driving impact with agents.
Save hours per week on data cleaning and ingestion
“Already, the Watershed agents are saving us maybe three to five hours a week, really reducing that manual work and data processing.”
Emma Bayliss-Chan, Head of Climate Strategy & Risk at Royal Mail
The problem
Sustainability data lives everywhere—PDF utility bills, sprawling ERPs, supplier emails, and spreadsheets. Getting that data together and into a consistent format ready to build an emissions measurement used to take weeks. To make things harder, teams also had to deal with missing data, inconsistent formats, errors, and duplicates.
“Before, the data process was incredibly manual and time-consuming. Now, with the agent, we’re able to take care of all those manual and time-consuming parts within one session. The agents are able to understand that data—and it may be in different languages and different formats. Gap filling, estimating, anomaly detection: all of that Watershed agents can do in a snap. We can use that data, and we know it’s reliable and accurate.”
— Christian Boothby, Sustainability Manager at Smiths Group
The solution
Watershed agents take care of this work end-to-end, turning monthslong workflows into workable data in moments.
For many companies, the first step of preparing for a carbon measurement is gathering data from disparate stakeholders and systems strewn across business entities, countries, and even languages.
When data comes from so many sources, it often arrives messy: in inconsistent formats and different languages, and containing errors and gaps, all of which has historically fallen on the sustainability team to fix.
Utility data often presents sustainability teams with a unique headache, with up to thousands of PDFs (or even paper bills) that need to be somehow ingested into a measurement. One Watershed customer recently uploaded and ingested 1,300 bills covering a year of energy across facilities in two days, with each processed in moments.
With utility data ingested by agents, customers gain a clean, consolidated view of energy consumption across their entire portfolio. That visibility makes it possible to pinpoint inefficiencies, model the impact of efficiency investments, and build the business case for action. From there, customers can track energy usage, emissions, and spend side-by-side to help their businesses understand the ROI of decarbonization.
Overall, by taking these manual processes and turning them into something not only faster, but also traceable, companies are prepared for audit.
“Every year when we go through third-party assurance, we get a list of questions. Last year, I got dozens, and it normally takes me two to three full days to go through data lineage for these inquiries. With the AI agent, I went one by one, and it took just minutes to perform the analytical work. When I compared it to my own answers, it came to the same results, but with more detail and more context to give back to the auditor. It was so nice to have that collaborative analytical partner.”
— Christine Trella, Cimpress
Already, the Watershed agents are saving us maybe three to five hours a week, really reducing that manual work and data processing. Beyond saving time, the Watershed agents are also helping us to improve the accuracy of our data by reducing the risk of manual error. [They also improve] traceability—with us being able to process more of the data natively in the platform, we can show that clear audit trail to our auditors and be audit-ready.
— Emma Bayliss-Chan, Head of Climate Strategy & Risk at Royal Mail
Accelerate measurement by mapping EFs in moments
The problem
Measurement is time-consuming by nature. For companies doing a spend-based measurement, manually mapping every purchase to a supplier's public emissions factor has historically meant going line-by-line through thousands of rows, with high risk of error and no guarantee of consistency. For companies needing a more granular, activity-based measurement, mapping every purchased good to the right emissions factor (EF, e.g., from ecoinvent) carried an even larger burden: hundreds of hours of rote work, with inconsistent results given how nuanced the differences between related emissions factors can be.
The solution
Watershed agents take care of the most time-consuming parts of measurement processes. For spend-based measurement, agents map purchases to each supplier's public, specific emissions factor, making measurements more accurate without requiring hundreds of hours of rote work.
For customers who need a more granular, activity-based measurement to track progress and hit targets, Watershed agents map every purchased good to the best-fit ecoinvent emissions factor automatically, reducing human error and turning this process into something completed in moments across thousands of lines of data.
Build PCFs automatically across your portfolio
“Leveraging Watershed’s platform, data, and AI-powered PCF tool enables Charter Next Generation to respond more quickly [to customers] and with a higher-value PCF. It is quite exciting.”
Scott Hammer, Sustainability Fellow at Charter Next Generation
The problem
PCFs are increasingly demanded by customers and regulators, but building them manually is slow and hard to scale. Companies also need to understand the product-level emissions for the goods they purchase to inform sourcing and product design, but suppliers don’t provide comparable PCFs. Capturing the true complexity of a product's supply chain, including actions taken two or three tiers up, has historically required significant time and expertise, making it impractical for companies to produce PCFs at portfolio scale.
The solution
For customers who need PCFs, Watershed automates the process to build PCFs in moments with Watershed Product Footprints. These PCFs scale across an entire portfolio and capture the nuance of each product’s supply chain, giving companies credit for actions they or their suppliers are already taking, like sourcing deforestation-free palm oil or using recycled steel three tiers up the supply chain.
Medtronic uses Watershed Product Footprints to scale PCFs across its portfolio in response to growing customer demand. Read more about how here.
Get insights and answers from sustainability data instantly
The problem
Measuring emissions isn’t an exercise for the sake of measuring emissions; companies collect the data to understand what drives emissions and how to reduce. But with millions of lines of data in every measurement, different GHG scopes to track, business units and facilities around the world, and data that changes every year, spotting trends can be difficult.
The solution
With Watershed agents, companies can immediately spot trends and identify drivers.
“Watershed agents are like data geeks sitting within our team that know our data inside and out," says Emma Bayliss-Chan, Head of Climate Strategy & Risk at Royal Mail. "We can simply talk to them in plain language terms and say: hey, I noticed our emissions went up this quarter — could you take a closer look into what the key drivers were? And they’ll come back to us with information a lot faster than it would have taken to manually sift through all the data.”
Agents for reporting
The problem
Building reports is painstaking work. Teams have to understand what’s required, research best practices and peer reporting, draft in their brand’s voice, guard against greenwashing, and ensure data is perfectly aligned across multiple reports. Each step is time-consuming, and the margin for error is high.
“For California, in mid-December we were told we had to comply by the first of January. Normally we’d rely on consultants for interpretation; in the end it was essentially a 2-day process using the SB 261 reporting module. Saving time, saving consultancy time, helping me to self-serve, saving our team budget: it’s made a massive difference. Based on the current reporting we already do, the output sounded like a Smiths report, but it was using Watershed AI, regurgitating the same information but in a slightly different way as required by the regulation. That’s been hugely helpful.”
— Sophie Darlington, Sustainability Manager at Smiths Group
The solution
With Watershed agents, reporting timelines collapse so that teams can spend less time aligning answers between reports or drafting responses datapoint after datapoint, and more time on action.
Agents for driving action with product design
“Calculating product carbon footprints in this way allows us to experiment with product data in a digital lab, testing ideas and understanding what the product carbon footprint impact would be.”
Anna Yates, EHS and Sustainability at Albany International
The problem
Designing lower-carbon products requires understanding the emissions impact of specific materials and procurement decisions, often across an entire portfolio. Without the right data at hand, sustainability and R&D teams are left guessing, making it hard to prioritize where changes will actually move the needle.
“We removed the guesswork on carbon return on investment. By running scenarios for lower-carbon materials, we could support overall financial and operational planning.”
— Emily Foster, Director of Environmental & Social Impact at Burton
The solution
In Watershed Product Footprints, companies use Watershed agents to drive smarter product design and procurement with emissions and carbon data side-by-side. Companies can look at procurement options, understanding the exact impact swapping a material would make for one product, or across a whole portfolio.
Partnering with Watershed has allowed us to accelerate our product carbon footprint work. Calculating product carbon footprints in this way allows us to experiment with product data in a digital lab, testing ideas and understanding what the product carbon footprint impact would be to inform product development and further support our customers.
— Anna Yates, EHS and Sustainability at Albany International
The sustainability teams driving the most impact aren't working harder. They're working differently, with AI agents that handle the time-consuming, error-prone work so their teams can focus on what matters: making progress.
Whether teams are just getting started with AI or looking to go deeper, Watershed's AI Academy brings together guidance, best practices, and real examples from customers who've done it.
