For sustainability to become a true driver of business choices and value, it has to leave the manual work era to become more automated, customizable, and explainable. Today, we're announcing a suite of enhancements to Watershed that will dramatically cut measurement time and deliver data that better reflects your business.
There's often an operational disconnect between sustainability data and business reality. Many platforms assume all businesses work the same way, with the same org structures, allocation methods, and reporting hierarchies. When regulations require audit-grade precision, this one-size-fits-all approach creates a risky gap between reporting and reality. And this lack of flexibility creates blind spots in your decarbonization strategy. For example:
- If your platform groups all manufacturing as one category but emissions vary wildly by production line, you can't make smarter product decisions.
- If a platform only reports at the portfolio level, a retailer piloting energy efficiency in flagship stores can't isolate those results.
When big data platforms enable customization to address this, they also often add weight and complexity to the process. This sort of overhead is precisely what makes sustainability programs look like a cost-center rather than a strategic edge.
We've heard stories of companies spending half a year on data collection, standardization, and cleaning, then another two to three months on mapping and calculations. All this time costs money and holds sustainability programs back from making the progress they want.
Accelerating measurement in Watershed
The enhancements announced today span every stage of the measurement process—from data ingestion to data lineage—to give you greater precision at greater speeds.
Automated utility bill ingestion: Facility-related emissions are among the most addressable reduction opportunities, yet utility data arrives in non-standardized PDFs that vary wildly across providers, languages, and formats—making manual entry slow and error-prone. Watershed is introducing an AI-powered utility bill ingestion tool that automatically extracts and validates emissions data from PDFs with audit-ready transparency. This feature is in testing with select customers today and will roll out more broadly in 2026.
AI auto-mapping for scope 3: Using AI, Watershed can automatically match your scope 3 data to supplier information and emissions factors and supplier information. The system provides suggested mappings that you can review and adjust before generating your footprint, ensuring you maintain control over data quality while moving more quickly through measurement.
Calculation customization: This expanded capability lets you customize emissions factors and other components of your calculation methodology to give you more flexibility. Previously, the desire to adjust your assumptions or calculation methods would send you into spreadsheets, with this expansion, your calculations can better reflect your business, without tedious manual work.
Flexible footprint configuration: This capability enables you to configure your footprints for different business units, geographies, or other organizational breakdowns. Get greater insight into the parts of your business where the greatest opportunities for decarbonization exist.
Complete data lineage: Released earlier this year, our expanded data lineage lets you see every step of the data transformation process, so teams can efficiently understand, troubleshoot, and make decisions about their data. Get the clarity you need to pass audits more smoothly, saving you time and money.
Greater options for analyzing activity data: For more flexibility into how you can query your data, we’re expanding our data analysis tool, known as “drill down,” to enable you to slice and dice your emissions by business activity data. For example, you can examine emissions per vehicle mile or which financial accounts are most emissive.
Learn more and get access
Watershed customers can learn about all of these new capabilities and prepare for the full measurement process in a series of on-demand trainings that we've created to make sure you enter this measurement season ready. Click here to access those trainings (customers-only).
If you're not yet a customer and would like to learn more, request a walkthrough of the Watershed platform here.
