Most companies' biggest climate impact comes from what they purchase, not what they produce directly. These upstream emissions—tracked as Scope 3.1—can account for 70% or more of a company's total carbon footprint. Yet this is precisely where companies feel most powerless. Spend-based estimates give them a blurry picture at best, while detailed carbon assessments remain prohibitively expensive and slow to produce. Without clear data on where the biggest opportunities sit, most sustainability teams find themselves stuck and unable to find leverage or reflect progress.
Today, we announced Watershed Product Footprints to change all of that. Product Footprints is the most advanced sustainability AI product on the market for sustainable procurement. It encodes AI with sustainability intelligence to uproot the three biggest barriers to understanding the emissions of the products you buy: speed, accuracy, and actionability.
- Speed: Produce an upstream carbon footprint in a matter of minutes, compared to traditional approaches that take several months.
- Accuracy: By decomposing each material into its sub-materials and processes, achieve levels of accuracy in emissions mapping that were previously impossible.
- Actionability: With Product Footprints, sustainability and procurement teams can refine the measurement with primary data and run scenarios to see the full effect of different purchasing decisions.
The result is an upstream product footprint that more accurately reflects your business so you can make smarter product and procurement decisions.
Breaking down the scope 3.1 measurement challenge
In the past, measuring emissions from purchased goods and services was slow and expensive. Often, companies lose the better part of a year just chasing down data from their suppliers. And when primary data wasn’t available, companies were forced to use broad, spend-based assumptions that didn’t reflect actual procurement choices. The choice was an inefficient path, or an inaccurate one. Product Footprints aims to give companies precision at scale.
How Product Footprints works
Product Footprints uses AI to decompose everything you buy into the materials and processes behind them. For any product—from a pair of jeans to an industrial chemical—the AI traces upstream steps like the emissions of different sub-materials, processes, transportation and more. After an initial AI-accelerated mapping, you can further refine your footprint using primary data and first-hand experience with your product and procurement processes. The AI will cascade those changes across your footprint, powering a far closer match to the reality of your business and the ability to scenario plan different product choices. As a result, you’ll surface more levers for decarbonisation in your product and procurement decisions.
Watershed’s approach to sustainability AI
In building Product Footprints, we took a more strategic approach to sustainability AI than other platforms. We embedded deep sustainability intelligence into our systems through a team of 12 climate scientists working alongside AI engineers. We prioritized unlocking sustainability progress, not just speed. And we held high standards for transparency and accuracy, knowing that the outputs needed to be reliable for decision-making. In action, these principles became:
- Multi-agent architecture for accuracy: Rather than relying on a single AI system that can suffer from confirmation bias, we use separate agents—one for mapping materials to emissions factors and another for independently evaluating those mappings. This prevents the system from validating its own work and reduces errors.
- Three-layer technical approach: Our system processes data through material enrichment to clarify messy company data, supply chain intelligence that creates digital twins mirroring actual procurement processes, and sustainability intelligence that maps to thousands of specific emissions factors based on region, supplier, and technical specifications.
- Greater transparency: Unlike black-box AI systems, we provide confidence scores, document data sources, show the reasoning behind each decision, and let users override mappings. This transparency addresses the trust issues that have limited AI adoption in sustainability reporting.
- Continuous improvement: The platform learns from user corrections and incorporates primary supplier data to improve accuracy over time, while maintaining the ability for sustainability professionals to refine and validate AI outputs.
You can read more about Watershed’s approach to AI here and through our team’s research paper on Criteria for Credible AI-assisted Carbon Footprinting Systems on ARXIV.
Early customer examples
Before bringing Product Footprints to market, we worked to shape and refine the product with a collection of companies known to have complex supply chains. Through their work and perspectives, we’ve been able to see some early benefits already.
One company had been purchasing low-carbon steel but couldn't get credit for the reduced emissions due to limitations of traditional spend-based calculations. The new system correctly identified and modeled the lower actual emissions of sustainable steel, enabling the company to link the reduced product footprint back to their corporate footprint.
Another company found that AI-generated footprints revealed differences between suppliers and materials that single emissions factors couldn't capture, showing better routes to sustainable procurement decisions.
A third company with more than 50,000 suppliers is using the tool to prioritise supplier engagement efforts. The company had previously struggled with slow, manual processes that created delays and data gaps in their sustainability program.
Impact, not just speed
Over the next few months, we’ll continue to add AI-accelerated functionality to the Watershed platform. Core to our AI strategy is impact. We want to leverage AI not just to speed up workflows, but to drive real decarbonisation progress. For decades, companies have been forced to make sustainability and procurement decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate emissions data because existing approaches simply don't work at scale. Product Footprints demonstrates how AI, when encoded with sustainability intelligence, can transform corporate sustainability.
Accessing Product Footprints
If you’re a Watershed customer, speak with your account manager about getting access to Product Footprints. If you’re not yet a customer, you can learn more and request a demo here.
