Photo courtesy of Kristina Wyatt
Kristina Wyatt is chief sustainability officer at Persefoni, a carbon accounting platform that helps companies measure and manage their emissions. She began her career as a securities lawyer at Latham & Watkins, where she helped develop the law firm’s sustainability practice. She then earned an MBA with a focus on sustainability and worked at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on climate disclosure rules before joining Persefoni three years ago. MIT Sloan Management Review spoke with Wyatt about the evolving challenges facing sustainability professionals and how technology is transforming carbon accounting. Here, we present edited highlights from that conversation.
What challenges are sustainability professionals facing in 2025?
Kristina Wyatt: They vary widely by company. A lot of companies are struggling with getting continued C-suite support for programs for which there might have been more enthusiasm a couple of years ago — because of the uncertainty, particularly at the U.S. federal level, but also with the pullback on the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive in the form of the [European Union’s] omnibus proposal. Now leaders are taking a little bit more of a wait-and-see approach.
At the same time, there are also plenty of companies that are just staying the course. They have set sustainability goals and targets and really have integrated sustainability into their core business.
How does your carbon accounting platform work, and what challenge is it meant to solve?
Wyatt: The challenge that Persefoni was formed to tackle is the messiness and the inaccuracy that used to exist with companies, or consultants they hired, [in] calculating their carbon footprints just using spreadsheets. There’s significant complexity in the carbon accounting process, but it essentially involves taking all the activities that a company engages in and then translating them into the carbon emissions associated with those activities.
All of that is easy math. But it becomes really complicated when you have thousands of emission factors and you have potentially hundreds of thousands of activities that you may be engaged in, like each trip in your company car or every airline trip for business travel or every electricity bill for all of your different locations. We apply the appropriate emission factors in a traceable ledger that is critical for auditing your carbon emissions, and then, on the other end, we calculate your Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.
How are you using and thinking about AI in the context of sustainability?
Wyatt: It’s a double-edged sword. AI has been a part of Persefoni’s product since the beginning. We’ve used it, for example, to help companies identify the types of activities that they’re very likely engaged in that would contribute to their footprint, based on their industry. Same thing with matching appropriate emission factors to those activities: That’s done through an AI tool.
So it’s very useful at helping solve sustainability challenges, but it’s double-edged because AI is very energy-intensive and growing in use. Those increasing energy needs will have climate impacts. We need fossil fuels to meet those demands today, but we need to be working on the transition to other sources of energy production, like renewables and nuclear, while finding ways to make the AI tools more efficient and less energy-intensive.
In terms of calculating the emissions associated with AI tools, it’s basically taking the data about their energy consumption. If they’re using a server like Amazon Web Services, you would take the associated energy consumption data and translate that into carbon emissions by using appropriate emission factors. That’s right in our wheelhouse.