Meet the Digital Workforce Scaling Up Sustainability and Climate Disaster Response

Conservation and development organization Rare, for example, is rolling out an Agentforce-powered regenerative agriculture agent to deliver real-time, localized guidance to more farmers.

"Currently, our team spends entire afternoons answering similar WhatsApp messages across many different municipalities," said Monica Varela, Vice President of Colombia Operations for Rare. "AI will automate routine advice, freeing our people to focus on problems that truly warrant an in-person visit while maintaining close relationships with farmers through multiple channels."

By extending its work with the same resources, Rare can increase the impact of its sustainability efforts.

"Agriculture is responsible for 80% of deforestation in tropical areas, and worldwide, is responsible for 23% of carbon emissions," said Varela. "Smallholder farmers make up 84% of farms worldwide. So if we have more of them practicing regenerative agriculture, we can really move the needle."

Another Salesforce accelerator participant, the Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®), promotes responsible forest management through a forest management certification program. The concept is simple: Getting more organizations certified faster ensures more forests are protected.

The council sees agents as a natural extension of its management process, offering 24/7 experts to help augment human teams. "Getting FSC certified requires an understanding of the standards that we have put out there and an interpretation of what standards are relevant to you as an organization," said Shree Nath, a data and analytics expert at FSC. An FSC-trained AI agent, he said, could answer any questions that an organization might have about getting certified. In any time zone, in any language, immediately.

"It improves the front-end prospecting, giving people the answers that they need and helps them on that journey," said Nath. "And once an organization becomes certified, we see an opportunity for AI to help with continued monitoring and evaluation of the kinds of impacts they're having on the ground."

Supporting disaster recovery

While proactive efforts are critical to supporting sustainability efforts, there's also a need for help when disaster strikes.

"We are seeing an increased frequency of climate disasters, whether it's wildfires in California or around the world," said Mick Costigan, VP, Salesforce Futures.

The reconstruction period following a disaster involves difficult decisions about where and how to rebuild, especially in areas facing recurring climate threats. This process requires coordinated services for affected communities. "One of the challenges has always been, how do you give people service when we just don't have enough people to do that," said Costigan.

This is where AI agents can step in. "Agents can provide a lot of value, giving people access 24/7 to information, to be able to ask questions, to be able to check on the status of things that are happening," said Costigan, highlighting how AI could help manage what he describes as a "complex engineering and rebuilding effort."

Agents can provide a lot of value, giving people access 24/7 to information, to be able to ask questions, to be able to check on the status of things that are happening.

Mick Costigan, VP, Salesforce Futures

Good360, a nonprofit connecting surplus goods with those who need it most, is using Agentforce to coordinate some of these disaster recovery efforts. The organization is optimizing its product placement technology with agents to ensure donated goods reach the affected communities after a climate event.

This reduces both waste and increases efficiency, which can be a game-changer in a crisis.

"In disaster relief community response, days could mean the difference between life and death," said Norman. "It could mean the difference between a community being resilient to disaster or not."

One can imagine a future in which autonomous agents operate across different nonprofits and even in coordination with personal AI assistants. These agents could together orchestrate deliveries of supplies and donations by robots without any need for human involvement.

"While we still need to develop protocols for agent-to-agent communication, I believe this will be incredibly helpful in the future," said Costigan. "Speed and coordination are critical when people are displaced, living in gyms."

Scaling sustainability impact

It's not just the nonprofit sector that can use agents for sustainability-related work.

For a heavy-emissions manufacturer, agentic AI can be trained to predict energy usage patterns and adjust operational processes without needing to ask a human for help. The agent can review new data as it comes in, make a decision based on that data, and act to update scheduled maintenance. This can lead to substantial cost savings and a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

"What will be particularly powerful is how these specialized agents will soon feed data to each other, creating an end-to-end pipeline of AI systems working together to achieve sustainability goals," Costigan said.

Agentforce, for its part, is open, supporting a broad range of LLMs and emerging protocols. This includes Model Context Protocol (MCP), which enables agents to interact with different enterprise systems and apps, and agent-to-agent (A2A) protocol, a standardized framework for AI agents to communicate with each other across siloed systems and applications.

Organizations can also use AI to improve their carbon footprint reporting, an important element in addressing impact. With Salesforce's Net Zero Cloud product, any organization can track and measure sustainability data, providing a holistic view of sustainability performance. This helps in managing emissions, automating reporting tasks, and ensuring data privacy and security.

"One of the challenges that organizations face in sustainability work is attracting the right level of priority and resources," Costigan explained. "It's often painstaking, laborious, data-intensive work. AI agents provide the digital labor when we simply don't have the human capacity to do what needs to be done."

And these use cases are only the beginning, according to Salesforce experts.

"Some of the most exciting sustainability applications are in image and audio," said Norman. "AI is helping identify species, assess ecosystems through satellite imagery, and detect chainsaws in protected forests. One of our Impact Fund portfolio companies even uses image recognition to spot wildfire smoke early and alert first responders. These powerful modalities hold huge potential."

Using agentic AI responsibly

While AI holds incredible promise in the fight against climate change, responsible use is paramount. Today's AI requires massive computing resources, which in turn require more power, which can increase CO2 in the atmosphere if not managed correctly.

"The end goal is sustainable forests that are resilient and that can help with slowing down climate change," said FSC's Shree. "So we're embarking on our AI journey with excitement and some trepidation because there's a concern about AI in terms of energy usage. We have to pay attention to the approach, the kinds of governance controls to make sure whatever we do is ethical, responsible, and equitable across the constituents we serve."

Salesforce has implemented a set of sustainable AI principles to guide its use of the technology to make it more sustainable and equitable. And it continues to explore other ways to reduce its impact.

The company also partnered with leading tech and academic partners on an AI Energy Score, a benchmarking tool that allows large language model (LLM) developers and users to report an AI model's consumption, giving companies a clearer window into their own use.

By openly sharing energy consumption data, our companies can collectively implement ecodesign practices and minimize the environmental footprint of AI technologies.

Ariane Thomas, Global Tech Director of Sustainability, L'OREAL Group

"Transparency like that offered by the AI Energy Score is crucial," said Ariane Thomas, Global Tech Director of Sustainability, L'OREAL Group. "By openly sharing energy consumption data, our companies can collectively implement ecodesign practices and minimize the environmental footprint of AI technologies."

The future of sustainability and AI

The promise of agentic AI in sustainability isn't merely about making current processes more efficient ‌ - ‌it's about fundamentally transforming our approach to managing a changing climate.

"There's enormous potential for real-time interventions or even early preventive actions," said Norman. "We're moving from looking in the rearview mirror to looking ahead - or better yet, having optimal environmental outcomes happen automatically with our blessing."

As these technologies mature, sustainability leadership won't just come from organizations with the best data or the most resources. They'll come from those that most effectively deploy AI agents as environmental allies‌ - ‌turning our relationship with climate change and its effects from one of reaction to one of informed, coordinated anticipation and resolution.

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