I spend most of my time covering cybersecurity and technology, but one theme I keep bumping into across every sector is sustainability. Companies are being asked to measure, report, and reduce their carbon emissions in ways that would have seemed absurd a decade ago. And increasingly, the pressure is coming from the private sector rather than government.
Yes, there are regulations. California has identified more than 3,000 companies that need to comply with climate disclosure rules, and similar requirements are expanding at the state and national level. But the real force reshaping how companies think about emissions isn’t government. It’s the supply chain.
When Your Biggest Customer Cares About Your Carbon
Companies like Amazon, Apple, and Walmart have spent years building out their own sustainability programs—investing in renewable energy, electrifying fleets, and redesigning packaging. But the vast majority of a large corporation’s carbon footprint doesn’t come from its own operations. It comes from its supply chain.
These are called Scope 3 emissions, and they’re the hardest to measure because they involve every company you buy from, sell to, or partner with. Amazon matching 100% of its electricity use with renewable energy and deploying more than 24,000 electric delivery vehicles is impressive—but those are Scope 1 and 2 improvements. Scope 3 is far more complex, and it’s where the attention is shifting.
Amazon co-founded The Climate Pledge in 2019, committing to net-zero carbon by 2040. More than 590 companies have signed on. To back that up, Amazon launched its Sustainability Exchange in 2024—a resource hub sharing decarbonization tools with suppliers—and began requiring key suppliers responsible for more than half of its Scope 3 emissions to present decarbonization plans.
In other words, if you want to be an Amazon supplier, you need to be able to produce credible emissions data. Amazon isn’t alone in this, either. Apple has been pushing supplier emissions accountability for years. Walmart has its Project Gigaton initiative. Major buyers across the board are making carbon data a commercial requirement.
The Spreadsheet Problem
That doesn’t mean it’s easy, though. For a lot of suppliers—especially mid-sized manufacturers and companies in energy-intensive industries—emissions reporting has traditionally been a manual, painful process. Somebody pulls utility bills, punches numbers into a spreadsheet, and hands it off to a consultant who turns it into a report that satisfies whoever asked for it.
That approach worked when sustainability reporting was a nice-to-have. It doesn’t work when your biggest customer wants audit-ready emissions data on a regular cadence and is making purchasing decisions based on it.
This is a problem I’ve seen play out in cybersecurity for years. Organizations know they need to do something, but the tools haven’t kept up with the requirements. Just like security teams struggled with normalizing data across dozens of tools, sustainability teams are drowning in manual data collection while expectations keep escalating.
Automating the Hard Part
That gap helps explain a recent announcement from Gravity, an AI-powered carbon and energy management platform. Gravity revealed it has joined Amazon’s Sustainability Exchange as a recommended emissions measurement tool for Amazon suppliers.
“Amazon’s Sustainability Exchange reflects a broader shift we’re seeing across global supply chains: emissions disclosure is becoming a core business requirement,” explained Saleh ElHattab, founder and CEO of Gravity. “More and more, we’re seeing partners turn to Gravity to ensure that the disclosure exercise for them and their supply chains is not just a painful chore. We make it manageable and a powerful tool for cost-cutting.”
Gravity is one of a growing number of platforms trying to automate carbon accounting. Founded in 2022, the company raised $13 million in Series A funding in early 2025 and says it uses AI to automate Scope 1, 2, and 3 data collection. Independent research firm Verdantix has noted the approach. “Gravity stood out as a vendor streamlining data collection and improving data quality using AI,” said Alessandra Leggieri, industry analyst, net zero & energy transition at Verdantix. “The company uses generative AI to read and import data on utility bills and fuel invoices, while also using agentic AI to collect public data to improve the accuracy of Scope 3 emission calculations.”
ElHattab framed the Amazon relationship in operational terms. “This partnership will optimize energy spend, improve efficiency, and strengthen operations for Amazon’s suppliers,” he said.
Beyond Any One Vendor
Gravity is far from the only company working on this problem. The carbon management software market has grown considerably, with platforms competing to automate everything from utility data ingestion to Scope 3 supply chain calculations. The fact that Amazon is recommending specific tools through its Sustainability Exchange is noteworthy—not because of any single vendor, but because it signals how far emissions reporting has moved from voluntary to expected.
As with all things related to business—and especially technology—there are two factors to watch. One is whether these platforms can deliver accurate, auditable data at the scale major buyers demand. The other is whether they can connect that data to operational value—helping companies reduce emissions and costs rather than just counting them.
I’ve been covering technology long enough to know that the gap between what a platform promises and what it delivers can be wide. But the trajectory seems pretty obvious at this point. Supply chain emissions are no longer someone else’s problem. Companies that want to keep doing business with the world’s largest buyers are going to have to figure out carbon measurement and reporting. The tools are maturing. The companies that invest in them now will be better positioned than those still relying on spreadsheets and good intentions.
