How Salesforce Uses AI to Deliver Sustainability Strategy
This year, Salesforce has intensified its commitment to agentic AI, discovering innovative ways to empower nonprofits tackling some of the world’s most urgent issues.
Through its AI accelerator programme, Salesforce is providing organisations with funding, advanced technology and expert mentorship to help them develop AI agents that amplify their impact.
The company also introduced Agentforce for Net Zero Cloud, a solution designed to strengthen sustainability teams by integrating intelligent automation and digital labour, enabling them to achieve faster ROI.
Sunya Norman, Salesforce’s SVP of Impact, highlights these groundbreaking initiatives and discusses how AI can drive meaningful progress for both people and the planet.
As SVP of Impact at Salesforce, can you share your key priorities for the year and how you plan to execute your strategy?
One key priority for us is Agentforce, Salesforce’s digital labour platform -- a workforce of intelligent AI agents that work alongside humans to complete tasks faster and more efficiently than humans alone. We’re supporting customers and partners in building and deploying AI agents to transform their businesses, responsibly.
We’re also bringing Agentforce and the power of AI to purpose-driven organisations, enabling them to do more with fewer resources to help solve some of the world’s biggest challenges.
For example, we launched Salesforce Accelerator - Agents for Impact to support nonprofits building AI agents to accelerate their missions. To date, we’ve supported 35 nonprofits in scaling their ideas to widespread adoption with funding, technology and expertise from 100+ pro bono fellows.
We’re also bringing Agentforce innovations to Net Zero Cloud, our sustainability platform. Net Zero Cloud can now support sustainability teams in a greater capacity, with AI-driven insights and unified data from across systems like finance, procurement and operations that enables teams to make sustainability a strategic asset for business.
With this pivot towards AI and agents, can you share examples of how organisations have benefited from innovations like Agentforce?
Agentforce has been transformative in helping organisations scale impact while improving efficiency. Our research shows that 74% of nonprofits recognise the value of technology, but limited staff and funding often stand in the way of achieving their mission.
That’s why we’re proud to support organisations like Good360 and Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA) through our accelerator programme. With Agentforce, Good360 can now match essential goods to communities in crisis in real time – projected to triple its disaster recovery impact and reduce emissions by up to 20%. ORRAA’s new Octopus Platform, launched at the 2025 UN Ocean Conference, uses Agentforce to connect blue economy projects to investors.
These AI agents are not tools; they’re collaborators, working 24x7 to analyse data, make decisions and take action.
During Earth Month in April, we announced a new nature-focused accelerator cohort that includes organizations like 1t.org, Forest Stewardship Council, and Rare. They are building and deploying Agentforce solutions like forest certification agents, regenerative agriculture coaches and reforestation mobilisers to accelerate global efforts.
All of this work begins with us as customer zero of Agentforce. Salesforce’s own sustainability team is using Agentforce for Emissions Insights to help automate manual sustainability data collection, freeing up the team’s time for strategic decision-making.
It’s a great example of how AI can streamline processes while enabling teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Tell me about Salesforce’s AI sustainability strategy?
At Salesforce, sustainability is a guiding principle in how we develop and deploy AI. We created a three-pillar framework to guide the AI ecosystem toward sustainability, focusing on:
- Smart demand (using AI wisely)
- Efficiency (doing more with less)
- Clean supply (powering AI with low-impact resources).
Agentforce is designed with sustainability in mind, eliminating the need for customers to train or finetune their own models. To drive transparency in the space, we co-launched the AI Energy Score to benchmark energy use of LLMs, and were the first to disclose efficiency for a proprietary model.
Our AI Research team develops compact and efficient AI models, which require significantly fewer resources than frontier LLMs. We are also actively investing in the clean energy transition, advocating for policy and participating in key coalitions, collaborating with peers to advance responsible and sustainable AI.
From your perspective as SVP of Impact, what challenges do organisations face when operationalising sustainability, and how does Salesforce address these?
At Salesforce, we know that values create value. Every impact leader must operationalise sustainability and demonstrate its business value. Unfortunately, many companies struggle with data access, accuracy, transparency and value chain emissions tracking.
At Salesforce, we help organisations operationalise sustainability with solutions like Net Zero Cloud, which tracks Scope 1-3 emissions, ensures compliance and identifies energy-saving opportunities that reduce costs.
We were also proud to launch the Sustainability Value Creation Partnership, showing how sustainability drives business value through efficiency, risk reduction and brand strength. This research found that 50% of leaders expect AI to deliver significant value for sustainability over the next two years.
Our goal is to bring innovation, technology like Agentforce, and data together – working with our customers and partners to help them transform their business, tackle challenges and make sustainability a key part of long-term business success.
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