TCS’ Digital Twindex: The Role AI Plays in Sustainability
AI’s sustainability credentials often come under intense scrutiny.
It is a strange paradox. AI technologies are viewed as powerful tools for accelerating climate and environmental goals, but they are also significant contributors to global emissions, with their consumption of electricity and water expected to grow exponentially in the short to medium term.
According to The 2025 TCS Digital Twindex Report, today’s technology landscape enables enterprises to balance profitability with purpose, with digital twins, AI, IoT and Green IT transforming sustainability from a compliance burden into a key driver of competitiveness and systemic regeneration.
The TCS Digital Twindex is a strategic research and thought leadership series that explores how digital twin technology, combined with AI advancements, is transforming industries and society.
Since its inaugural 2023 edition, it has highlighted digital twins as dynamic, real-time virtual replicas of physical systems that enable anticipatory, adaptive and intelligent operations.
With the accelerating arrival of generative AI and quantum computing, the Digital Twindex analyses the current state of digital twin adoption and forecasts how their deeper integration with AI will fundamentally reshape business ecosystems by 2035 – with TCS executives, partners and futurists sharing their insights and providing a holistic view of this technology-driven transformation.
What TCS leaders say about sustainability and tech
TCS’ report showcases that sustainability is evolving beyond risk mitigation to a broader, regenerative business model focused on restoring ecosystems in harmony with economic growth.
“The beauty of accepting climate risk as business risk means companies will take more steps to reduce the risk,” says Hemakiran Gupta, Head of Global Sustainability Services at TCS.
Organisations deploying AI-powered digital twins gain the ability to simulate ripple effects across complex value chains and geographies, enabling them to anticipate and mitigate supply chain disruptions while optimising resource consumption.
The result is a shift from linear, reactive business models toward circular, regenerative frameworks that regenerate resources and create new sources of value while maintaining operational efficiency.
Haley Price, Head of Sustainability at TCS North America, adds: “Businesses are looking to move from linear to circular, to become regenerative for the future... A lot of times, these regenerative capabilities are self-funding, which leads to the C-suite viewing sustainability efforts in a different way.”
This economic reframing positions sustainability investments as drivers of innovation, cost savings, and enhanced stakeholder trust – motivations as fundamental as traditional financial metrics.
For some business leaders, embedding sustainability into governance and operational excellence is essential to driving innovation and resilience.
Ravi Prasad Nimmalapudi, Senior Director of Sustainability at The Coca-Cola Company, says in the report: “We believe true leadership is measured by the impact we create.
“By making sustainability part of every decision, we can drive progress today while safeguarding the world for tomorrow.”
A tech ecosystem for sustainability impact
TCS’ findings emphasise that emerging technologies create powerful ecosystems that integrate sensors, AI, digital twins and cloud platforms to measure and optimise environmental footprints in real time.
Hemakiran says: “If we can bring the technologies that are available today and stitch them together with digital twins, AI, and sensors... organisations will build purpose-led, resilient businesses.”
This blending of instrumentation and intelligence underpins a new generation of adaptive operational platforms that adjust dynamically to changing environmental, economic and social parameters.
This is because enterprises operationalise vast datasets from disparate sources – including energy meters, supply networks and product usage patterns – feeding AI models that forecast risks and suggest actions to improve efficiency and reduce emissions.
On top of this, Jayasree Kottapalli, TCS’ Head of Sustainable Solutions – Communications, Media and Information Services, notes that companies advance through maturity curves by progressively reducing consumption and increasing resilience.
She adds: “Technology and business leaders are realising for their businesses to be sustainable, their supply chain must be sustainable.
“They must have sustainable energy consumption and sustainable operations. They must realise that sustainability is not just a climate change phrase.”
Digital twins represent the real-time nerve center for these efforts.
Zeeshan Rashid, TCS Global Head Advisory for Sustainability, explains: “Digital twins are a powerful tool for sustainability, acting as a predictive brain that uses real time sensor data to optimise operations.
“This synergy between digital twins and AI allows businesses to model and implement ecofriendly solutions paving the way for a more sustainable future.”
By continuously analysing operational data, these AI-driven virtual replicas identify inefficiencies, test alternative scenarios and drive proactive interventions – all while minimising the need for costly physical trials and reducing wasted materials and energy.
Alison Wise, Founder of Wise Strategies, shares her perspective on the practical impact.
She says: “Every step a business takes to optimise how energy is sourced and used makes the whole system more resilient and sustainable: you’re going to save money, but you’re also helping create the energy infrastructure of the future.”
Is AI still a double-edged sword when it comes to sustainability?
AI is able to accelerate sustainability efforts by synthesising massive data points across businesses and supply chains, offering insights impossible to achieve manually.
Eric Weitzman, SVP at FactSet, shares: “The use of AI to gather data quickly and get a summary of companies and their suppliers, distributors and customers, to quickly get a sense of the entire ecosystem, would have been difficult years ago.”
This capability drives accelerated ESG reporting, risk assessment and scenario planning, unlocking new opportunities for sustainable decision-making.
However, AI’s energy demands also pose significant challenges calling for careful management.
The computational intensity of training models and running large-scale simulations can result in increased energy consumption and emissions.
Haley says this underscores the necessity of ethical AI deployment.
“It seems clear that every successful business will be using AI in the future,” she says. “This means that every business must have a specific approach in place to ensure that their AI efforts are responsible, ethical and ultimately help to make the world a better place."
In light of this trend, organisations are increasingly deploying Responsible AI frameworks to balance the promise of AI with its environmental and social footprint.
Speaking in the report, Amanda Gardiner of the UN Global Compact, says: “What excites me about Gen AI is turning data into action.
“AI lets you go beyond reporting to truly equip teams with the ability to use data strategically, magnifying the impact their choices can have on sustainability practices.”
This approach ensures that AI acts not only as a tool for operational gains but also as a catalyst for ethical, transparent and equitable sustainability advancement.
Tech is enabling a regenerative, profitable future
TCS’ Digital Twindex for sustainability underscores that the future of competitive enterprise will be defined by tech innovation and digital integration.
J. Carl Ganter, Managing Director at Circle of Blue and World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council, says: “We are quickly moving from an era of ambiguous risks to a cascade of profound realities.
“It’s our generational opportunity to think and act systemically – especially at the fundamental nexus of water, food and energy – and combine AI, digital twins and human creativity to urgently model, test and choose the future we want.”
This future, TCS’ report suggests, will demand enterprises to invest deeply in AI-driven anticipatory systems, real-time digital twins that orchestrate complex physical and supply chain networks and Green IT architectures that minimise environmental footprints without sacrificing performance.
The integration of these technologies forms the backbone of Industry 4.5 – an era of augmented human-machine collaboration, modular and intelligent operations and pervasive digital resilience.
Forward-looking organisations will not only adopt technology to reduce risks but leverage it as a force multiplier – enabling proactive innovation, market agility and strategic foresight.
By embedding AI and digital twins at the core of operational and strategic models, enterprises unlock new layers of value creation, transforming business ecosystems into intelligent, adaptive and regenerative systems.
