Jannika Kremer’s Personal Reflection on 2025

For me, 2025 was the year when I, as a senior sustainability consultant, truly had to navigate AI in my work. It had been there in the background for a while, and whereas the earliest adopters were using it for things like making avatars of themselves as Daenerys from Game of Thrones or Eleven from Stranger Things, the early adopters within our line of business were using it to streamline our services and analyze data in ways we had not been able to before making those who leaned in to AI more competitive. What once felt peripheral or even playful was suddenly becoming unavoidable and deeply embedded in how work itself was done.

That shift forced a reckoning. As a continuous improvement and operational excellence practitioner, I have always known that change is constant, and that learning and adaptation are not optional. But knowing that intellectually and living it operationally are different things. With AI, the pace and scale of change were unlike anything I had experienced before. Alongside the opportunity came an acute awareness of risk, particularly around data, governance, and trust. New tools and processes could not simply be adopted because they were available or impressive. They had to be implemented deliberately, with safeguards in place, so that our information and that of our clients stayed protected.

At the same time, the market was flooding with AI and ESG software solutions. Software providers for sustainability platforms were popping up left and right, each offering the latest AI tool to complete sustainability reporting, double materiality assessments, climate risk disclosures, or GHG inventories. There were moments when I genuinely wondered whether sustainability consultants would still be needed at all, whether AI would simply automate the work out of existence.

That fear did not last long once we began engaging seriously with the tools themselves. By comparing platforms and, more importantly, partnering with software providers, a familiar truth resurfaced. Organizations are made up of people. And people navigating change do so best when that change is facilitated, communicated clearly, and when ownership of processes is intentionally and thoughtfully defined. AI technology could accelerate the work, but it could not replace responsibility, judgment, context, or the human work of guiding organizations through uncertainty. And if anything, 2025 gave us plenty of economic, political, and regulatory uncertainty to contend with on multiple fronts.

Seen through that lens, our role as consultants did not disappear or get replaced by AI. It evolved. It became more efficient, more iterative, and more collaborative. With the help of AI, we were able to benchmark and compare ways that would previously have taken weeks. We could map and analyze a client’s value chain with a level of detail and precision where only a conversation or two would be needed to refine and sharpen the outcome. AI-driven efficiency carved out space for more collaborative and meaningful conversations with stakeholders about what, why, and how, as well as next steps, conversations that would otherwise have been given far less time and space due to the demands of information extraction and management.

That efficiency mattered. It allowed us to move faster and still deliver meaningful ESG support at a moment when many sustainability budgets were being cut or scaled back, often in response to a shifting and increasingly polarized political landscape. In that sense, AI did not diminish the work. It made the role more focused, more human, and, paradoxically, more necessary than before.

Return to 2025: Working Through the Mess and the Shift that Defined the Year