Sustainability 4.0: How the Celonis Context Model connects sustainability to operational execution

As we begin London Climate Action Week 2026, business leaders face a defining challenge.

For years, sustainability and competitiveness have been viewed as irreconcilable goals. One bringing the financial burden associated with reducing environmental impact. The other focused on growth, efficiency, and shareholder value. But in today's world of geopolitical uncertainty, climate volatility, supply chain disruption, and accelerating AI adoption, that distinction is rapidly disappearing.

Organizations are now expected to reduce emissions, strengthen resilience, comply with growing regulations, deploy AI responsibly, and deliver profitable growth, all at the same time. The companies that lead the next decade will be those that can achieve all these objectives simultaneously.

At Celonis, we believe this requires a fundamentally new way of operating, powered by Sustainability 4.0 and the Celonis Context Model.

You’ll find us at London Climate Action Week with our sustainability ecosystem partners, Climatiq, EcoVadis, Ventum, and IntegrityNext. Together we’ll be exploring how organizations can embrace this new way of operating, moving beyond sustainability reporting toward execution and measurable business impact.

Sustainability 4.0: The next evolution of sustainable business

Over the past decade, sustainability has largely been measured through reporting. Organizations invested heavily in ESG disclosures, carbon accounting, ratings, and compliance frameworks – initiatives that improved transparency, but rarely changed how businesses actually operated.

Today, transparency is no longer enough. If Sustainability 1.0 was awareness, Sustainability 2.0 was measurement, and Sustainability 3.0 was transparency, then Sustainability 4.0 is execution.

At Celonis we see Sustainability 4.0 as the use of AI, Process Intelligence, and operational data to embed sustainability directly into day-to-day business decisions. Rather than treating sustainability as a separate function and a reporting obligation, Sustainability 4.0 integrates it into procurement, supply chain, operations, finance, and IT.

The need for organizations to simultaneously optimize for cost, carbon, resilience, compliance, and growth is becoming increasingly important as regulations such as the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), and the upcoming UK CBAM, reshape global trade and supply chains.

Sustainability has become a strategic business and competitiveness issue, and future winners will be determined by their ability to transform sustainability into a value creation engine. This is where the Celonis Context Model becomes critical.

The Celonis Context Model: The foundation for Sustainability 4.0

The Celonis Context Model serves as the operational intelligence layer that helps people and AI understand how a business actually works.

By connecting real-time processes information, business knowledge, and decision intelligence into a shared model, it provides both humans and AI with unprecedented insight into what’s happened in the past, what’s happening right now, and what should happen next.

Instead of relying on assumptions, it gives them the context to understand how orders flow through the supply chain, how suppliers interact with procurement processes, how inventory moves across operations, and where costs, risks, bottlenecks, and emissions originate.

This operational understanding enables organizations to optimize sustainability and business performance simultaneously. What’s more, the Celonis Context Model also enables a more efficient approach to AI itself.

Context enables more efficient use of AI

For sustainability, AI is a double-edged sword. While it undoubtedly delivers the means to optimize resource use and hit sustainability targets, it can also be resource-heavy when deployed without business context.

Much of the discussion around AI's environmental impact has focused on model training and hyperscale data centers. Increasingly, however, the conversation has shifted to inference: the continuous use of AI across thousands of enterprise workflows and decisions. Because most AI models are trained on public information and possess little understanding of how a specific business actually operates, they can generate unnecessary queries, retrieve excessive information, and repeat reasoning cycles. Each of these steps consumes computing resources and costs tokens.

The Celonis Context Model changes all that. Agents grounded in operational context can route simple tasks to less resource-intensive models and reserve expensive reasoning for the calls that really need it. Celonis exposes functions, such as a manufacturing lead time, that agents can call directly, and then move on, replacing probabilistic guessing with a single deterministic call based on pre-structured business logic. The Context Model can turn tokenmaxxing into token taming – optimizing AI execution to minimize token consumption while maximizing outcomes.

Showcasing Sustainability 4.0 at London Climate Action Week

On its own the Celonis Context Model is a game changer. But when it’s used in collaboration with our ecosystem partners, the result is an intelligence layer to operationalize sustainability across the enterprise. Climatiq provides real-time carbon intelligence, EcoVadis delivers trusted sustainability performance insights, Ventum enables sustainable Procurement and Supply Chain transformation, and IntegrityNext strengthens supplier sustainability and compliance management.

During London Climate Action Week we’ll explore how organizations can move beyond compliance and reporting toward execution and measurable business impact.

• Together with Climatiq, we’ll be examining how AI, PI, and real-time carbon data can transform Product Carbon Footprints (PCF) and Scope 3 reporting, enabling operational carbon intelligence and measurable decarbonization.
• Together with EcoVadis, we’ll be exploring how sustainability, operations, procurement, finance, and technology can be connected into a single framework, to build AI-ready, sustainable enterprises.
• Together with Ventum, we’ll be demonstrating how PI and agentic AI help organizations prepare for UK CBAM requirements, automate supplier engagement, improve transparency, and turn compliance into competitive advantage.
• Together with IntegrityNext, we’ll be discussing how organizations can strengthen supplier sustainability performance, improve supply chain transparency, and create more resilient and responsible value chains.

Across all these conversations, a common theme emerges: sustainability creates the greatest value when it becomes part of operational decision-making rather than a separate reporting activity.

When sustainability and competitiveness go hand in hand

Enterprises today have everything they need to achieve both their sustainability and growth objectives. The two are no longer incompatible. The organizations that lead the way will be those that use context as a competitive advantage, connecting sustainability, AI, and execution into a single system of value creation.

Sustainability 4.0 provides the vision. The Celonis Context Model provides the foundation. Together, they enable organizations to transform sustainability from a compliance exercise into a strategic capability that drives resilience, profitability, and competitiveness.

Connect with us at London Climate Action Week, or get in touch to see how your business can make the most of Sustainability 4.0.