We’re often asked what makes Manifest Climate better than other AI tools on the market, like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot. Here’s what we say.
Firstly, what is Manifest Climate?
Manifest Climate is an ESG compliance tool that helps ESG-regulated companies, auditors and consultants quickly establish compliance with various disclosure standards, including CSRD, IFRS S1 & S2, and more.
Manifest Climate was specifically built for this purpose, but now that tools like ChatGPT and Copilot are available to the public, ESG professionals want to understand why they can’t simply rely on ‘generic’ AI tools to understand and assess ESG regulatory compliance.
It’s a good question. There are many reasons not to entrust ESG compliance to a tool like ChatGPT or Copilot.
What should you use generic AI for?
Generic AI tools can be useful for tasks like text generation and summarization, administrative tasks like organizing meetings and responding to emails, and automating repetitive tasks.
In this way, generic AI tools can be like an untrained junior employee: okay with handling simple tasks (particularly administrative ones), but rarely up to the task when the task requires deep domain knowledge and a complex, context-informed perspective.
For ESG compliance and audit purposes, it’s critical that the people and tools on the job have a high degree of accuracy, detailed regulatory knowledge, and contextual relevance. Generic AI has none of these things.
Why shouldn’t you use generic AI to assess ESG compliance?
Generic AI tools have a tendency to hallucinate
ChatGPT and similar models are known to occasionally produce “hallucinations” — outputs that sound credible but are incorrect or misleading. For example, if you were to pass disclosure text through ChatGPT along with CSRD requirements to determine whether you are complying, you have no way of knowing whether the answer it comes up with is accurate, or entirely made up. ESG compliance requires detailed assessment against nuanced standards, which generic AI isn’t equipped to parse with high fidelity. In the ESG space, where regulatory accuracy is paramount, relying on a system that may generate plausible but inaccurate responses is a compliance risk.
ChatGPT lacks context and precision
Like a junior employee beginning their career, ChatGPT doesn’t have a nuanced understanding of complex ESG frameworks like CSRD, TCFD, or OSFI B-15. It lacks the specialized knowledge to interpret, assess, and validate these disclosures accurately, often making the wrong assumptions. Because it has been built to essentially help anyone with anything, ChatGPT’s training is simply too broad. It is ill-suited for the specific, high-stakes context of ESG compliance, where even small oversights can lead to significant risks for companies.
What does Manifest Climate have over generic AI tools?
Manifest Climate is a specialized, multi-layered AI model
Manifest Climate doesn’t rely on a single AI model to do it all. Instead, we use multiple AI models in sequence to optimize every part of the ESG audit process. From categorizing regulatory documents to synthesizing and decision-making, this layered approach ensures unmatched accuracy and consistency, while avoiding the pitfalls of hallucinations.
Our in-house ESG experts start by creating a regulatory framework or ‘rubric’ for each regulation, interpreting both disclosure requirements and relevant guidance. We then train our AI to apply this expert judgment, making compliance assessments explicit and accurate, optimizing the AI output through expert QA processes.
The AI model also benefits from learning across thousands of manually reviewed public documents, leveraging our years as ESG consultants. Unlike generic AI, it can read and interpret complex content, including images, charts, graphs, infographics, and footnotes—which are key for understanding stylized sustainability disclosures.
These layers are our ‘secret sauce’ — they ensure that our analysis is highly sophisticated, entirely relevant, and an effective starting point for assessing and improving your disclosures.
CASE STUDY
SCI, a large North American public company, relies on Manifest Climate for benchmarking and first-pass disclosure drafting
“One of the major benefits [of Manifest Climate] is how the AI can find specific information within sustainability reports, like the language our peers use,” says
Carolyn Heidelberger, Environmental Sustainability Analyst at SCI.
“It helps us decide how we are doing to speak about our own initiatives. For example, we had a recast of our data for our 2022 sustainability report. We weren’t exactly sure the exact words we should use, or what that looked like. So by jumping into the product, it gave us a really good clear idea of the direction to go.”
Manifest Climate produces actionable analysis
We break down each ESG requirement into specific data points, enabling our system to assess each document line-by-line. This approach allows us to ensure no ambiguity or misinterpretation in the audit, providing a level of precision that generic AI tools simply cannot match.
When we produce a compliance assessment, each data point we source is linked back to the exact location where it was found among your previous disclosures, allowing you to easily dive deeper, cross-check for accuracy, and feel confident that your assessment is not, in fact, a hallucination.
Manifest Climate offers benchmarking against standards and peers
When checking your compliance against relevant ESG standards, Manifest Climate acts like an auditor would. ESG compliance often involves unwritten, implicit criteria that auditors consider. Our solution translates these implicit judgments into explicit, measurable data points. By doing so, we allow our AI to mimic auditor decisions with impressive accuracy, giving companies a compliance assessment that’s as close to human judgment as possible — only faster and more scalable.
But Manifest Climate goes beyond this auditor functionality and becomes more like an ESG consultant with its ability to benchmark your company’s climate disclosures against those of your peers and industry leaders. This is a helpful asset for C-suite and board conversations, showing you where you’re leading or lagging compared to your peers.
Having easy, item-specific access to peer disclosures can also show you what ‘good’ or even ‘best practice’ looks like for a particular disclosure line item, making it much easier for your team to draft or source data for this particular requirement.
Manifest Climate is backed by human quality assurance
While our AI is powerful, we also recognize that human oversight is essential for high-stakes audits. Prior to becoming a software company, we were an ESG consulting firm, so we’re a team of highly specialized experts in this field.
Our ESG and data conduct regular QA checks on the data points, ensuring the accuracy of each compliance assessment. This hybrid approach combines the efficiency of AI with the insight of human expertise, providing an audit reliability rate of over 90% — a metric that surpasses generic AI’s capabilities.
Manifest Climate is a flexible, centralized climate disclosure platform that locates the information you need in seconds
The limitations of ChatGPT are in the name — it’s a chat format. Manifest Climate is not a chatbot; it’s a sophisticated platform that reads your previous disclosures, produces ESG compliance assessments, and then records these assessments for posterity.
In ESG compliance assessments, half the battle is often locating the information you need. Sustainability information is not uniformly found in one place. It could be scattered across multiple public and private documents, including financial statements, internal policies, proxy statements, sustainability reports, and more. Traditionally, there has been no standard way to report this information, so a lot of the information is scattered in untagged, variable formats: images, graphs, charts, footnotes, and so on.
Manifest Climate not only has a Disclosure Database that covers all publicly available documents from NYSE, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 (that are updated daily); our technology is also able to read and pick up information from various formats. If there are private documents such as internal policies or draft reports that you want included in your review, you can upload those as well.
With Manifest Climate, your entire team can access a centralized platform to streamline ESG compliance efforts. You’ll have a real-time view of your compliance performance, with the ability to track progress over time and benchmark against peers. Our platform also provides direct links to locate specific ESG compliance information across both public and private documents, creating a clear foundation for your regulatory compliance efforts.
Choose Manifest Climate for accurate, actionable ESG compliance
While ChatGPT and other generic AI tools are impressive in their flexibility, Manifest Climate delivers the accuracy, regulatory depth, and audit precision that ESG-regulated companies need. For those serious about achieving consistent, reliable compliance, Manifest Climate offers an unmatched blend of AI-driven insights and human expertise — purpose-built for the ESG space.
