ERM and Auquan bring agentic AI to sustainability advisory
Specialist sustainability consultancy ERM has announced a new collaboration with agentic AI firm Auquan. The partnership will see the firms attempt to deploy AI agents across sustainability workflows with financial institutions.
The proponents of agentic AI claim that unlike other forms of AI, which approximate the best answers to questions with a fresh series of tokens after each prompt, agentic systems can ‘learn’, ‘reason’, and ‘act autonomously’ to ‘solve’ complex, multistep problems. In theory, this enables a model to refine its decision-making over time, leading to improved outcomes.
ERM brings decades of experience advising private markets investors across buyouts, growth equity, and infrastructure transactions. It has supported private equity firms and their portfolio companies through thousands of deals globally, combining technical depth with commercial insight. Relevant to that, the Auquan platform automates the scanning of global news, regulatory disclosures, and stakeholder reports to surface controversies, litigation, and adverse media related to target companies and key counterparties.
Auquan’s sustainability agent system is said to “enhance the speed, scale, and depth of sustainability insights” for clients. As ERM’s customers navigate complex regulations and investment mandates on their ESG commitments, they will now have access to this tool.
"The work required to properly assess ESG risks and impacts is among the most data-intensive and time-consuming in finance," said Chandini Jain, CEO of Auquan. "ERM is the gold standard in sustainability consulting, and together we’re using agentic AI to empower firms to deliver on their investment mandates while moving faster and reclaiming their time to focus on strategic work."
As regulatory requirements such as SFDR Article 8 intensify scrutiny on company claims, demand for comprehensive reputational risk assessments at scale continues to grow. Combining its ERM’s sustainability knowhow and client relationships across institutional finance with Auquan’s autonomous AI agents will aim to help ERM’s clients rapidly identify and assess reputational risks as part of the broader due diligence process.
"As demand for sustainability advisory accelerates and regulatory requirements become more complex, we are enhancing our capabilities by embedding scalable AI solutions to meet our clients’ growing needs,” concluded Andrew Radcliff, global service leader for mergers and acquisitions at ERM. “Our collaboration with Auquan enables us to provide faster, data-driven insights that help to mitigate risk and enhance investment decisions.”
