Your competitor just used sustainability intelligence to win the deal

Something has quietly changed in enterprise sales.

A few years ago, sustainability was mostly a reporting exercise. Today, it is increasingly becoming part of procurement, supplier selection, and strategic buying decisions. And most sales organisations are still not equipped for it.

I’ve seen this shift firsthand through our work at PlanetAI together with Nokia over the past year.

The companies winning large deals today often understand their customer’s sustainability pressures better than their competitors do. They know the decarbonisation targets. The supplier requirements. The board-level priorities. They know how to position their offering against those pressures.

Meanwhile, many sales teams are still walking into meetings blind.

The information itself is not hidden. It is buried inside annual reports, sustainability disclosures, supplier requirements, websites, rankings, and press releases. The real problem is scale. Nobody has time for “PDF archaeology” before a customer meeting.

One moment during our collaboration with Nokia made this very real for me.

At a major event last year, Nokia unexpectedly received an opportunity to meet the management team of a potential European customer — with only about 30 minutes’ notice. There was no deep strategic account preparation beforehand. No time for consultants. No time to manually go through sustainability reports or procurement disclosures.

Using PlanetAI’s AI-driven match analysis between Nokia and the customer, the team was able to immediately understand the customer’s sustainability goals, strategic priorities, current performance level, and where Nokia’s solutions could create concrete value.

That changed the dynamic of the meeting completely.

Instead of walking into the room with a generic pitch, the team entered already understanding the customer’s direction and pressures. PlanetAI didn’t replace sales expertise — it accelerated and sharpened it.

That experience eventually evolved into integrating PlanetAI insights directly into Nokia’s ESG Sales Engagement Plans for key accounts, helping make sustainability a structured part of account strategy rather than an afterthought.

Anni Rautakoura described the impact perfectly:

“PlanetAI insights has opened the door for sustainability to be part of strategic sales discussions, rather than only a compliance point.”

And I believe this reflects a much larger market shift already underway.

According to a recent KPMG sustainability transformation study, 92% of business leaders now expect measurable ROI from sustainability investments within 1–3 years. That changes the role sustainability plays inside organisations. It is no longer just reporting or risk management. It is becoming directly tied to competitiveness, procurement decisions, customer relationships, and growth.

I believe we are entering a new era of enterprise sales intelligence.

The winners will not simply have better products. They will understand their customers better — faster, deeper, and more strategically than everyone else.

That is ultimately what we are building at PlanetAI

Not another reporting tool.

But an intelligence layer that helps companies understand where the market is moving before the deal is already lost.