For today’s organizations, sustainability is no longer just a compliance exercise—it is a business-critical mandate driving operational efficiency and overall company goals. Leaders are increasingly focused on business risk and value. They recognize that volatility is forcing sustainability to evolve, driven by factors like regulatory variability, business uncertainty, and the mandate for a strong return on investment (ROI). They are increasingly using environmental data as the backbone of strategic decision-making to identify cost savings, optimize supply chains, and mitigate financial risk.
Companies must make sustainability a priority to manage these risks and unlock new value. As energy costs rise and regulatory landscapes shift, companies must transition sustainability from a cost center to a driver of sustainable business value. To do this, organizations need powerful tools that embed sustainability insights directly into finance, operations, and procurement, ensuring that every environmental metric helps improve the bottom line and drive impactful change.
What is a net zero cloud?
A net zero cloud is a specialized software solution designed to help organizations achieve their sustainability goals while driving operational efficiency and business value. While traditionally focused on the target of reaching net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, modern platforms have evolved into essential business intelligence tools that align environmental performance with overall company goals. These platforms operate on cloud infrastructure and provide tools for comprehensive environmental accounting, data management, and action planning.
The primary function of a net zero cloud is to centralize and simplify the complex process of tracking, calculating, and reporting an organization’s carbon footprint across all scopes—Scope 1 (direct emissions), Scope 2 (indirect emissions from purchased energy), and the challenging Scope 3 (all other indirect emissions in the value chain). However, beyond reporting, a net zero cloud enables companies to operationalize sustainability. By unifying disparate data from utility providers, supply chains, and travel desks, these platforms allow organizations to identify cost-saving opportunities, mitigate regulatory risk, and forecast the financial impact of their climate strategies.
The best platforms, like Salesforce Net Zero Cloud (now Agentforce Net Zero), go beyond simple tracking to offer AI agents that work alongside humans to improve operational capabilities and turn sustainability data into measurable business results.
What is Salesforce Net Zero Cloud?
Salesforce Net Zero Cloud, now known as Agentforce Net Zero, is a sustainability management platform built on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform that allows organizations to track, analyze, and report their carbon emissions and other environmental data. While it established the standard for carbon accounting and ESG data management, the platform has evolved to combine unified data with agentic AI to drive sustainable business value.
Net Zero Cloud helps organizations embed sustainability and operational data into decision-making to gain visibility into overspending, risks, and opportunities. The platform is powered by Agentforce to offer automated report authoring, helping companies confidently comply with existing and emerging regulations. It enables organizations to move beyond manual spreadsheets by unifying siloed data—from utility bills and supply chains to travel and HR systems—into a single source of truth.
Net Zero Cloud is designed to demystify the process of climate action. With Agentforce, companies can automate compliance and operationalize sustainability. AI agents empower teams to ask natural language questions to uncover cost-saving opportunities, forecast future emissions, and automatically draft audit-ready reports for frameworks like CSRD and CDP, significantly reducing reporting cycles and operational costs. The platform helps transition sustainability from a burdensome compliance exercise to a strategic driver of business value.
Benefits of Net Zero Cloud
Using a dedicated platform like Net Zero Cloud provides significant advantages in managing and accelerating an organization’s journey to sustainability and operational efficiency. These benefits include:
Comprehensive Environmental Accounting
Net Zero Cloud allows organizations to conduct environmental accounting with a high degree of granularity and accuracy. It supports the allocation of emissions across different accounts and by greenhouse gas (GHG) categories, including support for FERA (Financed Emissions Required for Accounting) emissions. The platform helps organizations move beyond simple estimates toward more precise, activity-based tracking that aligns with global standards.
Operational Cost Reduction
Net Zero Cloud transforms environmental data into a tool for operational efficiency. By unifying data from utilities, waste, and travel, organizations can identify specific areas of overspending—such as energy spikes in specific facilities or inefficient logistics routes. This visibility allows companies to negotiate better rates with suppliers, reduce energy and water bills, and lower fuel usage, directly impacting the bottom line.
Data Collection and Gap Filling
A major challenge in emissions tracking is collecting data from a vast supply chain and other complex sources. Net Zero Cloud features the Data Collection Agent, which can be piloted and later generally available, to automate and simplify this process. The platform also offers tools for data gap filling in bulk, along with data gap visualization, helping organizations maintain a complete and reliable single source of truth for all Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.
Enhanced Compliance and Reporting
The platform is designed to ease the burden of regulatory compliance. It provides quantitative support for standards like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) via its data model and data mappers. This automated report authoring capability enables companies to confidently comply with various existing and emerging sustainability regulations.
Revenue Growth & Brand Loyalty
Sustainability management is increasingly a driver of top-line growth. Net Zero Cloud enables companies to embed sustainability data into sales and marketing, empowering customers to evaluate purchases based on carbon footprints. By providing transparency and "green" product options, organizations can increase brand loyalty and capture the 80% of consumers willing to pay more for sustainably produced goods. Additionally, automated responses to ESG-related RFIs (Requests for Information) help sales teams win deals faster with reliable, auditable answers.
Strategic Supplier Engagement
Supply chain emissions — often categorized as Scope 3.1 — frequently represent the largest portion of an organization's total GHG emissions. Net Zero Cloud provides procurement insights and supplier views to identify key hotspots, such as specific product lines (like frozen foods and imported produce) or vendors (like meat and dairy) driving disproportionate emissions intensity. It can highlight opportunities, for example, by comparing the emissions-to-spend ratio of different suppliers, enabling strategic decisions to shift spend toward lower-intensity partners. By digitizing supplier collaboration, companies can pinpoint supply chain risks, negotiate based on carbon intensity, and drive decarbonization across the entire value chain.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Net Zero Cloud integrates sustainability metrics with operational data, providing leaders with insights into risks and opportunities across the business. This integration empowers organizations to operationalize sustainability, turning environmental data into actionable business intelligence that can drive efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance brand reputation.
How does Net Zero Cloud work?
Net Zero Cloud functions by unifying an organization's sustainability and operational data on a single platform, applying smart analytics, and providing tools for climate action.
- Data Ingestion and Consolidation: The process begins with collecting data from across the organization and its value chain. This includes energy bills, facility data, travel logs, procurement records, and supplier-provided information. The platform uses agents (like the Data Collection Agent) and data model objects to collect and aggregate metrics at the parent level.
- Environmental Accounting: Once data is collected, Net Zero Cloud acts as a single source of truth, automatically calculating the organization's carbon emissions. It applies the latest emission factors from its marketplace to convert activity data into investor-grade, audit-ready metrics for Scope 1, Scope 2, and complex Scope 3 emissions, ensuring your data is reliable for financial filings and third-party audits.
- Insight Generation and Hotspot Analysis: Beyond static dashboards, users can now use Agentforce to have a conversation with their data. You can ask natural language questions like "Which business units had the highest energy cost last month?" to instantly identify hotspots and operational inefficiencies. This AI-driven analysis democratizes data access, helping teams pinpoint specific vendors or facilities driving disproportionate emissions and costs.
- Strategic Action Planning: Net Zero Cloud empowers leaders to move from hindsight to foresight. Based on the identified hotspots, Net Zero Cloud cloud suggests strategic steps. Using What-If Analysis and Forecasting, organizations can simulate different sustainability strategies, such as fleet electrification or renewable energy adoption to visualize their financial and environmental impact before implementation. For instance, it may recommend engaging top emitters like meat, dairy, and frozen food suppliers on reduction or shifting spend to lower-intensity suppliers.
- Reporting and Compliance: The final step involves generating reports that meet regulatory and stakeholder requirements. The platform automates report authoring for various mandatory and voluntary frameworks like CSRD, CDP, GRI, and SASB, helping organizations confidently disclose their performance and track progress against commitments like Science-Based Targets (SBTs).
- Operational Integration: Net Zero Cloud breaks down silos by embedding sustainability insights directly into core business processes. Whether it’s surfacing carbon data in Salesforce Field Service to optimize truck rolls or providing travel emissions data to finance teams, the platform ensures that sustainability drives operational decisions across Sales, Service, and Commerce.
Key Features of Net Zero Cloud
Net Zero Cloud offers a robust suite of features to manage and accelerate the sustainability journey. Some examples include:
Environmental Accounting Excellence
The platform provides advanced capabilities for accurate emissions calculations, including AEI (Allocated Emissions Insights) allocated emissions breakdown by GHG categories and eventually by accounts, along with fleet distance adjustment capabilities.
Emissions Factors Marketplace
Users can access and load global emission factor datasets such as IPCC, USEEIO, and IEA. They can also search for up-to-date emissions factors, including specific data listings like "Supplier-Specific Primary Emission Factors", from a marketplace to ensure calculations are based on the latest available science and data.
Data Collection Agents
The Data Collection Agent helps streamline the manual work of gathering sustainability data. It is designed to simplify and automate the set-up process for collecting data, which is essential for comprehensive Scope 3 tracking, particularly for purchased goods and services. These capabilities facilitate the identification of data gaps and validate records, freeing sustainability teams to focus on strategy
CSRD Quantitative Support
Net Zero Cloud includes data model objects and data mappers to provide quantitative support for complex reporting frameworks such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB, now part of ISSB), which are critical for compliance in a tightening regulatory landscape.
Procurement Insights
The platform provides a dedicated view for procurement analysis, showing key metrics like total emissions split, spends, and emissions intensity. This allows for quick snapshot analysis and helps identify key vendors (like meat and dairy) that are significant emission hotspots. Features such as Supplier Scorecards enable direct engagement with vendors to capture actual emissions data rather than relying solely on estimates, facilitating collaborative decarbonization efforts.
Strategic Forecasting
Forward-looking decision-making is supported by What-If Analysis and Emissions Forecasting tools. Organizations can simulate sustainability scenarios, such as fleet electrification or renewable energy adoption, to visualize financial and environmental impacts before implementation, ensuring alignment with Science-Based Targets (SBTs).
Net Zero Cloud Use Cases
Net Zero Cloud helps business professionals across various roles solve complex sustainability challenges such as:
Accelerating Scope 3 Emissions Reduction
The most challenging emissions to track and reduce are those in the supply chain (Scope 3). A company that manufactures consumer goods can use the procurement insights in Net Zero Cloud to analyze emissions by product line and supplier. For example, they might discover that processed foods, frozen foods, and imported produce are driving disproportionate emissions intensity. The platform allows the company to engage those high-emissions suppliers and strategically shift future spend to lower-intensity partners, driving measurable reductions across their value chain.
Automating Global Regulatory Reporting
A multi-national financial services firm facing new regulations in Europe, such as the CSRD, can leverage Net Zero Cloud's reporting features. The platform automatically aggregates all required environmental data and maps it to the necessary disclosure format, helping the firm to confidently comply with quantitative support for the mandate. This capability frees up time for the sustainability team, allowing them to focus on strategic climate action rather than manual data compilation.
Operationalizing Climate Risk Management
A large logistics company can use Net Zero Cloud to integrate its operational data (like fuel use and fleet mileage) with climate risk models. By linking the environmental footprint with financial metrics and business-critical operations, leaders gain a clearer picture of climate-related business risk. If a particular shipping route is shown to have high operational emissions and a high emissions-to-spend ratio, Net Zero Cloud’s insights can prompt the company to explore alternative, lower-carbon transportation methods.
Optimizing Energy Efficiency
A global retailer or property management firm can use Agentforce Net Zero to unify utility and facility data across hundreds of locations, automatically benchmarking building energy intensity. For example, Agentforce can analyze consumption patterns to identify specific properties with abnormal energy spikes or excessive usage during non-operating hours. This insight allows facility managers to implement targeted interventions—such as retrofitting HVAC systems or adjusting control schedules—that immediately lower utility bills and improve the bottom line.
Streamlining Fleet and Logistics Operations
A transportation or logistics company can integrate fleet telematics and fuel data into the platform to uncover hidden operational costs. By analyzing vehicle performance data, the platform can identify inefficiencies such as excessive idling or suboptimal routing. These insights enable operations leaders to enforce more efficient driving behaviors and optimize delivery routes, resulting in significant reductions in fuel consumption and vehicle maintenance costs.
Get Started with Agentforce Net Zero
Sustainability is no longer a peripheral concern; it is a vital part of managing business risk and driving value. Agentforce Net Zero (formerly Net Zero Cloud) provides the intelligent platform necessary to navigate this complexity. Companies can harness the power of their sustainability and operational data to gain visibility, confidently comply with emerging regulations, and accelerate their climate action. To explore how Net Zero Cloud can transform an organization’s approach to environmental accounting and strategic climate planning, take a look at detailed product information and resources.
This article is for informational purposes only. This article features products from Salesforce, which we own. We have a financial interest in their success, but all recommendations are based on our genuine belief in their value.
Net Zero Cloud FAQs
A net zero cloud is a specialized, cloud-based software platform that assists organizations in managing, measuring, and reporting their progress toward achieving net zero carbon emissions. These platforms unify and centralize environmental and operational data, automate complex emissions calculations, and provide the insights needed to mitigate financial risk and drive sustainable business value across the value chain.
Salesforce Net Zero Cloud is the former product name of the sustainability management platform offered by Salesforce, which is now called Agentforce Net Zero. It is an AI-powered, cloud-based solution that helps companies unify data to gain visibility into operational inefficiencies, financial risks, and cost-saving opportunities by embedding sustainability and operational data into decision-making. Powered by Agentforce, it helps organizations confidently comply with existing and emerging regulations through automated report authoring while driving sustainable business value.
The benefits of Net Zero Cloud include automated environmental accounting, simplified data collection and data gap filling through AI-powered tools like the Data Collection Agent. It helps ensure audit-ready compliance with complex regulations such as CSRD through automated report authoring, enables strategic supplier engagement through procurement insights, and empowers leaders to uncover operational inefficiencies that link sustainability to reduced costs and business value.
Net Zero Cloud works by: 1) Unifying sustainability and operational data using Ai-powered agents to ingest information from the organization and its value chain. 2) Automatically calculating emissions (Scope 1, 2, and 3) by applying accurate emissions factors. 3) Generating insights and identifying emission hotspots through natural language conversations with Agentforce. 4) Forecasting future scenarios to recommend strategic action plans that reduce risk and spend.. 5) Automating compliance and reporting for various complex regulatory frameworks like CSRD.
Net Zero Cloud is the former product name for the Salesforce sustainability platform, which is now called Agentforce Net Zero. The platform continues to provide comprehensive environmental accounting and sustainability management features, but now operates as an agentic AI solution that unifies operational data to drive sustainable business value through enhanced data collection, analysis, and automated reporting.