In an interview with TimesTech, Vivek Mehra, Co-founder, CSO & CTO of Onlygood.ai, shared how the platform is revolutionizing sustainability by integrating AI, IoT, and carbon accounting into business operations. Since its inception in 2022, Onlygood has helped enterprises cut carbon emissions at scale while ensuring regulatory compliance. Vivek emphasized the platform’s mission to make sustainability a growth driver, not just a checkbox.
Read the full interview here:
TimesTech: Onlygood.ai was born out of a vision to make sustainability a growth driver for businesses. What inspired you both to create a platform that integrates technology with sustainability, and how has the journey been since its inception in 2022?
Vivek: Both Rajeev and I had been participating in sustainability initiatives at a personal level over many years – such as utilizing CSR funds for tree plantations, or ensuring livelihoods for lower-income workers, or providing remedial education for underprivileged children. We realized that these piecemeal initiatives would never be enough to save the planet unless we helped businesses embrace sustainability at scale and help them accelerate their sustainability journeys. While enterprise carbon footprints were always a focus for leading businesses, a key missing aspect was an inability to capture, collate and analyze supply chain carbon emissions. So we designed and built the Onlygood technology platform to address this. The journey since 2022 has been extremely rewarding and we have saved hundreds of thousands of tons of Co2 emissions across various industries – automotive, apparel, textiles, plastics, polymers and others.
TimesTech: Carbon accounting and ESG reporting can often be complex and time-consuming. How does Onlygood.ai simplify this process for enterprises, and what role does AI and IoT play in making carbon management more efficient and verifiable?
Vivek: The big challenge with ESG data is data capture from a globally fragmented supply chain, which includes disparate levels of data competencies and maturity around ESG practices. Without the real-time, touch-less streaming of data that IoT sensors and devices can provide (such as connected energy meters), it is impossible to capture and collate ESG data on a continuous basis – as is required by current global regulatory mandates. AI-based techniques such as computer vision can help capture this data, as well as enable forecasting and creating what-if scenarios to create decarbonization pathways
TimesTech: The platform claims to go beyond dashboards by offering real-time product traceability and role-based access. Can you elaborate on some key use cases where Onlygood has significantly improved sustainability outcomes for businesses?
Vivek: Beyond the accuracy and veracity of data, the platform provides analytics and insights to help businesses first understand a true picture of where they are in their sustainability journey. We help them understand gaps in energy, water, waste and transportation measurement and addressal, as well as help them set goals for reduction towards net zero. A key aspect is an ability to onboard multiple suppliers across the globe onto the platform for a seamless collation of Scope 3 data. This helps make compliance reporting easy and accurate, and also influences suppliers to align their net zero goals with the enterprise.
TimesTech: With global regulations like CBAM, CSRD, and India’s BRSR coming into play, how does Onlygood.ai help exporters and manufacturing SMEs ensure compliance, particularly in regions like the EU?
Vivek: Onlygood’s platform provides a unified, central repository to store data and supporting documentation that can be used for verification and auditing. The data is compliant with the GHG protocol and the ISO 14064 standard to carbon emissions reporting. This enables on-demand, accurate reporting across a variety of global formats such as GRI, CBAM, CSRD (ESRS), and BRSR amongst others. The system can be configured to change emissions factors and align with new reporting formats as they evolve over time. The added configurability of workflows, data auditability and document management enables easy assurance by any certified 3rd party. All these features are also automatically available to any supplier onboarded onto the platform.
TimesTech: Your platform addresses carbon, culture, and compliance sustainability. Why is it important for companies to look at sustainability through this holistic lens, and how does it impact their ROI and brand perception in the long run?
Vivek: Sustainability initiatives are rarely successful if they are undertaken without strategic intent, or without leadership support. At Onlygood our mission is to help our clients think of sustainability not as a compliance mandate, but as an intrinsic part of their business. Our goal is to help clients embed sustainability in everyday process and production, in collaboration with their employees and suppliers as partners. Brands that have a strategic intent to focus on sustainability by design have deeper emotional connect with their buyers and end-customers leading to market differentiation and ultimately top-line growth.
TimesTech: With ambitions to expand globally and work with EU partners and emerging markets, what are your future plans for scaling Onlygood.ai? How do you see your platform contributing to global sustainability goals over the next 3-5 years?
Vivek: The Onlygood platform is evolving into a global standard toolkit and repository that can interface with existing enterprise and supplier technology landscapes as well as industry standard disclosure portals such as CDP and Ecovadis. The platform’s unique configurable design allows it to adjust for local geographic data requirements, quickly implement workflows for data collection and validation, domain-specific analytics and insights, as well as an up-to-date alignment with the fast evolving global regulatory requirements. Our AI-based implementations ensure that we have continuous technology releases with newer, faster functionality for our clients. In the next 3-5 years, we see Onlygood helping to consolidate ad-hoc sustainability initiatives into well-rounded climate strategies for clients with clearly delineated risks and deeper, actionable insights. For the EU and emerging markets we hope to be the gold-standard for sustainability insights and data.
