One of the biggest challenges in risk monitoring is sifting through mountains of irrelevant data. Whether you're using search engines, financial news platforms, or even specialized in-house analytics, you end up with too much noise. Scrolling through to page 12 of Google is not only time-consuming, but leaves you with the nagging feeling that you could still be missing something.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hot topic, with new breakthroughs and possible applications popping up every day. The question is no longer simply “can AI help me with that?” but rather “how can I use AI to help with that?” For Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) controversy and risk monitoring, AI is used to sift through enormous data sets at unparalleled speeds, bringing critical insights to the forefront faster and more efficiently than humanly possible.

When there are hundreds of companies to monitor, for example in a large investment portfolio or a group of suppliers, the advantages of AI are obvious. But what about smaller portfolios? How do you know it’s time to start using AI? Based on our experience working with private equity firms, asset managers and commercial banks, we’ve pulled together five signs that it’s time to consider AI.

1. Overwhelmed by Data: There's Too Much Noise

An AI-powered tool filters out the noise, even in situations where seemingly only humans would be able to do it, giving you the peace of mind that there’s no controversy lurking in the dark corners of the web. All of the key information is gathered in one place, ready for you to evaluate and decide the best course of action.

2. Difficulty Finding Critical Information: The Black Hole of Private Companies

On the flip side - sometimes instead of finding too much data, you can’t find any data at all. For private companies, information can be scarce, especially for smaller companies based overseas, where the only news coverage is local and in the local language. In this case, ESG ratings agencies often aren’t able to fill the gap either. There are millions of firms worldwide and less than 50,000 of them are covered by rating agencies (source).

AI, on the other hand, enables systematic coverage and statistically relevant results without human intervention, analyzing millions of websites and providing coverage on millions of public & private companies. If you are struggling to find information on a company, AI might be the answer.

3. Can't Accurately Analyze an Event: The Context is Missing

Beyond the actual controversy or event itself, understanding the context and history around it is essential for risk assessment. Is this a one-off concern or part of a recurring pattern? To get the full picture, you need to take a closer look not only at the company in question, but the key players, i.e. key executives, and the industry as a whole to understand if this is within the norms.

AI has an important role to play here also. By simply expanding the search, AI can provide you with a full picture of the controversy, including a quick summary and a benchmark against competitors in just a matter of minutes.

4. Missed Critical Window for Action: The Cost of Inefficiency

Markets can change quickly - and it’s only getting worse as information is spreading faster and more widely. The more time it takes you to gather and analyze information, the less time you have to react. This can be a challenge whether you are monitoring 30 companies or 100’s. If you find yourself trapped in a cycle of reacting to news rather than acting proactively, AI can help. Because AI scans and analyzes information in seconds, the alerts to potential controversies are in near real-time, allowing you as much time as possible to take action.

5. Missing ESG Expertise: The Knowledge Gap

To top it all off, ESG is complex and constantly evolving. Understanding what data is relevant and how to evaluate it requires real expertise. ESG rating agencies provide some guidance, but they typically leverage self-reported data - which is naturally biased. Take greenwashing for example where a company misleads its stakeholders, investors, and consumers about its environmental practices by communicating positive environmental performance contrary to its actual, less positive execution. It’s difficult to identify greenwashing using self-reported data.

Because AI relies on external stakeholders, such as online forums or news sources, it offers an unbiased take on a company’s ESG performance. Additionally, by choosing an AI with ESG expertise built-in, you benefit from an expert analysis without increasing the burden on your team.

As the speed and amount of information available continues to grow, AI offers a scalable way to monitor your partners, suppliers and portfolio. To learn more and find out if AI is a good fit for your company, contact our experts at SESAMm.

Allianz Commercial oversees underwriting for a highly diversified global client base, including a vast ecosystem of large and medium-sized enterprises and infrastructure projects.

To enhance visibility into underwriting risks at scale, Allianz Commercial partnered with SESAMm to implement an automated sustainability and reputational risk due diligence capability directly integrated into underwriting workflows. SESAMm now automates the assessment of hundreds of thousands of companies each year, delivering structured insights on sustainability and reputational risk in seconds via a real-time API-driven workflow.

This deployment functions as a fully integrated component of daily underwriting activities across global teams, supporting high-volume decision-making processes without adding operational burden.

Key Benefits at a Glance

• Efficiency: Transformed a manual, multi-step process into a fully automated, real-time underwriting check delivered in seconds.
• Going Beyond Data: Automatically completes the sustainability and reputational due diligence questionnaire rather than simply delivering raw risk event data, saving time and enabling faster referral decisions.
• Dedicated Corporate and Infrastructure Projects Coverage: Comprehensive global coverage across corporate coverage and infrastructure projects.
• Tailored Approach: Risk logic configured to Allianz Commercial’s underwriting policies and decision frameworks, delivering assessments tailored to its specific requirements rather than requiring adaptation to an off-the-shelf product.

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Underwriting teams had sustainability and reputational risk data for large listed companies from an existing data provider, but required broader coverage across SMEs and privately held companies. To fill this gap, underwriting teams relied on a combination of internal processes and external research to identify potential risks. As volumes increased, ensuring consistent and timely access to sustainability impacts became a key challenge, particularly during onboarding and renewal cycles.

As part of this process, SESAMm delivered significant additional value by providing direct answers to each sustainability and reputation due diligence questionnaire question in a systematic way, enabling Allianz Commercial to fully automate the process, which was not feasible with other solutions.

Allianz Commercial aimed to:  

• Provide underwriters with immediate access to structured risk data.
• Align with internal sustainability and reputational risk guidelines.  
• Support efficient onboarding and renewal workflows at high volumes.

Allianz Commercial needed a solution that could deliver real-time, standardized, and scalable risk insights directly within underwriters’ workflows.

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SESAMm partnered with Allianz Commercial to deploy a fully integrated risk intelligence layer embedded within its proprietary underwriting environment. Underwriters now access SESAMm insights directly within their existing interface.

When underwriters enter a company identifier, the system uses Dun & Bradstreet’s D‑U‑N‑S® Number to anchor the search in a globally recognized, trusted, and data‑rich company record. With that foundation, the SESAMm API can instantly retrieve and deliver a structured sustainability and reputational risk assessment, supporting both precise entity matching and scalable discovery across millions of companies.

The SESAMm API evaluates external data over a multi-year period and automatically answers predefined due diligence questions across sustainability and reputational risk categories. Each response includes:

• Clear yes/no determinations
• Supporting justification and context
• Supporting evidence, compliant with Allianz Commercial audit track requirements

The output is aligned with internal reputational risk and sustainability guidelines and supports transparent, auditable underwriting decisions without adding operational complexity.

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Since deployment, SESAMm has enabled Allianz Commercial to evaluate corporate coverage  and infrastructure projects underwriting with consistent, real-time external risk intelligence. A process that previously required multiple research and validation steps can now be completed in under a minute through automated API-driven checks embedded directly within underwriting workflows.

The solution supports the assessment of hundreds of thousands of companies annually for Allianz Commercial and provides underwriters with documented sustainability and reputational risk insights at the point of decision. With expanded visibility across privately held and smaller companies globally, Allianz Commercial benefits from a far more consistent risk coverage while maintaining the speed and reliability required for high-volume onboarding and renewal processes across global operations.

Greenwashing in ESG has become harder to detect, not easier, because the corporate playbook has matured. Claims are vaguer, disclosure is more selective. Meanwhile, two adjacent problems have grown up next to it: greenwishing and greenhushing. The biggest greenwashing risk in your portfolio probably isn't the company you suspect, it's the one you don't. This guide is about all three, and how AI surfaces them at the speed your investment process needs.

Over the past decade, many organizations have improved their carbon footprints, from recyclable and biodegradable packaging and single-use plastic to planting trees and reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. However, some businesses and companies looking to boost their eco-friendly image without committing to serious changes and addressing environmental issues have been associated with false green marketing. We call this "Greenwashing."

Defining Concepts

What is Greenwashing?

Greenwashing is a practice used by businesses to represent themselves as more sustainable than they truly are. Greenpeace and the Environmental Protection Agency define greenwashing as making false and misleading claims about a product's environmental benefits or practices, services, technology, or company practices. Greenwashing typically involves companies spending more money on advertising and marketing than on implementing sustainable business practices that minimize environmental impact. These false green claims can deceive consumers into believing that a product or company is more environmentally friendly than it is, leading to increased sales and profits. As a result, false advertising, misleading initiatives, and groundless claims have increased green investors' exposure to risks emerging from potential lawsuits from activist groups, image deterioration, and heavy losses in assets invested.

In recent years, new concepts have emerged alongside greenwashing:

• Greenhushing refers to a company’s refusal to publicize ESG information. The company may fear pushback from stakeholders who would find its sustainability efforts lacking or from investors who believe ESG undermines returns.
• Greenwishing, or unintentional greenwashing, describes a practice where a company hopes to meet certain sustainability commitments but simply does not have the means to do so.

High-Profile Greenwashing Case Studies

When talking about greenwashing, the usual suspects are the oil and gas industry, the food and beverage sector, and other environmentally impactful industries. However, the financial industry has also been embroiled in its own greenwashing controversies.

DWS Greenwashing Analysis

DWS Group has been at the center of repeated greenwashing allegations. In April 2025, the firm was fined €25 million by German prosecutors for misleading ESG claims, building on years of scrutiny. It all started in 2021 with whistleblower claims that DWS overstated its ESG credentials, triggering investigations by both U.S. and German authorities. A police raid in June 2022 led to the CEO’s resignation, and in 2023, the SEC fined DWS $25 million for ESG misstatements. Lawsuits in Germany also allege false advertising around ESG. Greenpeace condemned DWS’s ESG bonus scheme as cosmetic rather than meaningful. Despite public commitments to sustainability, these controversies underscore a pattern of overstated ESG practices designed to attract investors.

BNY Mellon Greenwashing Analysis

BNY Mellon faced similar regulatory action. In May 2022, the SEC fined BNY Mellon Investment Adviser, Inc. $1.5 million for misleading statements about ESG integration in mutual funds. Although the funds were marketed as ESG-focused, the SEC found that BNY Mellon failed to apply ESG quality review as consistently as claimed, raising concerns about greenwashing in the financial sector.

The Challenges of Detecting Greenwashing

It’s challenging to produce an accurate assessment of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, which creates opportunities for companies to hide ineffective and fake green initiatives. According to Regtank, the main challenges to detecting greenwashing include:

• Lack of reporting standards – There’s no universal set of standards for ESG compliance.
• Lack of transparency – Companies often don’t disclose the specifics of their “green campaigns,” making it hard for investors and consumers to verify their claims.
• Limited consumer awareness – Misleading marketing can exploit consumers’ eco-consciousness and brand loyalty, reducing scrutiny of false green claims.
  

These gaps lead to inaccurate ESG data and scores, allowing greenwashers to avoid accountability. Ultimately, detecting greenwashing requires careful scrutiny of company claims and a deep understanding of their supply chains and operations.

How Artificial Intelligence Detects Greenwashing

As greenwashing practices become more common, activist investors, journalists, and the general public are using social media, news outlets, and blogs to highlight false claims. Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an invaluable tool in the early detection of greenwashing by analyzing vast amounts of public data.

At SESAMm, we use generative AI and LLMs to identify greenwashing risks across billions of web-based articles. Our data lake covers over 25 billion articles in more than 100 languages from four million news sources, blogs, social media platforms, and forums, analyzing data on five million public and private companies. Through our AI platform, we generate reliable, timely, and comprehensive insights to detect greenwashing, monitor ESG controversies, and identify related risks.

The Regulatory Landscape

The rise of greenwashing is not going unnoticed by regulators, as frameworks like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) directly target misleading sustainability claims and hollow marketing.

1. The CSRD significantly strengthens the requirements for companies to substantiate their sustainability commitments. Mandating standardized and detailed ESG disclosures directly addresses the practice of greenwashing, where companies exaggerate their environmental credentials in marketing without meaningful follow-through. Under the CSRD, companies can no longer rely on vague or selectively presented data—any gaps or inconsistencies in their sustainability claims will be exposed in public filings, making greenwashing much riskier. This means an end to cherry-picked data and a shift toward more comprehensive, comparable, and verifiable ESG performance for investors and stakeholders.
2. The CSDDD (if it stands) further reinforces these efforts by obligating companies to go beyond marketing statements and prove they’re actively managing environmental and human rights impacts throughout their supply chains. This directive closes loopholes that greenwashing often exploits, such as highlighting only direct operations while ignoring supplier practices. By requiring due diligence on environmental impacts across the value chain, the CSDDD aims to turn sustainability from a branding exercise into a legal and operational priority. If real supply chain actions don’t support a company’s green claims, it could face legal action and reputational damage.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead, greenwashing will continue to face intense scrutiny from regulators, investors, and the public. With evolving regulatory frameworks like CSRD and CSDDD, the pressure is on for companies to ensure genuine environmental responsibility—not just green advertising. At SESAMm, we believe that the combination of regulatory rigor and advanced AI technologies will play a critical role in uncovering false green claims and supporting investors in navigating ESG risks with greater transparency and accountability.

SESAMm’s AI Technology Reveals ESG Insights

Discover unparalleled insights into ESG controversies, risks, and opportunities across industries. Learn more about how SESAMm can help you analyze millions of private and public companies using AI-powered text analysis tools.