26 March 2025
What is your vision for digitising Longevity Partners’ service offering and why is this a priority?
We think that most of our clients are facing a few recurring and sticky problems: The first is frustration with data, and online platforms in general – there seems to be a widespread view that they are not enabling progress fast enough; the second is the difficulty of coordinating their own internal and external consultant teams, keeping track of progress, reports, etc. and the third is using the above to drive decision making and ultimately investment towards interventions which actually have an impact on the metrics they and their investors care about.
What role do AI, data analytics and automation play in Longevity Partners’ digital roadmap?
As consultants, we’re only valuable to our clients if we can provide accurate, insightful, and actionable advice on which they can act. To do this, we need to know more than anyone about everything our clients care about, which is rooted in data, both our clients’ and from the wider market and beyond. AI and automation are just the tools we’re using to speed up the delivery of that advice to our clients, which we hope will lead to faster, more accurate decision making and greater impact.
Why now? What is driving the need for digital transformation at this time?
We’ve been looking at this issue for several years – collecting data and biting off chunks of the problem at a time, without wanting to fully commit to developing an all-encompassing solution if it didn’t meet our clients’ needs. Having watched early entrants to the market struggle to adapt their early approaches to a dynamic market, and we wanted to avoid repeating their mistakes. That, coupled with the rise of competent Large Language Models, with the potential to massively disrupt the knowledge-based service economy, as well as recent investment in our business from Leon Capital and Nuveen Private Equity has enabled us to commit to developing a comprehensive approach which we think will meet our client’s needs.
What are the biggest challenges in digitising sustainability services, particularly within Longevity Partners’ offering?
Most won’t be surprised to hear data quality and completeness is problem number one. Beyond that obvious one, scale and language is an issue – we work across thousands of assets, in multiple countries, which adds significant localisation challenges. The application of frontier LLMs to complex engineering and sustainability problems requires a carefully curated knowledge-base on which to further augment the broad-based knowledge they come equipped with out of the box. This then creates the issue of testing and verification, accuracy and quality control of AI. A future problem, if we can create AI tools which have expert level knowledge of our niche industry, is how to develop the next generation of experts, and which skills are going to be the most valuable to future problem solvers.
What roadblocks have we encountered so far in our digital transformation journey, and how is Longevity addressing them?
Data privacy and security is a concern for most, if not all our clients, and we are in the process of pursuing ISO27001 certification to help provide reassurance that their data is in safe hands. For our more sensitive clients, AI security is an equally important concern – with some internal compliance teams refusing to allow AI use without having direct access to the models. I suspect this will relax as companies become more comfortable, but for now it may limit innovation in the realm of AI tools.
Can you share some of the key digital initiatives or platforms currently in development?
We’ve started with the services our clients come to us for the most – BREEAM in Use and GRESB. In both cases, we’re automating and streamlining the evidence collection and assessment process and giving our clients much better visibility into progress and, ultimately, their scores. We’ve been gathering early feedback from select clients, which has been extremely encouraging as well as giving us a few pointers on what else they want from the products.
Our Policy and Regulations team have also digitised our ‘Consortium of Investors’ service, turning it from a twice-yearly regulatory review into a guided self-service tool, meaning our clients can review their regulatory risks at any time, as well as being alerted to changes in policies and regulations as they happen, across the globe.
We’ve also got big plans to tie all these pieces of the puzzle together – stay tuned for more details on that…
How do our digital initiatives compare to other platforms on the market? Who else is innovating in this space and what sets Longevity apart? What is Longevity going to do differently?
We’re not trying to compete with the market leading data platforms, the Deepki and Measurabl’s of this world. We work very closely with them and have no interest in changing that – our focus is very much on solving client problems through expert consulting, and using digital tools, as well as integrating trusted partners to do that more effectively.
We’re very aware our sustainability teams, asset managers, and their property managers don’t want to remember another platform password, so our efforts are all around reducing friction across that supply chain.
How will Longevity’s digital transformation impact clients in practical terms? What new benefits or efficiencies will they experience?
The initial benefit from our first digitised services should be better transparency, and more efficiency from us and their supply chain. Once our wider approach is crystalised, they should gain even more visibility across their programmes, and ultimately better service from our consultants, who will have more time to focus on their problems and spend less time consolidating poor data.
How would you respond to the viewpoint that ‘this is just another platform’?
We are very familiar with the ESG/Sustainability platform landscape, and work closely with many of the industry leaders. Our goal is to focus on our strengths, and create a global, full-spectrum, tech-enabled consultancy, with tools focused on our improving our consultants’ impact foremost. There will be self-service elements to what we develop, but these will always be driven by our consulting team.
How will you ensure that your digital solutions remain user-friendly, relevant and accessible?
Talking to clients! We’re always out and about trying to work out what’s keeping our clients up at night and focusing on these issues. We’re excited to get feedback on our products and services at any stage, so if anything I’ve spoken about rings true, and you want a demo of any of the approaches we’re developing, please do reach out.
Sustainability consulting often involves complex, tailored advice. What are the main benefits of digitising our services and how do you ensure that digitisation enhances—rather than oversimplifies—our expertise? (slightly repetitive question from earlier but a different way of putting it!)
I think this is where some platforms are failing – whilst many of our clients are experts in their own right, they don’t have the time to pick up a platform and learn the software well enough to answer the questions they have. Others oversimplify (put in heat pumps!) with limited context or throw an AI black box at the problem (just give us your energy bills and floor area and we’ll create a net zero pathway!). We’re strong believers that digital approaches, platforms, and AI based tools have a big part to play, but that they must be supported by the “Best-Available-Human”. Luckily, Longevity is full of them, ready to provide complex, tailored advice.
You’ve outlined the initial platforms and services that will be available to Longevity clients, what is next on the digital agenda for Longevity Partners?
The focus for the beginning of the year is very much on rolling out AI tools and training throughout the business to upskill our consultants, especially in data security. We’ve also created our own secure ‘LongeviGPT’ which we’ve started to train using our proprietary data, and we’re excited to start testing that in anger.
Finally, as I’ve already hinted, we’re creating something which we believe will revolutionize how we deliver our work, and we will have more to share on that later in the year.