Article by Nicholas Andreou, Philipp Essl & Jeremy Rogers: “Impact assessment, either pre-investment or post-investment, is a critical component of robust impact measurement and management (IMM). As many social and environmental issues worsen, high-quality data and insights are needed, more than ever, to effectively allocate resources to solutions that address these challenges. However, impact assessment is often a resource-intensive and difficult process to do well. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an exciting umbrella of technologies that has the potential to transform how investors think about IMM (for example, in deep listening).
Our firm, Better Society Capital (BSC) is an impact fund-of-funds with a mandate to build the UK impact investing market. We have spent many years developing our IMM toolkit and processes, and we were recently placed on the Bluemark Leaderboard as having top-quartile scores across the eight categories of the Operating Principles of Impact Management (Bluemark is a leading impact management verification company, and the operating principles are a recognized framework outlining impact management best practices for impact investors). We are interested in how using AI alongside existing processes and judgment can bring additional insight, so we decided to run an experiment using our own portfolio to test the question: Can AI give investors the impact assessment rigor they crave at the speed they need?…(More)”.
