As businesses face increasing pressures to measure and manage their environmental impact, carbon accounting has emerged as a critical capability. We had the pleasure of speaking with Sara Pealy, VP and Head of Product Management at Persefoni, a leading carbon accounting and management platform. Our conversation explored how Sara and her team navigate the complex and evolving regulatory landscape, leverage customer insights to drive product innovation, and harness the power of AI to scale their impact. Here are the key takeaways from our discussion:
Q: Can you give us an overview of Persefoni's offerings and the core problems you solve for customers?
Sara: Persefoni is a carbon accounting and management platform. We often refer to ourselves as the "ERP of carbon." Essentially, we ingest data from various enterprise systems - things like ERP exports, utility bills, travel records, etc. We then apply emissions factor sets based on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which is the global standard for carbon accounting.
From there, we provide insights into a company's carbon footprint - the total emissions, the breakdown by scope 1, 2, and 3, and where in the value chain it's coming from. Armed with that information, customers can start to build decarbonization plans, whether that's through operational changes, renewable energy purchases, carbon offsets, or other levers.
Our customers span a wide range of industries and maturity levels. Some are just starting their carbon accounting journey and looking for an intuitive platform to guide them. Others are much further along and need a more sophisticated tool to streamline their data collection, calculations, and reporting. But across the board, the core challenges are often the same: data quality, process efficiency, and aligning to ever-evolving standards and regulations. That's where we come in.
Q: Speaking of evolving regulations, the carbon accounting space has seen a flurry of new disclosure requirements and reporting frameworks in recent years. How do you stay on top of those changes and ensure your platform is keeping pace?
Sara: It's a great question and absolutely critical for us to get right. We have a dedicated sustainability team whose job is to track the regulatory landscape and voluntary disclosure frameworks, and make sure our platform is aligned to those standards.
Just to give you a few examples - in the U.S., the SEC recently proposed requiring public companies to report their scope 1 and 2 emissions. In Europe, there are a number of regulations coming online related to sustainable finance and corporate sustainability reporting. And then you have voluntary frameworks like CDP and TCFD that are becoming table stakes for companies looking to demonstrate climate leadership.
Our sustainability team is constantly monitoring those developments, whether through their own research, conversations with regulators and framework developers, or discussions with our customers about what they're seeing. They then work hand-in-hand with our product team to make sure we're building the right capabilities into the platform to meet those evolving needs. It could be updating our calculation methodologies, enhancing our data model to capture new attributes, or adding new reporting templates.
Having that tight feedback loop between what's happening in the market and what we're building in the product is absolutely essential. It's a big part of how we deliver on our promise to customers to be that one-stop shop for all their carbon accounting and reporting needs.
Q: That's a great segue into the product development side. I know you recently launched a free version of your platform, Persefoni Pro, in addition to your existing enterprise offering. Can you share how you balance the needs of those different user segments as you prioritize your roadmap?
Sara: Absolutely. Persefoni Pro is designed to be an entry point for companies that are earlier in their carbon accounting journey, typically small and medium enterprises. It offers a streamlined set of features to help users calculate their footprint and identify hotspots and reduction opportunities.
What's been really interesting is that even as we've expanded our user base with Persefoni Pro, we're seeing a lot of commonality in the core needs and challenges across segments. Things like data collection, data quality, calculation accuracy, and reporting - those are pretty universal pain points, regardless of a company's size or maturity level.
Where we start to see divergence is in the depth and specificity of the requirements. A multinational corporation with complex operations is going to need a higher degree of customization, more granular data tracking, more advanced analytics, than a smaller company that's just dipping its toe in the water.
So the way we think about it is, how do we architect our platform in a way that allows us to serve both ends of the spectrum? We want to have a simple, intuitive UI that makes it easy for any user to get started, but with the flexibility and scalability under the hood to support those more sophisticated use cases.
Persefoni Pro has actually been a great testing ground for us in that regard. We can introduce new capabilities there, see how users engage with them, gather feedback, and then iterate and enhance them before rolling them out to our enterprise customers. It allows us to move a lot faster and have a tighter loop between building, measuring, and learning.
At the end of the day, our north star is delivering customer value. Whether you're a Fortune 100 company or a 50-person startup, if we can help you more easily and accurately track and manage your carbon footprint, we're doing our job. And the more we can learn from each customer interaction and use those insights to level up the platform for everyone, the better.
Q: On the topic of customer insights, you mentioned the importance of that direct feedback loop with users. Can you share more about how you gather and act on those inputs?
Sara: Customer feedback is absolutely the lifeblood of our product development process. We have a few key channels for gathering those inputs.
First and foremost is our customer experience team. They're on the front lines everyday fielding inquiries, troubleshooting issues, and getting a pulse of what's working and what's not. We use Zendesk to track all of those interactions, and I meet with the CX team weekly to review the top themes, feature requests, and pain points.
We're actually in the process of embedding that CX function directly within the product org, which I'm really excited about. We'll have a dedicated team of CX managers who work hand-in-hand with our product managers and engineers to triage issues, prioritize fixes and enhancements, and make sure the voice of the customer is always front and center. It's going to allow us to be a lot more agile in connecting the dots between what we're hearing from users and what we're building in the product.
The second major feedback loop is through our customer success team. Each of our enterprise customers has a dedicated CSM who meets with them on a regular basis to provide training, answer questions, and gather feedback. That's been hugely valuable for us, because carbon accounting is still such a new muscle for a lot of companies. They need that white glove support to get up and running and derive real value from the platform. And for us, it's an opportunity to be in lockstep with customers as they go through that journey and really understand where they're getting stuck, what's moving the needle for them, and what they need more or less of.
I actually jump on a lot of those calls myself, because there's just no substitute for hearing directly from customers in their own words. We can look at product usage data and NPS scores all day, but there's so much rich context and color that comes out of those conversations that you'd never get from a dashboard.
Those discussions often end up being a gut check on our product roadmap. We come in with a point of view on where we think the market is going and what we need to build to stay ahead of the curve. And then we pressure test those assumptions with customers and say, "Here's what we're thinking, how does that resonate with you? What are we missing?" More often than not, if we're doing our jobs right, what we hear back is "Yes, you're exactly on track, that's what's keeping me up at night and where I need you to go." But occasionally a customer will raise something that we hadn't considered, or connect some dots for us in a new way, and that's pure gold. That's how we keep our finger on the pulse and make sure we're not just building in an ivory tower.
Q: One last question - I have to ask about AI, given how much buzz there is around generative AI and large language models at the moment. How are you thinking about leveraging those technologies at Persefoni?
Sara: It's a great question and one we're actively exploring. We actually have an AI-powered assistant in our platform today called Persefoni Copilot. It's essentially a chatbot that users can query to get answers to common carbon accounting questions, learn how to perform certain tasks in the platform, or troubleshoot issues they're experiencing.
The really cool thing is, the corpus that powers Persefoni Copilot is fully homegrown. Our CX team has built up this incredibly rich knowledge base over the past few years of all the questions they've gotten from customers, the help articles they've written, the best practices they've codified. And so we've used that proprietary data to train the language model to be hyper-specific to carbon accounting concepts and the Persefoni platform.
It's not just a generic chatbot that can tell you the weather or crack a joke. It actually understands the nuances of things like Scope 2 market-based accounting or how to set an emissions reduction target. And the beauty of it being AI-driven is that it's constantly learning and expanding its knowledge base as we feed it more data.
We're already seeing some really promising signs in terms of engagement and case deflection. Users are getting to resolutions faster without having to file a support ticket. And we're also getting all this great data on what people are searching for, where they're getting stuck, which help articles need to be improved. It's this virtuous cycle where the more people use it, the smarter it gets, and the more value it can provide.
Looking ahead, I think there's a ton of potential to extend that type of AI-driven assistive technology to other parts of the platform. Could we use it to automatically classify and map emissions factors based on a customer's raw data? Could we provide predictive insights and recommendations on decarbonization levers? Could we auto-generate regulatory reports based on a customer's footprint and targets?
We're just scratching the surface, but I'm incredibly excited about the possibilities. At the end of the day, our goal is to make carbon accounting as seamless and intelligent as possible, so companies can focus on actually reducing emissions and being better stewards of the planet. I think AI is going to be a huge part of unlocking that, and we intend to be at the forefront.
Conclusion
Our conversation with Sara underscored the multifaceted nature of driving product innovation in an emerging and rapidly-evolving space like carbon accounting. By marrying a deep understanding of the regulatory landscape with an unrelenting focus on customer needs, Persefoni is building a platform that can flex and scale to meet the demands of an increasingly climate-conscious business world.
A few key themes emerged from our discussion:
- The importance of having a dedicated team to track and interpret the ever-changing patchwork of carbon accounting regulations and frameworks, and translate those requirements into product capabilities
- The power of a multi-pronged approach to customer feedback, combining quantitative product usage data with qualitative insights gleaned from one-on-one conversations and support interactions
- The value of a usage-based tiering model, where a free or low-cost entry point offering can serve as a testing ground for new features and a pipeline for upmarket growth
- The vast potential of generative AI and language models to streamline the user experience, codify institutional knowledge, and pave the way for more predictive and prescriptive carbon accounting and reduction tools
As the imperative for corporate climate action only grows, Persefoni is well-positioned to be a trusted partner to companies at every stage of their sustainability journey. With a product strategy grounded in customer empathy, regulatory rigor, and technical innovation, they are charting a course for a more accountable, data-driven approach to decarbonization - and a more livable future for us all.
