A strange thing for us to say? but that’s what we heard when we attended the Sustainability Leaders 2026 conference in Melbourne in March. The message rang out … not just from one voice, but from a chorus of voices in the audience of this premier Australian sustainability leaders conference.
LET’S SOLVE THE MYSTERY
Who, or what ‘killed’ carbon accounting platforms? Competition in the market? No. Competition is good for customers, good for the market and, ultimately, good for sustainability journeys. Competition drives new ideas and product innovation, key components of mature product offerings.
However, we have this evidence (a statement from a presenter at the Melbourne conference): ‘We are training our team to use Claude to replace our carbon accounting platform’.
So Claude did it! Not so fast. (Full disclosure):
We use AI, and it is an important, if not critical component, of our platform.) What is ‘killing’ carbon accounting platforms is their decision to use AI models as a substitute for accurate data aggregation and interpretation.
The market is now flooded by hundreds of opportunistic carbon accounting platforms backed by millions of dollars of capital and by slick marketing campaigns making promises of quick and easy solutions generated by do-it-all AI.
A spreadsheet is not a replacement for a database that enforces relational integrity and business logic in its records. Similarly, an AI model generating text is not a replacement for a reporting system that calculates results according to complex business logic, regulatory requirements, and other parameters.
An AI-generated deliverable that uses the right vocabulary can deliver inaccurate or erroneous outcomes that may remain undetected until regulators, auditors, knowledgeable stakeholders, or investors probe it. AI can do many useful things, but it can’t take responsibility or pay fines.
Any organisation that bases decisions on using AI as a substitute for accurate data aggregation and interpretation opens itself to significant risk; a risk that many organisations are currently not well-positioned to manage.
We aren’t just saying this to be contrarian. We are saying this because clients are coming to us after ending their relationship with one of these opportunistic platforms because of failed on-boardings, significant over promises, and profound under delivery.
HOW WE’RE DIFFERENT
By the time we launched Trellis in 2018, we’d worked as advisors and assurance auditors with hundreds of enterprise customers reporting under the NGER Act and other legislation and standards. Our customers span diverse sectors, including aviation, commercial assets, higher education, government, mining, industrials, manufacturing, retail, logistics and more.
With our forensic understanding of the ‘problem space’ for most if not all organisations, we set a clear mission for our company:
Today, Trellis integrates, processes, and validates thousands of mixed format files every day to unlock data insights and reporting for our customers who collectively own or operate more than 33,000 facilities across Australia and New Zealand. We engage with customers daily – some of Australia’s predominant corporate, government and not-for-profit (NFP) institutions – to redefine, design, iterate and genuinely co-create solutions tailored to their needs.
WE SEE THE DATA THAT REALLY MATTERS
GHG (Scope 1, 2 and 3) reporting is the result of aggregating activity data to tell a valuable and detailed story about an organisation’s environmental impacts.
Whilst this story is a useful indicator, the real value is in the spatio-temporal and intensity detail. Those thousands of data points collected on a daily/weekly/ monthly basis can reveal the risk and opportunity in a business and its value chain.
The ability to uncover this data is what sets Trellis apart from the rest:
- Purpose-built: Implements regulatory frameworks, sector taxonomies, and company-specific data to produce outputs that are actionable, traceable, auditable, and materially accurate.
- Standards integration: Actively queries GRI standards, GHG Protocol, IFRS ISSB and sector-specific guidance to produce outputs that are framework-literate by design.
- Data-grounded outputs: Connects to real operational, supply chain, and financial data to produce insights and disclosures grounded in evidence.
- Network effects: Drives internal engagement with the information through trust and accessibility to create multi stakeholder ownership of the challenges and opportunities and produce best-practice reporting and disclosures.
Trellis is supported by deep configuration expertise, expert human oversight, large custom datasets, and ongoing calibration with evolving standards. We represent AI working with domain knowledge, large amounts of data context, regulatory architecture, and real data, not as a substitute for it. Trellis produces consistent, comprehensive, and decision-ready outputs, and it does so at speed.
When AI is accessed or deployed thoughtfully in sustainability services, it can do things that were previously impossible at scale.
WANT TO TALK?
‘We’re ready when you’re ready’. If you want to hear more, please feel free to reach out. We’d love to hear your views and share our work.
