Transparency in Sustainability Reporting and the enabling role of digital technologies

Inglese

This work provides a comprehensive and practice-oriented exploration of transparency in sustainability reporting, with a particular focus on how digital technologies can play a supporting role. The research is mainly looking at the European context, where an evolving legislative framework is radically reshaping corporate reporting. At the same time, the world is witnessing the disruption carried out by technologies such as Internet of Things, data automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this rapidly changing panorama, reporting transparency is widely invoked by the overall community, though lacking a unified conceptual and operational definition. To fill this gap, this broad research project offers an in-depth literature review to map how transparency is defined, measured and perceived by stakeholders. While many scholars stop at investigating the information disclosure dimension, this research highlights the importance of further investigation on all the other complementary dimensions: relevance, faithfulness, understandability, comparability and verifiability. The need for innovative transparency measurement frameworks is stressed, as the majority of the transparency indexes used in the academic debate poorly address the complexity of this concept. In this sense, an exploratory study is conducted to assess the role that Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) might play to streamline the transparency assessment process. An average accuracy rate of 83% has been registered, demonstrating the poorly addressed potential of such a tool to improve the efficiency of independent controls from the averaged stakeholders. More precisely, while LLMs lack in mathematical competencies, replicability and methodological clarity, they reveal impressive results in streamlining specific tasks of content analysis. The Sustainability Reporting 5.0 concept has been then introduced to indicate a new form of reporting process, where digital technologies are differently exploited and integrated in the whole system. While technology is positioned as a potential enabler of both transparency and efficiency, the broad research carefully outlines potential biases, ethical dilemmas and paradoxes that digital technologies also carry out. A final exploratory study demonstrates how transparency is much more than regulatory compliance, and for this reason it requires a completely different cultural mindset. This case study shows that companies which truly integrate sustainability reporting in the business management practices need to invest important amount of resources to restructure the entire government process. However, when holistically addressed, the sustainability reporting process turns out to worth no less than the company’s competitiveness.