What if your CSR issue required more expertise than you have in-house?
This week, the eSqwad team was at Produrable, where many of the discussions centered on the cross-functional approach needed to address CSR challenges. One question stood out as the elephant in the room: what if a CSR issue requires more expertise than is available in-house—what do we do then?
Today, CSR leaders must address issues spanning a wide range of areas: decarbonization, procurement, biodiversity, employee engagement, climate change adaptation, product innovation, and changes in consumer behavior.
It is obviously impossible to master each of these topics with the same level of expertise. However, when a complex problem arises, we often have to try to find a solution using the limited expertise available in-house.
But that is precisely where eSqwad can change the way we work.
Bringing together the expertise available in-house is already a challenge
Let’s take a topic as seemingly simple as reducing a product’s environmental impact: an engineer will naturally focus on its design, a buyer on suppliers, a communications specialist on how to highlight the efforts made, and a CSR manager on the impacts to be measured.
Each offers a relevant perspective, but none of these perspectives alone is sufficient to address the problem as a whole.
Drawing on a variety of areas of expertise allows us to identify questions we might not have otherwise considered, to challenge certain assumptions, and sometimes to discover solutions that remained hidden from our own professional perspective.
The main value of collective intelligence lies in this: in bringing together different perspectives on the same problem.
But bringing them all together—especially at a time when CSR issues are being deprioritized—is a real headache. By boosting collective intelligence, eSqwad guarantees engagement for a few hours with a real return on investment.
And if there are still some expert reports missing, what do we do?
Solving this problem is the very goal around which eSqwad has built its approach: we don’t just facilitate collective intelligence—we enhance it. At eSqwad, we use artificial intelligence to give teams access to the expertise they lack, right when they need it.
Employees can assemble a team of different AI characters, each representing a specific area of expertise or perspective on the subject, and then consult them as their thinking evolves. The idea is not to ask the AI to find the right answer on its own, but to recreate the conditions of a discussion that would have been difficult to organize with so many experts gathered around the same table.
This approach is particularly well-suited to CSR issues, because they rarely require a single skill set. They require balancing environmental, economic, regulatory, social, and operational constraints before even beginning to consider solutions.
AI thus becomes a way to broaden the scope of thinking, without relieving teams of the responsibility to choose what they actually want to implement.
More expertise, less wasted time
Additional expertise can help an idea evolve. An unexpected perspective can call into question a solution that was previously thought to be sound. A question posed by another person can open up a new avenue that the team hadn't considered.
The goal, therefore, is not to replace interactions among employees, but to enrich them with perspectives they might not otherwise have access to.
It is this combination of artificial intelligence and collective intelligence that lies at the heart of eSqwad: helping teams tackle a complex issue, explore it from multiple angles, and develop solutions that they can then effectively implement within the company.
This week, the eSqwad team was at Produrable, where many of the discussions centered on the cross-functional approach needed to address CSR challenges. One question stood out as the elephant in the room: what if a CSR issue requires more expertise than is available in-house—what do we do then?
Today, CSR leaders must address issues spanning a wide range of areas: decarbonization, procurement, biodiversity, employee engagement, climate change adaptation, product innovation, and changes in consumer behavior.
It is obviously impossible to master each of these topics with the same level of expertise. However, when a complex problem arises, we often have to try to find a solution using the limited expertise available in-house.
But that is precisely where eSqwad can change the way we work.
Bringing together the expertise available in-house is already a challenge
Let’s take a topic as seemingly simple as reducing a product’s environmental impact: an engineer will naturally focus on its design, a buyer on suppliers, a communications specialist on how to highlight the efforts made, and a CSR manager on the impacts to be measured.
Each offers a relevant perspective, but none of these perspectives alone is sufficient to address the problem as a whole.
Drawing on a variety of areas of expertise allows us to identify questions we might not have otherwise considered, to challenge certain assumptions, and sometimes to discover solutions that remained hidden from our own professional perspective.
The main value of collective intelligence lies in this: in bringing together different perspectives on the same problem.
But bringing them all together—especially at a time when CSR issues are being deprioritized—is a real headache. By boosting collective intelligence, eSqwad guarantees engagement for a few hours with a real return on investment.
And if there are still some expert reports missing, what do we do?
Solving this problem is the very goal around which eSqwad has built its approach: we don’t just facilitate collective intelligence—we enhance it. At eSqwad, we use artificial intelligence to give teams access to the expertise they lack, right when they need it.
Employees can assemble a team of different AI characters, each representing a specific area of expertise or perspective on the subject, and then consult them as their thinking evolves. The idea is not to ask the AI to find the right answer on its own, but to recreate the conditions of a discussion that would have been difficult to organize with so many experts gathered around the same table.
This approach is particularly well-suited to CSR issues, because they rarely require a single skill set. They require balancing environmental, economic, regulatory, social, and operational constraints before even beginning to consider solutions.
AI thus becomes a way to broaden the scope of thinking, without relieving teams of the responsibility to choose what they actually want to implement.
More expertise, less wasted time
Additional expertise can help an idea evolve. An unexpected perspective can call into question a solution that was previously thought to be sound. A question posed by another person can open up a new avenue that the team hadn't considered.
The goal, therefore, is not to replace interactions among employees, but to enrich them with perspectives they might not otherwise have access to.
It is this combination of artificial intelligence and collective intelligence that lies at the heart of eSqwad: helping teams tackle a complex issue, explore it from multiple angles, and develop solutions that they can then effectively implement within the company.