Rethinking impact consultancy in the age of AI
Jan Leyssens
Building, coaching, and experimenting in the world of impact. Always open to meeting good people and meaningful projects.
The past few weeks we've been building the first iterations of what will become the next version of ImpactGenie.
In a post a few days ago, Manu shared a bit about the toolstack we're setting up, so I thought this would be a good time to also share our vision on how AI can be used as a force for good.
I'm really interested in hearing your reflections on this!
The Problem: Time and effort wasted on the wrong things
In sustainability and impact consulting, too much time is lost in research, contextualization, and benchmarking.
Consultants spend hours—sometimes weeks—analyzing companies, mapping industry dynamics, understanding regulations, and identifying potential innovation pathways. This process is crucial, yet inefficient. It creates a bottleneck where expertise is used for information gathering rather than impact creation.
We believe that with AI, we can change this. We can make sustainability consulting faster, sharper, and more actionable—without compromising depth or strategic vision.
Our Vision: AI as a strategic accelerator
With ImpactGenie, we want to automate and improve the foundational work of sustainability consultants. Our tool will generate deep, structured read-in reports of a specific company that provides clarity on:
1. Company-specific insights
Core company details (name, URL, size, industry, location, etc.)
Business summary: What do they do?
Existing sustainability initiatives
Published ambitions and commitments (from reports, articles, interviews, etc.)
Risks and contradictions (practices that undermine sustainability goals)
2. Industry-specific insights
Key impact areas and sustainability KPIs (both opportunities and risks)
Relevant regulations and policies
Market trends, customer expectations, and competitive landscape
Emerging business models and technological advancements
Benchmark cases: frontrunners, best practices, and innovation examples, both from within the industry, as well as inspiration cases from other industries that we could learn from
3. Region-specific insights
Local policy frameworks and legislation
EU-wide policy frameworks and legislation
Economic and historical industry context of the region / location of the company
Regional opportunities and limitations for sustainability transformation
4. Company-type-specific insights
How similar companies (based on size, structure, and adaptability) are approaching sustainability and innovation
Most common barriers and enablers for these kind of companies
By gathering this information from public sources, but also linking the data to each other through AI, and giving users the option to upload company specific knowledge (internal reports,…), we can move beyond just collecting information, towards providing immediate, actionable intelligence.
This way, with very limited input (we will ask users to validate specific insights to ensure quality), sustainability professionals can get a pre-researched, benchmarked overview of a company’s starting position and strategic opportunities.
The Future: Moving from knowing to doing (from awareness to action)
Right now, sustainability consultants work in a knowledge-heavy, action-light industry.
Most big consultancy firms have based their entire business model on this. They sell generic reports—polished but passive, packed with insights yet rarely leading to real change.
We believe, with the coming of AI, knowledge will (and should) become a commodity — freely available, easily accessible, and efficiently processed. The real competitive edge lies in action.
ImpactGenie is build to:
✅ Reduce the time and cost of research, so more effort can go to implementation.
✅ Give impact-driven consultants sharper insights, making them more effective than bullshit-consultancy agencies.
✅ Accelerate our sustainability transitions by eliminating research bottlenecks and enabling faster, more informed decision-making.
By automating the reading in phase of sustainability consulting, we free up the most valuable resource: human creativity and expertise for real-world solutions. Instead of weeks spent understanding the context, consultants can now focus on designing, testing, and implementing.