Q&A: Sophia Mendelsohn, Chief Sustainability Officer, SAP

Sophia Mendelsohn has been running SAP’s sustainability practices and programmes globally since 2023 when she joined the company as Chief Sustainability and Commercial Officer. 

Before joining one of the world’s largest software companies, she was Chief Sustainability Officer at Cognizant and JetBlue Airways.

At SAP Sapphire 2025 in Orlando, Florida, she explored all things sustainability at SAP.

We're here at SAP Sapphire with fantastic announcements on everything from business AI to business data cloud. From the sustainability side, from a top level, what's the key takeaway from the news?

Fundamentally, sustainability is a data play that supports and enhances generative AI. We all know AI is only as good as the data it can ingest and no dataset is good and complete without considering sustainability attributes. 

That's because every business, every product, every service depends on natural resource inputs and a stable climate.

SAP has ambitious targets to reach net zero by 2030. Can you tell us a bit about what's behind SAP's sustainability goals?

Really good sustainability goals are always based on what your stakeholders want to see from the business.

In our case, we know customers, investors and our communities are looking to SAP to explain and reduce their carbon emissions.

The main challenges in reducing carbon emissions are not necessarily the emissions themselves – it is the people. They're the change management around the emissions reduction that has to line up with your business incentives and needs.

Topics such as environmental stewardship, human rights and AI ethics are embedded across SAP’s operations and supply chain. How do you track that?

We think about sustainability, emissions and AI in three different categories. 

The first is reducing emissions at the root cause. That's the energy that the data centre runs off and the size and fit of the large language model being used. 

The second is around what you do with all that AI once you've demanded it and drawn on the energy. We have a wonderful customer, Chobani – they make ethically sourced and produced yoghurt – and they've used SAP business AI to reduce their time spent on expenses by 75%. Every time I hear them say that, I think that's 75% of their time back to their core sustainability mission. 

The third category is making sure you put your hand up for sustainability in the application of AI. It should not be that the CFO, the COO, the CPO, the CMO – I could keep going with all the officers - are all in line first for the use of AI. The CSO, the Chief Sustainability Officer, should be up first and foremost for the application of AI for their needs and goals.

When it comes to tracking sustainability initiatives, SAP works with so many companies globally. What role do SAP solutions play in helping track these?

The number one thing customers are using SAP sustainability solutions for right now is to remove that friction of regulatory compliance and reporting. 

Ultimately, our customers want to be rewarded for their investments in sustainability. They want to communicate fair and transparent information to their own customers, employees and shareholders. 

We help them do that by semi-automating the regulatory reporting process, semi-automating the data collection, the data generation and the data aggregation that puts people in those hard, long work cycles behind a sustainability report.

We're seeing a lot of global challenges around tariffs recently. From a sustainability point of view, from your role, how does that affect business?

Global tariffs are a perfect example of why it is so important that sustainability data and product carbon footprint be based on actuals, not estimates. 

Those are the actuals that come from your business process information. That's because if you're basing your carbon goals and targets on estimates or spend and that spend goes up because of tariffs, your carbon footprint just went up because of tariffs. 

So instead of being rewarded for your good efforts, you're actually punished. 

The solution to avoiding tariff chaos in carbon footprint and sustainability is to make sure you're using actuals from your business processes.

How are you continuing to ensure that sustainability remains a priority for SAP? And what advice would you give to other leaders in the technology and sustainability space?

What we see here in hundreds, if not thousands of conversations is that sustainability remains a fundamental attribute of how our customers want to run their operations. 

That's because they're looking to reduce risk and increase opportunity and even achieve a green margin. 

The number one thing you can do is ask how sustainability fits into the business processes that you run every day.