20422: Impact Investing and Impact Measurement in the Age of AI: Que Vadis?

In order to tackle one of the grand societal challenges, namely climate change, an enormous financing amount is required. To cover this deficit, new investment formats have been and are evolving. As such, impact investments have grown massively over the past years and a new area of research has been established which gained scholarly attention. These types of investments aim at generating a positive social and/or environmental impact alongside financial returns. However, despite the growing interest and enthusiasm toward impact investing as a pathway to tackle pressing social and environmental issues, scholars and partitioners lament the lack of actual impact and the persistence of the social and environmental problems some investment opportunities initially intended to tackle, giving rise to the so-called phenomenon of ‘impact washing’. With the fast development of AI and machine learning applications, potential tools to address the issue of ‘impact washing’, stemming from e.g. the lack impact measurement techniques, are developing. Such tools might improve the rigor and transparency of impact measurement by automating and standardizing the collection, analysis, and reporting of sustainability metrics as AI models can integrate diverse data types. In this panel symposium, we aim at exploring this area, combining the impact investing and AI/machine learning domain, by sparking a critical discussion among our panelists from various research disciplines and from practice.