The sustainability blind spot in your ESG strategy: nobody asked the people

Here is a finding that should unsettle every board. When some researchers asked ordinary people which corporate behaviours matter most, the answer was overwhelming. Roughly 44% of the weight went to how companies treat their workers. Every other category, communities, customers, shareholders, even the environment, landed between 12% and 18%.

Read that again. In the public's eyes, the "S" in ESG is not a supporting act. It is the headline.

Now hold that against most boardrooms, I advise. Emissions data dominate ESG dashboards. Ratings driven by expert-weighted methodologies. Sustainability reports that are technically flawless and humanly hollow. We have built an ESG industrial complex calibrated to what experts think matters, not to what people actually value.

After three decades leading technology in global and Indian banking, and now advising boards across BFSI, healthcare, automotive, agriculture and telecom, I have learned one governance truth: when your measurement system diverges from your stakeholders' values, you are not managing risk. You are incubating it.

The challenge: a materiality inversion

Most ESG rating systems rely heavily on expert judgment. Experts choose the metrics. Experts assign the weights. Experts often disagree with each other, which suggests the weights are closer to opinion than to science.

The research took a radically simple alternative: ask the public directly, year after year, with demographically matched panels. The results are remarkably stable. Fair pay that covers basic living costs ranks first, at roughly 21% of total importance, nearly double the next issue. Job creation, ethical leadership, worker health and safety, and career development round out the top tier. And these priorities hold across age, gender, income, political affiliation and ethnicity. On workers, a divided world agrees.

Here is the twist for sustainability leaders: this is not an argument against the environment. It is an argument about sequencing and legitimacy. Climate action that ignores the workforce loses public licence. Climate action built on fair work earns it.

The AI collision: where sustainability meets the workforce

Why does this matter more in 2026 than ever? Artificial intelligence has fused the "E" and the "S" into a single board-level question.

Consider the environmental side. The International Energy Agency reports that global data centre electricity demand grew about 17% in 2025, while consumption by AI-focused data centres surged roughly 50%. A typical AI data centre already draws as much power as 100,000 households, and global data centre demand is projected to roughly double towards 945 TWh by 2030. Every AI ambition your board approves now carries a carbon and energy shadow. Workload placement is now a governance decision, and a fiduciary one.

Now consider the social side. The same AI systems reshaping your energy footprint are reshaping your workforce, automating roles, redesigning careers, redistributing opportunity. If the public weighs worker treatment at 44%, then how your enterprise manages AI-driven workforce transition is arguably the largest sustainability decision on your agenda. Not your solar procurement. Your people.

This is what I call the responsible computing mandate: govern the energy your intelligence consumes, and govern the human transition your intelligence creates, as one integrated obligation.

What this looks like across industries

In our consulting assignments, the pattern repeats across sectors. A banking client discovered its AI contact-centre transformation would deliver efficiency gains, but only after reskilling pathways were designed did employee adoption and customer trust follow. A healthcare organisation found that clinician wellbeing metrics predicted digital adoption better than any technology KPI. An agriculture-sector platform learned that farmer livelihood outcomes, not carbon metrics alone, determined whether sustainability programmes scaled. Across automotive and telecom, the same truth held: workers treated as stakeholders, not line items.

The data and the field experience converge on one message: people-centred sustainability is not soft. It is a strategy.

The future roadmap: from expert-led to human-led ESG

Where is this heading? Three shifts every board should anticipate.

First, human-materiality audits will emerge. Boards will stress-test their ESG weightings against stakeholder-derived priorities, asking employees, customers and communities directly, rather than inheriting expert assumptions. The methodology exists. The courage is what's scarce.

Second, software carbon intensity will become a disclosed metric. As AI workloads swell, regulators and investors will demand visibility into the emissions embedded in digital operations. Boards that instrument this early will own the narrative; the rest will inherit someone else's.

Third, the AI workforce transition will enter fiduciary territory. Directors will be expected to evidence oversight of reskilling, redeployment and equitable access to AI-era opportunity, because a 44% stakeholder priority cannot remain a management footnote.

Three actionable takeaways for leaders

Audit your weights. Compare what your ESG framework measures against what your stakeholders actually value. If worker treatment isn't near the top, your materiality map is inverted.

Fuse your AI and sustainability governance. Put AI energy intensity and AI workforce impact on the same board agenda, reviewed by the same committee, with the same rigour as financial risk.

Ask, don't assume. Institutionalise direct stakeholder listening, employees first, as a standing input to sustainability strategy, not an annual survey ritual.

The board question that matters

ESG was never meant to be a compliance scoreboard. It was meant to answer a simple question: Is this company just? The public has told us, consistently and across every demographic divide, what justice means to them. It starts with how we treat the people who do the work, including through the most profound technological transition of our lifetimes.

My challenge to every director and CXO: at your next board meeting, ask one question. "If our stakeholders weighted our ESG priorities, would they recognise our strategy?"

If the honest answer is no, the fix is refreshingly simple.

Just ask them.

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