AI Agents for Sustainable SMEs: A Green ESG Assessment Framework
For SMEs and policymakers, this provides a scalable, automated ESG assessment tool, though it is an incremental application of existing AI methods to a specific domain.
This work introduces an AI-driven ESG assessment framework for European SMEs, using expert-validated baselines and an n8n-based agent system with LLMs to automate classification and recommendations. The system achieves high consistency with human-derived outputs, supporting effective monitoring aligned with the European Green Deal.
This study presents a novel, AI-driven framework for assessing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) performance in European small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). An initial phase established expert-validated ESG baseline scores from a subset of the Flash Eurobarometer FL549 survey data. In the second phase, a scalable AI agent system, built on the n8n automation platform, applied these baselines to perform automated ESG classification and generate contextual recommendations using large language models (LLMs). The results demonstrate the AI system's high consistency with human-derived outputs, thereby supporting more effective monitoring and intervention strategies aligned with the European Green Deal.