Targeting Green Prospects : Identifying Environmentally Conscious Prospects Using AI-driven Tools Within the Swedish Energy Sector

Sammanfattning

Abstract The study explores, in collaboration with a prominent Swedish energy company(Company X), how AI can be utilised for B2B customer prospecting. The focus lies on finding customers willing to purchase recently developed sustainable products rather than traditionally environmentally harmful products. Performing a mixed methods study, consisting of a qualitative component, conducting a total of 17 interviews, both with employees at Company X and external parties. The interviews focused on discussing technology acceptance, infrastructural needs, and current sales processes that are possible to streamline. Furthermore, a comparative quantitative evaluation of the prominent AI models ChatGPT & Microsoft Copilot was conducted. This evaluation analysed 90 randomly chosen Company X customers to uncover whether or not the companies were deemed to have environmentally sustainable ambitions and therefore become a viable prospect. It wasdone using publicly available sources, including sustainability reports, company websites, social media, and news articles. The results were later compared to a manual control group.The results show that both AI tools used proved to be marginally more conservative in deciding which company showed sustainable ambitions, and more prominent for smallerfirms. However, with increasing company size comes more sustainable ambitions. The paper concludes that AI tools should be employed in the search for customers, based on the promising results. Both traditionally viable customers as well as sustainable inclined ones, however, with accompanying investments in routine maintenance for the internal CRM system for the client company.