On October 19th, 2024, TIMETOACT GROUP Austria hosted the first AIM Hackathon, "Sustainability Meets LLMs". The event gathered bright minds from JKU, TU Wien, Universität Wien, WU, and industry — all united to explore how Large Language Models can accelerate real-world sustainability impact.
The Challenge
The task was clear but ambitious: build Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions using public ESG and sustainability reports to tackle real environmental, social, and governance (ESG) challenges. Teams worked throughout the day to detect greenwashing, assess ESG report relevance, and support compliance with the European Green Deal.
Setting the Scene
In his keynote, Daniel Weller (Senior Software Developer & AI Expert at TIMETOACT) shared key insights into ESG reporting, providing a strong foundation for participants to build AI applications that go beyond buzzwords — and drive measurable impact.
Winning Projects
The creativity and technical quality of the submissions exceeded expectations, showing the potential of AI to contribute meaningfully to sustainability goals.
- 🥇 SAM – Sustainability Advanced Model
Developed by nexus. Group AI, SAM is an AI-powered ESG reporting platform that helps companies streamline their sustainability compliance. It leverages RAG and NLP to generate real-time ESG compliance scores aligned with the European Green Deal. Read more → - 🥈 Trustpilot for ESG
Created by The NightWalkers, this tool detects greenwashing by identifying misleading or unsupported claims in ESG reports, assigning trustworthiness scores to corporate statements — a valuable resource for investors, NGOs, and consumers. Read more → - 🥉 ESG Relevance Mapping
Built by The Venturers, this prototype uses sentence-level classification to identify which parts of a report contain factual versus vague or promotional content, creating relevance maps for easier comparison across companies. Read more →
Highlights & Impact
Participants not only built working prototypes within a single day but also demonstrated the potential of generative AI to promote transparency and accountability in corporate sustainability reporting. The event fostered collaboration between academia and industry, proving how AI can be applied for measurable societal benefit.
From greenwashing detection to real-time ESG compliance — this hackathon showed that AI can be a powerful force for sustainability when used responsibly.
Key Takeaways
- RAG can empower ESG analytics — LLMs combined with structured data retrieval open new ways to analyze reports.
- Transparency matters — AI tools can help combat greenwashing and rebuild trust in sustainability communication.
- Collaboration fuels innovation — Cross-university and cross-industry teamwork leads to truly impactful ideas.
Thanks
A huge thank you to TIMETOACT GROUP Österreich for hosting and supporting the event, and to all participants for their creativity and commitment. This hackathon marked the beginning of AIM’s journey toward identifying and enabling AI for Good applications for a sustainable future. 🌱
