Why software firm Genesys will reset its emissions reduction baseline

As greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data collection systems become more thorough, a growing number of companies are restating prior-year inventories during their annual carbon disclosure exercise.

Close to three-quarters of S&P Global companies updated their emissions math at least once this decade, forcing restatements of earlier years, according to an analysis by Harvard Business School.

When Genesys, a call-center software company funded by Salesforce and ServiceNow, faced this situation, it took a more radical step: Rather than recalculating data for its 2022 baseline year, Genesys decided to submit new targets to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) for revalidation.

The company made that decision, in part, because the sustainability team found limitations in its historical data when it adopted a new enterprise management system in 2025, said Genesys Global Sustainability Officer Bridgette Bell McAdoo.

Genesys contracted with service provider Watershed to strengthen its data collection, particularly for indirect sources, which fall under the Scope 3 category as defined by the GHG Protocol.   

“Rebaselining, to me, is not a negative thing,” McAdoo said. “It says that a company probably has more mature data sets — or a better methodology.”

Genesys’ current emissions reduction targets, which were validated by SBTi earlier this year, call for an absolute reduction of 50 percent across all three emissions categories by fiscal year 2031, compared with FY2022. 

SBTi requires companies to review their targets every five years; Genesys’ updated net-zero standard, however, places a higher emphasis on short-term accountability and will require annual progress reports.

Genesys disclosed a year-over-year cut of 15 percent as part of its FY26 sustainability report, published Aug. 11. The company restated its data for 2025 when preparing the disclosure; as a result, the number for that year was 26 percent higher than originally reported, with all of that increase coming from Scope 3. Its recalculations were assured by independent sources.

Aside from using the Watershed platform, the Genesys sustainability team relies on close relationships with the company’s information technology group and with partners, particularly its cloud software provider Amazon Web Services, to gather metrics it needs, McAdoo said.

“The goal is to continue asking all the questions that need to be asked” especially as Genesys adds artificial intelligence to its products, McAdoo added. “I constantly tell the team that we need to stay agile and flexible, especially when it comes to our emissions data, and I would rather have good, clean data than try to force the data from the past to work for today.”

Structural overhaul

Better data is also forcing the Genesys team to reconsider how it presents that information to both internal stakeholders, such as the sales team, and external audiences, including customers.

At 52 pages, the company’s 2026 sustainability report is 20 pages shorter than the previous edition, a move meant to improve readability. In the future, the Genesys team will continue shrinking its annual report in favor of more frequent updates to the web site.

“We’re looking across our peer set to see how people are reporting,” McAdoo said. “We have seen that some are no longer providing an extensive report. They’re just providing the data, and I can see benefits to that.”

The Genesys team also studied viewership and reordered how information is presented so that the progress it wants to highlight shows up in the first quarter of a report or on the top third of its sustainability-themed web pages.

In addition, Genesys reformatted the executive summary section as collateral that can be used by its sales and customer experience teams, and it translated that material, along with infographics, for more than a dozen countries.