• Osense is a platform that integrates environmental strategies with financial indicators to optimise companies' ESG (environmental, social and governance) performance and predict impacts on financials, in order to optimise operational efficiency and risk management.
• The startup was founded by Cosimo Cecchini and Giuseppe De Candia, has two operational headquarters (in Puglia and in Amsterdam) and an ongoing expansion in Bologna.
• The system uses advanced artificial intelligence technologies to integrate and structure external information and internal company data, to generate more precise and reliable analyses and responses and to simulate complex scenarios.

In a context where sustainability is increasingly central to businesses, technology can make all the difference. Osense was created precisely with this goal in mind: to help companies integrate ESG parameters and financial data to improve environmental performance without sacrificing economic efficiency.

What Osense does

Osense is an innovative platform that integrates environmental strategies with financial indicators to optimise ESG performance (environmental, social and governance) of companies and support them in decision-making processes. Thanks to artificial intelligence, Osense collects data from disparate sources, simulating optimisation scenarios through predictive "what-if" models and offering tailored solutions to improve sustainability and operational efficiency.

A distinctive feature of the platform is the integration of financial and environmental KPIs, enabling companies to assess the impact of their choices in terms of sustainability and economic performance. With this data it becomes possible to reduce CO2 emissions along the entire value chain and to engage stakeholders.

Osense was born from the vision of two co-founders: Cosimo Cecchini, with an economics background and years of experience as a product manager in telecommunications, and Giuseppe De Candia, a software engineer specialising in artificial intelligence. Initially focused on the electrification of corporate fleets, they then evolved the project into its current form. Today the startup has two operational headquarters, in Puglia and in Amsterdam, with an ongoing expansion in Bologna.

Turning sustainability into a competitive advantage

According to Cosimo Cecchini, co-founder of Osense, the project is the result of a journey of learning and adaptation to the market. "We refined our idea by listening to companies' needs and developing an iterative process, which was also recognised by the international edition of Harvard Business Review. Our goal is to make companies genuinely accountable, that is, more responsible for the environmental impacts of their activities."

The platform goes beyond simple reporting: through the simulation of alternative scenarios, it allows companies to assess the financial and environmental implications of every decision, including factors such as the cost of capital, the cost of debt and corporate value. A key aspect of the system is the automated collection of data, which takes place through the upload of documents of any size and format into a repository, without the need for prior categorisation or alignment with standards. "After an initial assessment, our system analyses information from different areas of the business, from logistics to waste management, through to water consumption, providing concrete insights to optimise processes."

Let us look at a concrete example of application, in which Osense carried out a project for a major player in the Italian energy sector, focused on the management of the disposal of meters and electrical cables. Thanks to the platform, the client was able to monitor in detail the logistics, the energy consumption of machinery and the management of recycled materials, identifying emissions reduction strategies and markedly improving operational efficiency.

"Artificial intelligence can solve more problems than it can create"

With an innovative approach based on artificial intelligence, Osense not only supports companies in their sustainable transition, but helps them turn sustainability into a concrete competitive advantage. Without losing sight of the major questions surrounding the sustainability of artificial intelligence itself, which requires an ever-growing use of energy to process data and generate solutions.

"We reflect on this topic often", concludes Cecchini. "From my point of view, today people talk about artificial intelligence mainly because of the current hype. I believe, however, that it is still too early to draw definitive conclusions. Technology is developing so rapidly that labelling it as an environmental destroyer seems premature to me. Personally, I am optimistic. I think AI can solve more problems than it can create, but we will need to wait a few years to see the real impacts. The balance between benefits and risks has yet to be assessed, but some developments are already encouraging, such as the Chinese language models that were built with considerably fewer resources — that represents a positive step in this direction. Naturally, setting aside the geopolitical aspects and various external factors, the fact that they managed to create these models with a fifth of the resources is, in itself, good news."