ClimateTech and mobility

Turning climate ambition into demonstrated impact

Executive summary

ClimateTech, mobility and energy players that move from pilots to integrated deployment will capture infrastructure investment and prove climate impact at scale

Challenges and opportunities arise at three levels:

Brand: ClimateTech and mobility organizations now compete on proven deployment, not promised ambition. Trust grows when deployment gaps close, emissions reductions are demonstrated, and climate commitments align with visible progress, not just stated targets.

Experience: Citizens, consumers, and industrials expect coordinated transition experiences, seamless multi-stakeholder workflows, transparent status, and proactive coordination. Fragmented interactions must become orchestrated journeys that build trust and accelerate adoption.

Tech: Organizations must combine a robust AI/data foundation with repeatable delivery patterns to enable system-wide orchestration. Govern AI to minimize carbon impact and turn learnings into reusable deployment assets.

The market reality: Capital is concentrating on players that can prove deployment

After a decade of strong ambitions, ClimateTech and mobility are entering a challenging phase, driven by geopolitics and global market caution, but also by three structural tensions:

Most large companies have climate goals but only a small minority are on track to accomplish them. Many companies are still increasing emissions because they cannot act on all levers at once
Consumers, buyers, cities, and investors are experiencing a gap between promises and reality: on pricing, reliability, congestion, and visible impact.
AI, digital tools, and complex infrastructure are reshaping how systems deliver outcomes, while the industry struggles to leverage them.

Pressure is mounting to scale proven solutions without overextending capital, trust, or operational capacity. For ClimateTech, mobility, and energy players, this presents an urgent problem. They provide the infrastructure, technologies, and services that are necessary to turn climate goals into real outcomes. If they cannot show tangible progress, then capital and demand will begin to concentrate on a smaller set of proven leaders instead, and leave the others struggling to scale.

The question for C‑suites now is no longer “do we have a vision?” but “how do we align brand, stakeholder journeys, and tech stack so that our policies, assets, programmes, AI, and people operate as one system? A system that investors, customers, and citizens can see, understand, and trust?”

The promises of a new world are not enough anymore

Today, energy, climate, and mobility leaders face a widening gap between their stated ambitions and actual deployment. This threatens their credibility with investors, trust with citizens, and their competitive position in capital markets.

Climate-tech VC and growth equity funding reached $40.5 billion in 2025 (+8% year-on-year), but capital is concentrating sharply: the top deals account for a growing share, while nearly 50% fewer companies reached Series A in 2024 versus 2022.
By the end of 2024, only ~13.5% of low-emissions technologies required by 2050 under a Paris-aligned pathway had been deployed, versus ~17.2% needed on a “cruising speed” trajectory.
Early funding for new companies fell nearly 50% in 2024 versus 2022, with those advancing facing six-month delays.

Deployment gaps threaten credibility and capital

When climate organizations fail to deliver, it erodes trust in climate commitments and gives competitors who prove results a market advantage. Across seven climate domains, only power, mobility, and critical minerals are accelerating—hydrogen, carbon capture, and heavy industry remain stalled.

Here’s the hard truth that organizations need to face: Ambition alone does not guarantee impact. Without measurable deployment, aligned user experience, and scalable technology, climate pledges will fail. Long-term viability depends on cumulative, measurable wins. Simply adding more targets, pilot projects, or digital touchpoints without proven execution will only continue to widen credibility gaps.

Most organizations fail not because they lack climate ambition or technical expertise, but because brand, experience, and technology decisions happen in isolation, compounding deployment gaps instead of closing them.

Read on to explore how ClimateTech, mobility and energy organizations can align brand, experience, and technology to overcome these challenges.

The new brand imperative: Lead with proof of deployment, not transition roadmaps

The challenge: Loss of credibility across the entire sector affects even those players who have genuine track records of successful deployment

Years of overblown climate claims and stalled deployments across the sector have created a widespread skepticism that now affects all ClimateTech and mobility brands, even those with genuine track records. Investors, cities, and enterprise buyers who have been burned by failed ambitious narratives, now demand proof of deployment and not roadmaps.

This trust crisis directly affects capital allocation and competitive position. Funding concentrates on the few players demonstrating measurable progress at scale, while those still positioning around potential face delayed rounds and compressed valuations. Particularly in industries like automotives and mobility, once the gap between promises and delivery becomes visible to consumers and fleet operators, it further accelerates brand defection.

The main challenge here is credibility. Rebuilding it requires an honest assessment of readiness and constraints, and a deliberate step away from classic marketing stances and self-protective technicalities.

95% of surveyed cities have 2035 sustainable‑mobility targets but are already 10–15 percentage points behind required modal‑share trajectories and historically only achieve 3–5 points per decade.
For cities, residents lose 40 hours per year to congestion while municipal websites tout 2035 sustainable mobility targets
37% of the largest companies have full scope 1–3 net‑zero targets and 65% have at least operational targets, yet only 16% are on track and 45% still increase emissions, sharpening scrutiny on who can credibly position as climate leaders.
In cities like Singapore, Berlin, and Copenhagen, where progress is visible,mobility brands lead by delivering measurable reductions in congestion and emissions per trip, not just setting targets.
Around 75% of decarbonization communications focus on short‑term projects rather than long‑term programmes, creating a stop‑start feeling for employees, communities and customers.
Nearly 75% of automotive Chinese buyers plan to switch brands—loyalty is collapsing as promises outpace delivery

Solutions to explore

Position around deployment track record, not ambition statements

Organizations in ClimateTech must replace generic claims of “leading the transition” with real, tangible deployment metrics: Show the number of operational sites, MWh delivered, vehicles deployed, cities served. Make readiness visible through project timelines, not technology roadmaps—showing investors and buyers where you've proven scale, not where you might reach it.

Make the deployment roadmap the backbone of the story

Organize your brand narrative around how your proven track record of readiness will expand over time: which solutions and projects you scale first, what conditions must be met, and how each wave of deployment feeds learning into the next. Use this roadmap to show clients, investors and partners a clear path from today’s proof to tomorrow’s portfolio scale.

Claim clear thematic territories

Organizations should anchor their positioning in a small number of clear territories where they can show their distinct contributions like resilience, adaptation, industrial decarbonization and specific mobility archetypes. Within those territories, they should emphasise quantifiable outcomes (emissions reduced, resilience improved, communities served, shortened timelines) and connect them directly to offers and programmes, not just to corporate commitments.

What should leaders do next?

Stop claiming leadership without proof. Only position areas where deployment is measurable and repeatable, and ensure that every major claim your brand makes is backed by at least one concrete project, timeframe and outcome that can be shown to external stakeholders.

The new experience imperative: Turn fragmented transition workflows into a singular coordinated journey

The challenge: Disconnected platforms stretch deployment timelines and erode buyer confidence

Cities, fleet operators, and industrial buyers navigate separate platforms for planning, procurement, permitting, installation, and operations — each with different data models, owners, and interfaces. A single charging network deployment requires coordinating utility approvals, site assessments, hardware procurement, installation scheduling, and billing integration across a web of disconnected systems. When digital tools don't coordinate these workflows, deployment timelines stretch from months to years, eroding ROI and buyer confidence.

This is not just a physical infrastructure problem. It is also a UX and information architecture problem. When digital products fail to make systems and data easy to understand, whether it’s on status, costs or impacts, it leads to a drop in confidence and no change in users’ behavior, even when the infrastructure is already there. Operators delay procurement decisions they can't fully evaluate. Citizens don't adopt services they can't navigate. Investors can't verify the progress they're being asked to fund. The gap between what organisations have built and what stakeholders can actually see, understand and trust has become a deployment problem in its own right.

Climate-data reviews find that users and enterprise buyers struggle with the availability, quality, comparability and presentation of climate data, and that opaque methodologies and complex tools limit the use of climate and risk data in decision making.
68% of companies have undertaken quantitative climate risk assessments, yet only 17% disclose the financial impact of those risks — citing tool complexity and opacity as the primary barrier.
Utility digital experience scores 611/1,000 in customer satisfaction — against 738 for wealth management and 703 for insurance — with 32% of the largest utilities failing basic navigation standards.
Most studies define customer-facing platforms, digital twins and AI tools as mandatory for "future readiness" and flag fragmented apps and non-interoperable ticketing as key pain points, even in leading systems.
On average, large capital projects overrun budgets and schedules by 30 to 45 percent, driven by fragmented data systems and absence of shared visibility across stakeholders.
Redesigning specific high-volume digital journeys, like payment and payment-assistance flows, has led some energy providers to a 10–20% boost in customer satisfaction and a 20–30% reduction in cost-to-serve.

Solutions to explore

Make climate systems understandable with transparency by design

Organizations must design digital products that clearly show how the system works: what is available, which constraints apply, what it costs, what are the currently-calculated impact of emissions, and what will happen next. Transparency in UX shows limits, uncertainty and trade‑offs openly. The experience must confirm what the brand claims.

Unify fragmented journeys into coherent digital flows

Create one clear digital home for each transition programme, where all stakeholders see the same view of status, next steps, risks and benefits. Connect exploration, configuration, pricing, financing, operation and support into one continuous journey, and replace scattered campaign pages with portfolio views that show all projects and their progress over time.

Turn complex data and AI into usable, behaviour‑shaping interfaces

Translate grid data, asset performance, forecasts, and AI outputs into interfaces that people can use easily in their daily work. Feed insights back into system-level coordination, so each operational decision strengthens measurable climate outcomes. Add short explanations and guidance directly into these tools to show the impact of choices on emissions, costs and service.

What should leaders do next?

Stop layering disconnected digital touchpoints. Rationalize to a small number of journey‑based ‘front doors’ and only launch or relaunch journeys once interfaces show real-time system status, clear next steps, and visible outcomes for users.

The new technology imperative: Replace bespoke deployments with a shared data core and repeatable delivery patterns

The challenge: Without a shared data layer, every project starts from scratch and AI stays siloed

Most ClimateTech and mobility players have domain expertise. They understand grids, fleets, emissions, and optimization. What they lack is the architecture to turn that expertise into something repeatable, scalable and visible across their portfolio.

Data about assets, customers, operations, emissions and financials sits in separate systems that don't talk to each other. AI is piloted in isolated pockets, delivering local results that never feed back into the wider organisation. Each new deployment starts from scratch, whether it’s a new plant, a new corridor or a new charging network. Organizations end up rebuilding what was already learned elsewhere. The result is that organisations that have genuinely cracked parts of the problem cannot prove it, cannot scale it, and cannot coordinate it across programmes.

This has a direct cost. Without a shared data core, there is no single view of how the portfolio performs as a climate and business system. Investors cannot see aggregate progress. Partners cannot plug into a common platform. And the AI investments that are supposed to accelerate the transition mostly remain disconnected from the energy, mobility and industrial outcomes they were meant to drive.

12 out of 21 decarbonization levers are now used by a majority of companies, and more than 80% use energy efficiency, waste reduction, renewable energy, circular principles and building decarbonization. But performance is uneven: organisations using 15+ levers cut emissions by nearly 2% per year, while those with fewer than 10 levers tend to see a growth in emissions.
AI‑enabled solutions already account for 27.7% of ClimateTech equity in 2025 and 63% of the largest companies show evidence of using AI. Yet, only 14% use AI directly for decarbonization, meaning most AI use is not focused on energy, mobility or industrial climate outcomes.
Around 90% of large infrastructure projects are still delivered as bespoke, one‑off projects; only ~10% use repeatable teams or supply chains.
In urban and mobility systems, top performers combine strong physical networks with digital coordination, data lakes and analytics. Many cities can host close to 100 mobility players, which makes system‑level orchestration a real technical and data challenge.
By 2025, about 1,650 GW of renewable projects in advanced development were still waiting for grid connection, which highlights how grid planning and operations are lagging behind deployment.

Solutions to explore

Build shared data infrastructure for deployment coordination

Build a central data and AI layer that brings together climate, asset, operations and policy data in one place. Use this layer to run analytics, support decisions and track emissions, and let internal tools and external products connect to it through APIs, so that everyone uses the same trusted data.

Climate‑aware AI use and repeatable delivery

Decide clear rules for how AI should be used in a climate‑aligned way (for example, preferring low‑carbon cloud regions, using efficient models and a careful use of hardware). Turn project learning into reusable digital assets (standards, templates, component libraries, project datasets) so that each new deployment of a plant, hub, corridor or fleet can start from proven patterns instead of being rebuilt from scratch.

Orchestration tools for complex systems

Create shared data and interface layers (data lakes, common schemas, access rules and UIs) that let cities, utilities, OEMs, operators and partners plug into the same mobility and energy platforms. Add concrete tools on top of this, such as internal carbon‑pricing views, green‑IT dashboards, business‑model sandboxes and AI‑for‑decarbonization modules linked to energy, fleet, buildings and supply‑chain data.

What should leaders do next?

Stop ad hoc AI pilots and siloed systems. Define and fund a central data and AI core, codify repeatable delivery patterns and put in place shared orchestration layers before scaling new AI and digital products across the portfolio.

AREA 17 helps you face this new paradigm

The overall ClimateTech and mobility market acceleration is very real. But capital is now concentrating on the players that can prove deployment at scale, and the distance between leaders and the rest is opening up. The organizations that turn this momentum into measurable, coordinated progress will be the ones to capture the funding and market leadership

The ones getting there are treating brand, experience, and technology as a single unified system and replacing ambition statements with deployment proof, fragmented workflows with coordinated journeys, and bespoke projects with shared data infrastructure.

AREA 17 combines strategic consulting with hands‑on product development, working with ClimateTech, mobility, and energy organizations to think, design, and build the platforms that:

Make deployment progress visible, by turning roadmaps into credible, trackable narratives that replace ambition statements with operational proof investors, cities, and buyers can verify.

Orchestrate complex stakeholder journeys, by designing platforms that coordinate utilities, regulators, communities, and consumers in real time, replacing fragmented workflows with transparent, end-to-end deployment journeys.

Scale AI on climate-ready infrastructure, by building unified data and orchestration layers that connect grids, fleets, and climate systems as resilient, interoperable platforms, replacing scattered pilots with repeatable deployment patterns.