I’ll be the first to admit that Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) can be hard to define — and I’m a consultant who works in this space. In fact, I was recently a panelist for a conversation around ESG where I joked:

If you asked 10 different ESG practitioners to define ESG, you would probably get 10 different answers, and none of them would be wrong.

I was joking, but I think it’s probably true.

ESG is not necessarily a new concept; it’s really just a reorganizing and repackaging a variety of concepts that have been around for a long time, ranging from general risk management to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

Since we are all having a difficult time defining ESG — and since ChatGPT is apparently going to define things for us in the future — I thought I’d ask ChatGPT what its thoughts were. Here’s what it said in response to the prompt, “Define Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)”:

Just for fun, and because I’m a language nerd, the next day I wanted to see if ChatGPT had a different response to a slightly different prompt, “What is Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)”. Interestingly, it gave a similar (but not quite the same) answer:

Maybe even AI doesn’t even know what ESG is. Or maybe the different answers are indicative of how quickly this space is changing. I’m not sure.

But in my opinion, if you take these two answers together, it’s a pretty decent, and unsurprisingly concise, definition of ESG.

I’d love to hear what other practitioners have to say. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments. And you can learn more about our work, via our website.