UC has evolved from a nice-to-have collaboration tool into the essential infrastructure that keeps modern businesses running.
Whether teams are connecting across multiple offices, working from home, or engaging with customers, UC platforms have become the connective tissue of daily operations.
Consequently, the decision-making process around these platforms has been largely related to feature list, reliability, and security credentials, alongside price.
These considerations remain important, but they no longer tell the complete story.
A new dimension is emerging in the UC selection process, driven by both regulatory pressure and stakeholder expectations: sustainability.
This is increasingly relevant as UC platforms embed energy-intensive AI deeper within them.
However, just as platform features vary, so does their carbon footprint. Courtenay Mills, Head of Voice & Data at EfficiencyIT, explains why this variation could start to matter in ways that extend beyond environmental consciousness and why IT leaders should be asking harder questions of their providers.
The Carbon Cost of Unified Communications
The environmental impact of UC platforms is not a headline topic in the sector.
Yet with almost all major platforms being cloud-based, they rely on data centers to provide their service. It is the efficiency of those facilities delivering that service that directly impacts overall emissions.
Equally, as providers race to deploy more AI to power everything from meeting transcriptions to real-time analytics, the computational demands—and associated emissions—are rising rapidly.
This matters because sustainability is moving from nice to have to mandatory.
“The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive will soon require large organizations to account for supply chain emissions, and UK regulation is moving in a similar direction,” Mills explains.
“That means the choice of UC provider may directly influence your own disclosures.”
With legislation moving in one direction, companies found to be over-indexing on emissions could be at risk of regulatory action.
Removing emissions that originate from providers will be an easier way for businesses to cut their carbon emissions than trying to cut their own operations.
Thus, this new element may soon become another factor in UC procurement.
Assessing Your Vendor
Despite the growing need to know about a provider’s emissions, transparency about these environmental costs remains inconsistent.
“The environmental footprint of UC platforms is not uniform,”
Mills observes.
“Microsoft, for example, has made significant investments in AI to drive growth across its portfolio, including Teams. What is less clear is how this surge in compute demand will be balanced with credible emissions reductions.”
This uncertainty makes efforts to account for emissions from such a provider difficult to calculate.
By contrast, Salesforce has taken a more transparent approach with its AI Sustainability Outlook, publicly acknowledging the challenges posed by generative AI and outlining mitigation strategies.
This transparency gap matters because it reveals fundamentally different approaches to accountability. Some providers are willing to engage openly with the carbon costs of their AI features, while others remain notably quiet on the subject.
For businesses evaluating UC solutions, this difference in openness can signal how seriously a provider takes its environmental commitments and could create compliance reporting gaps that prove difficult to address later.
The variation extends to specific provider initiatives as well. 8×8, which operates in both UC and CCaaS, has committed to net zero by 2050, with interim UK targets to reduce emissions by more than 1,500 tonnes of CO₂e by 2025. Independent audits suggest the company has already reduced its carbon footprint by approximately one third.
Although this may seem like an obvious contender when picking a provider, the race to roll out more AI and scale can easily put those numbers in doubt.
Mills notes that “the challenge, as with many providers, will be ensuring these commitments scale as AI features such as call transcription, analytics, and summarization become a standard part of its platform.”
Questions Every IT Leader Should Be Asking
The path forward in an age of increasing sustainability requirements demands that IT and procurement leaders expand their evaluation criteria when assessing UC providers.
Cost and functionality remain critical, but they should now be joined by a series of sustainability-focused questions that go beyond marketing claims.
Mills suggests organizations should be asking, “What are your current emissions and how are they measured? How do you account for the carbon intensity of AI workloads? What proportion of your data center energy comes from renewable sources? And are your targets independently verified and aligned with recognized science-based standards?”
These questions serve multiple purposes. They help organizations understand the true environmental impact of their technology choices, but they also signal to providers that sustainability is a factor in procurement decisions.
As more buyers embed these considerations into their evaluation processes, market pressure may drive broader improvements across the industry.
The varying approaches taken by major providers illustrate different points along the journey toward climate accountability.
No single provider has solved all the challenges, but some are demonstrably more willing to engage with them transparently.
For businesses, the imperative is clear: sustainability can no longer be treated as separate from UC strategy.
As Mills concludes,
“What matters is that buyers recognize sustainability is no longer a side issue but a central factor in how communications should be delivered.”
By embedding sustainability considerations into procurement decisions today, organizations can ensure their communications infrastructure aligns with both their operational needs and their environmental commitments.
