Milestone has a strategic focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance.
We continue to implement new measures to strengthen focus on ESG projects and reporting. Our strategic aim is our value of responsibility – going beyond compliance.
To Milestone, ESG means taking responsibility for the way we do business, how our products are developed, sold, and used, and for the way we impact people, society, and the environment. To achieve our ESG ambitions, we are working to implement robust compliance and risk management systems within environmental and social sustainability, recognizing the need to ensure good governance in our global operations.
In 2023, we expanded the ways we assess, monitor, report, and act on ESG topics that could affect our business and stakeholders. Our reporting continues to be structured around topics related to the relevant environment and climate, people and society, and governance and risk. We rely on Danish guidelines and international sustainability reporting standards to guide our internal discussions and priorities and our external reporting.
Milestone adheres to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as our purpose, our business operations and solutions and our ESG program are all meeting SDG objectives. We need to meet the standards of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and have been working towards this for a while already, well ahead of the deadline for regulatory compliance.
We have already taken steps to follow the standards and will continue in the direction against full implementation over the coming years.
We prioritize our work on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues by focusing on the most material areas first. We have adopted the principle of double materiality, whereby we seek to understand the relative importance – materiality – of ESG areas to both Milestone and external stakeholders.
In 2023, we conducted a double-materiality workshop with a cross-functional management team assessing data privacy, trade compliance, human rights, and anti-corruption to be among our most material areas. This assessment draws on both a legal and policy analysis, extensive stakeholder interviews conducted to determine what ‘responsible technology’ means at Milestone, now and in the future, and a human rights impact assessment.
The Executive Leadership Team (ELT) and Senior Leadership Team (SLT) have been involved in assessing the double materiality of ESG matters, discussing the impacts, risks and opportunities related to material social sustainability topics.
Together with the mandatory regulatory topics our assessment of materiality guides our ESG work and reporting.
Building on this work, we also initiated a more extensive double-materiality assessment in line with the incoming European Sustainability Reporting Standards for completion in early 2024.
Our focus on ESG has been further strengthened in 2023. This ensures our accountability and license to operate, but it also gives us a platform to engage in dialogue with partners, industry organizations and political stakeholders.
As many businesses in 2023, we recognize that we still have some ground to cover. The global climate crisis, increasing stakeholder expectations and geopolitical instability all contribute to the continuous evolution of what it means to be a responsible business. We will continue to develop and expand our ESG program in 2024. New policies will be developed, training programs will be carried out, and in late 2023 we purchased an IT platform to collect, monitor, analyze and report an increasing amount of data within ESG.
Our ESG framework is closely linked to our business model. Milestone plays an important role in the supply chain for video management systems, and we are aware that our open and flexible platform make it a complex task to monitor and control where and how our products are used. That is why our policies, stakeholder engagement and due diligence processes play a key role in affecting how video management is carried out around the world.
Our focus on responsible technology is a commitment to ensure that our technology is developed, sold, and used responsibly. Five principles guide us, our partners, and customers.
Milestone focused on the responsible use of our technology for many years. Our commitment to the Copenhagen Letter in 2017, and our policies – on e.g. human rights and data ethics – are examples of this DNA and of our putting people first in all our business operations.
However, in 2023, to support our commitment to United Nation’s Guiding Principles (UNGP) on Human Rights and Businesses, we have established a formal program on responsible technology with executive leadership involvement to work across functions. We have established five Responsible Technology Principles, which guide the development of our products and services and the choice and character of our engagements across our value chain.
The principles help us identify ethical implications and human rights risks in our work and enable us to adequately address them from the outset.
Our systematic focus on responsible technology is our global trademark and a foundational part of our operating model.
To ensure a successful implementation we have defined five focus areas: 1) Governance, 2) Training and Awareness, 3) Sales (Due Diligence), 4) Research & Development and 5) Public Engagement.
Our insights and experiences from these will assist us in identifying how we can implement and continuously evolve the principles.
Milestone wants to be a beacon and industry leader on responsible technology. We consistently increase our ambitions and encourage our partners, peers, and the entire technology industry to work in the same direction to create common responsibility standards for technological development and growth.
In essence, we believe that more legislation is needed to secure public trust in technology and responsible development and implementation of modern technology for the greater good of societies.
Therefore, we are engaged in organizations, committees and roundtables that debate and define common ground on responsible technology.
In 2023, we have been involved in The Confederation of Danish Enterprises AI Coalition, we are represented in several policy boards in The Danish ICT Industry Association, we are part of the Danish AI Standardization Committee, and we have a seat at ArticleOne’s Business Roundtable on Human Rights and technology.
Also in 2023, we have participated in several events to direct focus on challenges and possibilities in video technology and AI. E.g. we participated in a facial recognition case competition with law students from the University of Copenhagen arranged by ADD (Algorithms, Data & Democracy), we were at the People’s Meeting (Folkemødet) and on the Copenhagen Democracy Summit to discuss AI and human rights, and we participated in a panel debate in Brussels about EU’s AI Act that were approved in December 2023. In addition, we provided input, advice and feedback on both the Danish and EU legislative process around AI and technology in general.
There are plenty of challenges to Milestone and our industry when it comes to development, sale, and use of video technology. When it comes to responsibility the bottom line is: existing regulation does not provide sufficient guidance for addressing ethical challenges related to the use of our technologies. Therefore, we need to evolve our own practices and principles, and we will promote new standards that balances our social responsibility and business objectives.