Harneet Kaur Narang and Gisele Urujeni, ESSEC Global MBA candidates, focus on the case of Fractal Analytics, a global provider of consulting services and AI to Fortune 500 companies and its journey to ESG.

Harneet Kaur Narang and Gisele Urujeni are ESSEC Business School Winners of the CoBS 2026 Case Development Challenge, part of the Advanced International Certificate in Responsible Business Practices. With kind acknowledgements to Fractal Analytics and CSO Chetana Kumar.

A Van in the Philippines

On a Monday morning, a mobile X-ray van leaves Manila. It carries an X-ray machine, a team of health workers, and an AI algorithm trained on millions of chest scans. It has screened hundreds of people for tuberculosis, a disease that still kills more than a million people every year. The AI reads each scan in seconds, flags abnormalities, and works even where internet connectivity is unreliable. No radiologist required. No weeks-long wait for results.

This is Qure.ai, an AI healthcare company incubated at Fractal Analytics, now operating across more than 4,800 sites in over 100 countries, and reaching around 32 million people. And it raises a question worth sitting with: what kind of company builds something like this and why?

Sustainability Is a journey. The Destination Was Never In Doubt

Fractal Analytics is a global provider of consulting services and AI to Fortune 500 companies, employing over 5,000 professionals across 10 countries worldwide. It listed on Indian stock

exchanges on 16th February 2026, but the responsible business story at Fractal did not begin with the listing. It began at the founding.

“Compliance is a non-negotiable. We make every effort to understand, be informed, and be

compliant, and then we go further”, says Chetana Kumar, the company’s Chief Sustainability Officer.

That commitment is visible in the infrastructure Fractal has built around it. A board-level CSR and ESG Committee oversees strategy. ESTA, the ESG Task Force, brings together C-suite leaders from different verticals for quarterly reviews. The company holds ISO certification for environmental

management, occupational health and safety and energy management. Its Scope 1 and 2 emissions are independently assured by a third party, and has earned a CDP ‘B’ rating, the highest achievable for a company disclosing privately, for three consecutive years.

Mrs. Kumar adds, “Sustainability is a journey. You start in a phased manner. Your maturity grows over time, which does not mean you are not committed to a high standard of excellence from the

beginning”.

When Reporting More Emissions Is Actually Good News

A telling moment in Fractal’s ESG journey came when in one recent reporting year, its reported emissions increased, simply because the company chose to report them more accurately.

Fractal decided to expand the depth and breadth of its Scope 3 reporting, the indirect emissions running through supply chains, employee commutes, and more. She adds, “We decided to report even deeper and broader. Sometimes categories become relevant to you at a later point in time. There’s nothing wrong with that, you make a plan and you report it transparently.”

This approach reflects that the credibility of any ESG programme rests on the quality of its data. To measure employee commute emissions, Fractal runs an annual company-wide carbon survey. To build awareness, it runs green champions programmes, hackathons, and GHG inventory training

across all levels of the organisation. It works directly with their suppliers to help them understand and measure their own footprints.

The Multiplier Effect: When AI Saves a Life, Count It

One side of the public debate on AI and sustainability focuses rightly on aspects like the energy required to train large models, the water consumed by data centre cooling systems and the lined emissions. These are real concerns, and Fractal takes them seriously. It has a maintained a responsible AI policy for more than five years now.

But there is another side to this calculation that almost nobody attempts to quantify. Fractal’s CSO says, “It is also good to measure the huge multiplier effect of what high-quality, responsible AI can save, in terms of planetary resources, as well as healthcare, and saving lives.”

Qure.ai is the clearest expression of this argument. TIME Magazine named it as one of the Most Influential Companies of 2025. It reads a chest X-ray in under a minute and detects abnormalities in the lungs, pleura, mediastinum, bones, diaphragm, and heart. The AI interpretation from qXR can prioritize workflow and get pre-read assistance with contoured marking in lung and pleural abnormalities, thus reducing the radiology workload. Qure.ai’s FDA cleared indications now total 26 across 9 products for X-ray and CT, exceeding 65 CE certified indications and other global validations. And it operates offline, which is precisely what makes those Monday morning vans possible.

“If you can prevent poaching using image and video analytics, if you can help predict flooding before it happens and protect livelihoods,” she reflects, “I don’t think too many people attempt to quantify that in lives, not just in dollars.”

Find Your Allies in Unexpected Places

Fractal’s listing means what was once a private commitment is now a public one. SEBI mandates that listed Indian companies treat climate risk as part of enterprise risk management. European clients subject to CSRD are pulling Fractal’s sustainability performance into their own supply chain

disclosures. The company has already completed a voluntary BRSR report, and has just finished its second double materiality assessment, aligned to the European Sustainability Reporting Standards. In many ways, it’s the same values as before, just more visible now.

When asked what advice she would give to a young professional hoping to build responsible business from the inside of a company, Fractal’s CSO offers something more useful than inspiration.

“The energy and resources in any organisation are finite. Being respectful of that, mindful of that, and taking care to design your strategies and your communication keeping this factor in mind, that is very helpful. Put yourself in the shoes of other stakeholders. Lay out the facts so that people can come to their own evidence-based decisions. And sometimes, you can find allies in the most unexpected places, if you have done a good job of educating them, and of building trust carefully over time.”

She adds one final thought, “Sustainability is as much about high-quality programme management as it is about anything else.”

The gap between companies that talk about sustainability and those that actually deliver on it isn’t usually about intent. It comes down to execution, discipline, and treating responsible business with the same seriousness as any other core part of the business.

Fractal, it seems, has always understood this. The van leaving Manila on a Monday morning is the proof.

Harneet Kaur Narang and Gisele Urujeni are MBA students at ESSEC Business School, Paris, participating in the Council on Business & Society’s Advanced International Certificate in Responsible Business Practices. This article is based on an original interview conducted with the CSO of Fractal Analytics.

Sources:

1. Qure.Ai Technologies | MTEC
2. Interview with Chetana Kumar, CSO (Fractal Analytics)
3. Qure.ai wins Gates Foundation grant for AI ultrasound TB diagnostics | StartupNews.fyi
4. Qure FY24-25 Impact Report: Global AI Healthcare Innovations
5. Radiology artificial intelligence firm Qure.ai among Time Magazine’s ‘Most Influential Companies in the World’ for 2025
6. Qure.ai App User’s Manual | Qure.ai Documentation
7. Qure.ai nets six new indications cleared by the FDA
8. Fractal Analytics
9. Qure AI | AI assistance for Accelerated Healthcare

Disclosure: Gemini was used for stylistic rephrasing. All content is original. No material has been reproduced without attribution. Sources of information used are listed above (for quoting technical information about Qure.ai).

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