How is Stora Enso using AI?

In its forests, for planning and monitoring, according to its annual reports, with biodiversity the newest objective. Both the 2024 and 2025 reports describe AI building a digital twin of the forest that can model management actions and predict their impact on rare species. The 2025 report adds a proof of concept linking a biodiversity metric to the company's forest planning system. Its results reports, through the half-year report for 2026, don't mention AI. Partners' material shows more: a cloud forest data platform, satellite-based bark-beetle detection, and a 2025 search for a generative-AI tool for its sourcing teams.

What the usual answer says

The top results are partners' stories. A cloud vendor writes about the forest data platform, an IT services firm about bark-beetle detection, and a finance software firm about machine learning for forecasting. They describe AI in several parts of the business. The annual reports focus on one.

What the annual reports say

The 2024 annual report has two AI passages. One says digitalisation, remote sensing and AI "enhance our operations in forests and the wood supply chain while aiding in biodiversity protection and restoration". The other is specific: the "Precision forestry programme utilises Artificial Intelligence to create a highly accurate digital twin of the forest, integrating multiple data layers into a digital platform". That data "can be used to model forest management actions in a certain area and predict their potential impact on rare species".

The 2025 annual report, published in February 2026, continues the same line. Stora Enso "advanced its use of AI and other technologies to better integrate biodiversity and wood production, including digital forest twins that model forest management actions and predict impacts on rare species". It then describes a partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Its main outcome was "the proof-of-concept integration of the STAR (Species Threat Abatement and Restoration) biodiversity metric, developed by IUCN, with Stora Enso's forest planning system". The report doesn't say that integration uses AI. Elsewhere it lists a digital twin covering all its forests among its opportunities for "data analysis driving optimal forest management". Its third AI mention notes that "AI has been partially utilised in image creation".

The half-year report for 2026, published in July, doesn't mention AI, machine learning or digital twins, and nor did the Q4 2025 release.

What partners describe

A Microsoft customer story from June 2025 describes the forest data platform. The platform combines "data from multiple sources such as remote sensing from above the canopy to machine sensors at ground level and combines them with AI", building "an accurate digital twin of the forest". An IT services partner's story from January 2023 describes combining satellite imaging and AI to track bark beetle activity. Both are vendors describing their own work, so they show scope, not results. And in January 2025, the venture platform Combient Foundry listed an opportunity for AI built on large language models to change how Stora Enso sources. It describes "a co-pilot tool" for purchasing teams and legal counsel.

Why the annual report shows the forest

The annual report is a sustainability-heavy document written to show actions, so AI appears where it serves biodiversity. The sourcing and finance work sits in partners' material. Reading only the report would place all of the company's AI in the forest. Reading only partners' pages would miss that the forest twin is what the company chooses to report, two years running.

What it means for forest owners

The forest planning system already holds stands, planned actions and expected yields. AI and remote sensing extend it with new data, such as species records and imagery, and a second objective: predicted impact on threatened species. The same plan then answers two questions. Two conditions make that possible. The planning system has to hold actions and outcomes consistently over time, so a model can learn what an action does. And the biodiversity metric has to be defined well enough to plan against. The report calls the integration a proof of concept, which is the honest stage for it.

When it doesn't apply

Annual reports and vendor stories each show part of a company. Businesses without their own forests have no forest planning system to extend.

Quarri for forest management is built around how a forest operation runs, from the cruise to the settled account.

Quarri is an AI-native data platform for the timber supply chain. It connects buying, production, sales and inventory for forest management, sawmill, wood products and pulp, paper and packaging operators.