Welcome to Assent’s Quarterly Innovation Spotlight! Every quarter, we share how we’re making product compliance, sustainability, and responsible sourcing easier, faster, and more connected for your business. Whether you’re working to deepen product visibility, manage your inbox bursting with customer requests, reduce supply chain risk, or prepare for what’s coming next, our goal is simple: to give you the clarity, confidence, and technology you need to lead with resilience.
The updates below leveraged Assent’s deep expertise, ever-growing network, and AI-native platform to strengthen data quality, reduce supplier friction, and introduce new capabilities that help you stay ahead of changing market dynamics. From improved declaration workflows, to announcing the market’s first AI Request Manager solution, we’re building the tools to future-proof your compliance programs and support your teams at every step. Let’s dig into what’s new!
A Look Back at 2025
2025 was a transformative year for supply chain sustainability, and for Assent. We rolled out some of the biggest product innovations in our history, all focused on helping manufacturers and distributors navigate changing market dynamics across geopolitical shifts, rapidly changing buyer expectations, increasing regulatory complexity, and digital transformation.
We began the year with the launch of the Assent Sustainability Platform, providing suppliers with a modern, unified experience that significantly reduces duplicate requests and accelerates high-quality data sharing. Built on Assent’s AI-native infrastructure, the platform helps you gain faster, clearer insights across the value chain and strengthens the business relationships you rely on.
In Q2, we introduced two major solution enhancements: one for the EU Batteries Regulation (EUBR) and another for the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). These solutions gave customers scalable, audit-ready ways to ensure due diligence requirements are effectively met, including the ability to calculate and collect emissions and responsible sourcing data. We also improved our trade compliance offering with updated harmonized system (HS) code lookup tools, and built stronger support for country of origin reporting.
Q3 brought two flagship releases: the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Packaging solution and our EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) solution, a powerful end-to-end workflow for due diligence, data collection, traceability, and due diligence statement (DDS) submissions.
These innovations, along with enhancements to the Metal Sourcing solution, Quick Declare, and substance lists, set the bar for innovation in 2025.
And in Q4, we continued to build on that momentum.
Request Manager
Customer requests are surging. Some organizations are seeing increases of up to 500% year over year. Yet with 80% of suppliers still relying on email inboxes and spreadsheets to manage those demands, it has become nearly impossible to keep pace. Fragmented channels lead to duplicated work, poor customer relationships, churn, and lost revenue.
Request Manager, announced in December and launching in just a few weeks, will change that. This AI-native solution gives manufacturers one centralized workspace inside the Assent Sustainability Platform to manage all compliance and sustainability requests, including those coming from outside Assent.
Here’s what suppliers will be able to do with Request Manager:
- Forward customer email requests directly into the Assent Sustainability Platform to automatically organize and track them
- Use AI-powered parsing to identify what the request is asking for and match it against existing data
- Respond instantly using data already in Assent’s platform, reducing manual work and speeding up turnaround times
- Upload their own documents when needed and share them securely with customers
- Create proactive customer workspaces to share declarations without waiting for incoming requests
Request Manager reduces the hours you spend responding to customer requests into minutes, making it more than an efficiency win: It’s a revenue-protection tool.
Agentic Network Submissions
Agentic Network Submissions uses generative artificial intelligence to ingest, classify, and validate declaration documents across multiple formats (PDF, DOCX, spreadsheets, scanned images, and more). Suppliers can upload documents directly in the Product Catalog and receive extracted data instantly, from regulation type and part IDs, to substance information, dates, and compliance status.
The workflow includes a human-in-the-loop review where suppliers can accept, reject, or correct parsed values. This ensures suppliers retain control and awareness of all data being shared. All actions are traceable, auditable, and logged to maintain a clear chain of due diligence.
With Agentic Network Submissions, suppliers benefit from faster declaration turnaround times, fewer manual errors, and easier bulk processing. For the customer, this means higher-quality data, faster request fulfillment, and stronger traceability. For Assent, this marks a major step forward in scaling intelligence across the Assent network, reducing friction, and unlocking more consistent compliance data for everyone.
Support for Declared Substances With Unknown or Confidential Concentrations
Beginning in November 2025, suppliers using the Assent Sustainability Platform can now select “Concentration unknown or confidential” when declaring a substance. This update gives suppliers a more flexible way to submit declarations, and gives customers more complete visibility into restricted substances.
For customers who still require concentration values, the system makes follow-up easy: You can quickly identify declarations missing this detail using reports like the DSL Exceedance Report and request updated data, and leverage in-product feedback to resolve issues quickly.
This change strikes an important balance: enable suppliers to provide the information they can, while maintaining the flexibility and traceability their customers need to manage risk effectively.
New User Roles in the Assent Sustainability Platform
This update empowers organizations to control their own user governance without relying on Assent teams to manage accounts. It also introduces structured audit logs that record role changes and access removals, strengthening security and traceability.
By giving suppliers more control over their internal structure, the User Roles feature enhances trust, reduces administrative burden, and prepares the platform for future role-based enhancements across compliance and sustainability workflows.
Other Module Enhancements
EU REACH SVHC Update
The EU REACH SVHC module has been updated to version 11/2025 and includes one new substance (DBDPE). Customers can choose when to adopt this update, as timing varies from typical REACH cycles.
Trade Compliance & Origin (TCO) Update
TCO v4.0 adds deeper support for aluminum, steel, and copper reporting — including smelt/cast details, full HS codes, and expanded export control classifications — helping importers stay compliant with Section 232 requirements.
EU Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) Update
The latest EU POPs update (09/2025) includes major additions like medium-chain chlorinated paraffins (MCCPs) and long-chain perfluorocarboxylic acids (PFCAs), threshold corrections, and alignment with Official Journal of the EU standards. Updating ensures customers collect data against the full POPs list.
Global Automotive Declarable Substance List (GADSL) Update
GADSL v02/2025 introduces new substances, removals, and updated thresholds. This ensures automotive manufacturers maintain accurate reporting across global supply chains and avoid exposure from outdated substance lists.
Conclusion
As we kick off 2026, I want to thank our customers, partners, and suppliers for your continued collaboration in 2025 that made everything we accomplished possible. This last year of innovations, from EPR and EUDR to AI enhancements to the Assent Sustainability Platform, represent our commitment to helping you lead with confidence in an increasingly complex regulatory world.
The updates we’re delivering today, especially Request Manager and our new declaration flexibility, are designed to future-proof programs and reduce the friction that slows teams down. We’re excited for what’s ahead, and look forward to continuing to build a more connected, intelligent, and resilient Assent network with you.
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