The increasing demand for energy and growing concerns for environmental issues are promoting the development of organic electrode materials. Among these, conjugated carbonyl compounds (CCCs) represent one of the most attractive and promising candidates for sustainable and eco-benign energy storage devices in the coming future. However, most of the current compounds suffer from dissolution in organic electrolytes and low electronic conductivity, which result in severe capacity decay and poor rate performance. Recently, researchers have achieved considerable progress by introducing electroactive carbonyl compounds into carbon nanomaterials. This perspective provides an overview of the up-to-date development of these nanocomposites in metal ion batteries (lithium-ion batteries or sodium-ion batteries) and supercapacitors (SCs), including the synthesis, performance improvement and applications. We mainly focus on carbon nanotubes (CNTs), graphene and mesoporous carbon (MC) as carbon nanomaterials because of their high specific surface area, good conductivity, electrochemical stability and favourable interaction with conjugated carbonyl compounds. This strategy opens up new possibilities to realize cost-effective, sustainable and versatile energy storage devices.