Schneider Electric accelerates its AI at Scale strategy

Schneider Electric, the leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, has announced the progress made on its AI at Scale strategic initiative. With more than 200 people onboard in AI roles since 2021, the company has strengthened its foundations for enabling new revenue streams, savings, and efficient working methods.

Over the past year, Schneider Electric has accelerated the momentum of AI by appointing its first Chief AI Officer, Philippe Rambach; implementing an AI hub and spoke operating model globally; bringing 200+ AI and data experts onboard; submitting 18 AI technology patents; enhancing 15 solutions with AI capabilities; developing 20+ internal AI applications; and launching an AI knowledge base on se.com/ai.

The AI Hub partners with all Schneider Electric business units and functions to address the most pressing customer challenges and prioritise AI use cases with the highest customer value. 

Focused on efficiency and sustainability, it has been working to develop further AI applications in the field of electrification, automation, and decarbonisation, such as microgrid management, alarm management, and HVAC optimisation for buildings, electric vehicles (EV) management, smart charging, asset management, and many more. 

Examples of AI-enabled Schneider Electric offers include offers such as EcoStruxure Resource Advisor, EcoStruxure Microgrid Advisor or EcoStruxure Autonomous Production Advisor.

"At Schneider Electric, we observe a great demand from our customers to leverage data for operational efficiency, electrification, and automation. The growing energy costs make many of them turn to AI applications to manage, predict and optimise their energy consumption," says Peter Weckesser, Chief Digital Officer at Schneider Electric. 

"We apply AI to enhance data-driven decision making, agility and decarbonisation. It has never been more visible that resource efficiency and energy sobriety boost the company's profitability".

"The AI by Schneider Electric is AI for good. We challenge it with the biggest problem of our generation – climate change," adds Philippe Rambach, Chief AI Officer at Schneider Electric. 

"It has been my first year in this role, and I am happy to discover and further develop the AI foundation of many of our products and services. Our customers rely on us to help them solve their challenges at scale, and they recognise that our advanced AI technologies and domain expertise make Schneider Electric the right partner in these difficult times."

On the internal efficiency side, the Schneider AI Hub and Spokes partner with all teams to unburden employees from day-to-day manual activities, allowing them to dedicate more time to customers, data analysis, continuous improvement, and real-time decision-making.

Among internal AI applications, the company launched a virtual sales assistant, which offers an entire ecosystem of connected tools supporting sales efficiency with data-driven recommendations. It provides custom actionable insights such as product recommendations, ordering patterns, or product decommissioning.

The AI Hub is currently developing applications in customer support, finance, global supply chain, sales, HR, and more, which are all expected to enable significant efficiency and savings by 2025.