Schneider Electric has announced a strategic collaboration with NVIDIA and HPE to accelerate the adoption of Physical AI across process and heavy industries. The companies are introducing Industrial AI Agents at the Edge as an initial demonstration of this approach.
The solution is built on HPE Private Cloud AI, co-engineered with NVIDIA within the HPE AI Factory with NVIDIA portfolio, combined with Schneider Electric’s operational technology expertise. It enables organizations to deploy and scale AI applications at the industrial edge. Autonomous AI agents operate directly within industrial environments, continuously monitoring, reasoning, and optimizing operations in real time while maintaining control over sensitive data, security, and costs.
The approach addresses three key barriers to industrial AI adoption at scale: data sovereignty, cybersecurity, and AI consumption costs.
- Data sovereignty: Critical operational data is often too valuable, sensitive, or regulated to move beyond operational boundaries. HPE Private Cloud AI provides a secure foundation that enables AI deployment close to operations while maintaining control, security, and compliance.
- Cybersecurity: Increased connectivity can introduce additional risk. HPE Private Cloud AI reduces the attack surface by keeping and processing data close to its source.
- AI consumption costs: Cloud-based inference, data transfer, and token-related costs can rise as AI usage grows. Deploying AI at the edge with HPE Private Cloud AI can help reduce some of these costs while providing greater control over workload execution.
Through Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Industrial Insights apps, customers can deploy, manage, and govern multiple Industrial AI Agents through a single environment. This supports lifecycle management, security oversight, and control of critical operations and infrastructure.
The first Industrial AI Agents focus on operational technology monitoring, cybersecurity, and energy optimization. Their application is already visible in industrial environments with companies such as CMPC Chile.
OTMS foundation at CMPC Chile
CMPC Chile, part of Empresas CMPC S.A., one of Latin America’s largest pulp, paper, and packaging producers, has used Schneider Electric’s OTMS in production for the past three years. The system monitors the health and availability of control systems across continuous pulp and paper operations. It provides a unified view of control systems, servers, workstations, and switches, helping specialists identify emerging issues earlier, diagnose problems faster, and establish clearer maintenance priorities. This deployment serves as an operational foundation for the potential introduction of Industrial AI Agents.
The first three Industrial AI Agents at the edge
- OT Monitoring Agents: Combine real-time operational data, equipment configurations, process topology, alarms, maintenance history, and engineering context to understand the physical state of industrial operations. The agents identify emerging issues, reason about likely operational impacts, recommend or initiate corrective actions, and verify that the intervention delivers the expected physical outcome.
- Cybersecurity Agents: Correlate network activity, control system behaviour, asset configurations, operational events, and process context to detect abnormal conditions. The agents assess potential impacts on industrial operations, recommend or execute response measures, and validate that systems have returned to a secure and stable state.
- Energy Optimization Agents: Integrate process data, energy consumption patterns, equipment performance, operating conditions, and production requirements to understand how energy is used across industrial operations. The agents identify optimization opportunities, recommend or implement adjustments, and verify the resulting impact on energy efficiency, operational performance, and sustainability outcomes.
Statements from the companies
Gwenaelle Huet, Executive Vice President, Industrial Automation, Schneider Electric, said: “The next generation of industrial innovation will be driven by intelligence embedded directly into industrial operations. While much of today's focus is on autonomous machines, we see a significant opportunity to apply Physical AI to the industrial systems that power the world's critical industries. Together with NVIDIA and HPE, we are bringing together expertise in automation, AI and edge computing to help customers transform operational data into action, improving resilience, efficiency, cybersecurity and sustainability while laying the foundation for more autonomous industrial operations.”
Sri Kodali, global head of Developer Relations – Energy and Utilities at NVIDIA, said: “Industrial operations generate vast amounts of data, but turning that data into action remains one of industry's biggest challenges. By combining NVIDIA Nemotron™ open AI models and HPE Private Cloud AI, a turnkey AI factory solution, with Schneider Electric's industrial expertise and OTMS platform, Industrial AI Agents can monitor, reason and optimize operations in real time, accelerating the path to Physical AI for process industries.”
Alexia Clements, SVP, Hybrid Cloud Solution Sales at HPE, said: “Industrial organizations see real opportunities to use AI, and they want to be sure their sensitive data and critical systems will remain protected. Through our collaboration with NVIDIA and Schneider Electric, we’re helping customers use HPE Private Cloud AI to bring AI closer to where their data is generated and decisions are made. This gives customers a way to expand AI use across their facilities while maintaining the security, privacy and control their businesses require.”
Matías Jory, Digital & Process Manager, Industrial Operations Vice-Presidency, CMPC, said: “For the past three years, OTMS has helped us improve visibility into the health and availability of our control systems. In continuous industrial operations, identifying issues early is critical to protecting production and avoiding costly disruption. Looking ahead, we see significant potential for AI Agents to build on this proven foundation, helping our specialists investigate issues faster and move more effectively from insight to action, while keeping people in control of critical decisions.”
Schneider Electric, NVIDIA, and HPE state that the collaboration creates a foundation for industrial operations in which intelligent systems can continuously monitor, reason, and optimize performance. Over time, these capabilities are intended to help automate the automation, supporting safer, more efficient, and increasingly autonomous operations across process industries.
