Schneider Electric has announced a strategic collaboration with NVIDIA and HPE intended to accelerate the adoption of Physical AI across process and heavy industries, and the three companies have introduced a first joint offering: Industrial AI Agents at the Edge.
The partners argue that while much of today's Physical AI discussion centres on robotics, humanoids and autonomous machines, process industries face a different problem. Operators run complex, continuous operations in which reliability, safety, cybersecurity and energy efficiency determine performance, and until now there has been no clear blueprint for applying Physical AI in those environments.
Edge deployment targets three barriers
The solution pairs HPE Private Cloud AI, co-engineered with NVIDIA within the HPE AI Factory with NVIDIA portfolio, with Schneider Electric's operational technology expertise. The aim is to let organisations securely deploy and scale AI applications at the industrial edge, keeping intelligence near the operations where decisions are made and value is created while retaining control over sensitive data, security and costs.
According to the companies, running at the edge addresses three constraints that limit industrial AI at scale:
- Data sovereignty. Operational data is often too valuable, sensitive or regulated to move beyond operational boundaries; HPE Private Cloud AI is positioned as the secure foundation for deploying agents close to operations while maintaining control and compliance.
- Cybersecurity. Greater connectivity can add risk across industrial and critical infrastructure environments; keeping and processing data near its source is presented as a way to reduce the attack surface.
- AI consumption costs. As AI use grows, cloud-based inference, data transfer and token-related costs can increase; edge deployment is offered as a means to reduce some of these costs and to govern where and how workloads run.
First three agents
Customers deploy, manage and govern multiple agents through Schneider Electric's EcoStruxure Industrial Insights apps, a single environment intended to simplify lifecycle management and security oversight while keeping critical operations under control. The first agents focus on operational technology monitoring, cybersecurity and energy optimisation.
OT Monitoring Agents combine real-time operational data, equipment configurations, process topology, alarms, maintenance history and engineering context to understand the physical state of operations. They identify emerging issues, reason about likely operational impact, recommend or initiate corrective actions and verify that an 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, assess potential impact, recommend or execute responses and validate that systems have returned to a secure and stable state. Energy Optimisation Agents integrate process data, consumption patterns, equipment performance, operating conditions and production requirements to find optimisation opportunities, recommend or implement adjustments and verify the resulting effect on energy efficiency, operational performance and sustainability outcomes.
Foundation at CMPC Chile
CMPC Chile, part of Empresas CMPC S.A. and one of Latin America's largest pulp, paper and packaging producers, has used Schneider Electric's OTMS in production for three years to monitor the health and availability of control systems across its continuous pulp and paper operations. The system gives teams a unified view of control systems, servers, workstations and switches, helping specialists spot emerging issues earlier, diagnose problems faster and set clearer maintenance priorities. That deployment is described as a strong operational foundation for the future introduction of Industrial AI Agents, with the potential to speed investigation and decision-making while keeping people in control of critical action.
Company positions
Gwenaelle Huet, executive vice president for industrial automation at Schneider Electric, said the next generation of industrial innovation would be driven by intelligence embedded directly into operations. While much current attention goes to autonomous machines, she sees a significant opportunity in applying Physical AI to the industrial systems that power critical industries, with the collaboration combining expertise in automation, AI and edge computing to turn operational data into action.
Sri Kodali, global head of developer relations for energy and utilities at NVIDIA, said industrial operations generate vast amounts of data but turning it into action remains a major challenge. Combining NVIDIA Nemotron open AI models and HPE Private Cloud AI with Schneider Electric's industrial expertise and OTMS platform is presented as a way for agents to monitor, reason and optimise operations in real time.
Alexia Clements, SVP for hybrid cloud solution sales at HPE, said industrial organisations see real opportunities in AI but want assurance that sensitive data and critical systems remain protected, and that bringing AI closer to where data is generated and decisions are made supports wider use across facilities.
Matías Jory, digital and process manager in CMPC's industrial operations vice-presidency, said OTMS has improved visibility into control-system health and availability, and that early identification of issues is critical in continuous operations. He sees potential for AI Agents to build on that base, helping specialists investigate faster while keeping people in control of critical decisions.
The companies frame the work as a foundation for operations in which intelligent systems continuously monitor, reason and optimise performance, describing an eventual path toward automating the automation. Those capabilities are set out as a direction of travel rather than results already demonstrated at scale.