While most conversations about Physical AI centre on robotics, humanoids, and autonomous machines, process industries face a different challenge
Operators must manage complex, continuous operations where reliability, safety, cybersecurity and energy efficiency are critical to performance. Yet until now, no clear blueprint has shown how Physical AI can be applied in practice across these complex environments.
Schneider Electric, NVIDIA, and HPE are working to bring AI closer to industrial operations, embedding intelligence where decisions are made and value is created. As an initial demonstration of this vision, the companies are introducing Industrial AI Agents at the Edge.
The solution combines HPE Private Cloud AI, co-engineered with NVIDIA within the HPE AI Factory with NVIDIA portfolio, and Schneider Electric’s operational technology expertise to enable organisations to securely deploy and scale AI applications at the industrial edge, bringing real-time intelligence closer to critical operations while maintaining control over sensitive data, security and costs.
Many industrial organisations face challenges when scaling AI across operational environments. Requirements around data governance, cybersecurity, operational performance, and AI deployment can create barriers to broader adoption. By operating at the edge, the solution addresses three challenges that limit industrial AI at scale:
- Data sovereignty: Critical operational data is often too valuable, sensitive or regulated to move past operational boundaries. HPE Private Cloud AI provides the foundation for Industrial AI Agents at the Edge, enabling organisations to deploy AI close to operations while maintaining control, security, and compliance.
- Cybersecurity: Increased connectivity can introduce risks across industrial and critical infrastructure environments. HPE Private Cloud AI reduces the attack surface by keeping and processing the data close to its source.
- AI consumption costs: As AI usage increases, cloud-based inference, data transfer, and token-related costs rise, creating challenges for organisations seeking to scale AI across sites, assets, and operations. Deploying AI at the edge with HPE Private Cloud AI can reduce some of these costs while giving greater control over where and how AI workloads run.
Through Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Industrial Insights apps, customers can deploy, manage, and govern multiple Industrial AI Agents in a single environment, simplifying lifecycle management and security oversight while maintaining full control of critical operations and infrastructure.
The first Industrial AI Agents focus on operational technology monitoring, cybersecurity and energy optimisation. Their practical applications are already evident in industrial environments, including at companies such as CMPC Chile.
Operational Technology Monitoring System in Production: CMPC
This next step is already proven at CMPC Chile, part of Empresas CMPC S.A., a Latin American pulp, paper, and packaging producer. For the past three years, CMPC Chile has used Schneider Electric’s OTMS in production to monitor the health and availability of control systems across its continuous pulp and paper operations.
OTMS provides CMPC’s teams with a unified view of control systems, servers, workstations, and switches, helping specialists identify emerging issues sooner, diagnose problems faster, and set clearer maintenance priorities. This deployment demonstrates the value of OTMS as a control-system monitoring solution and provides an operational foundation for the future introduction of Industrial AI Agents, with the potential to accelerate investigation and decision-making while keeping people in control of critical action.
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 Optimisation 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 optimisation opportunities, recommend or implement adjustments, and verify the resulting impact on energy efficiency, operational performance and sustainability outcomes.
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 optimise operations in real time, accelerating the path to Physical AI for process industries.”
Alexia Clements, SVP, Hybrid Cloud Solution Sales at HPE, said, “Industrial organisations 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 and process manager, Industrial Operations Vice-Presidency, CMP, 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.”
