Schneider Electric, NVIDIA and HPE have introduced Industrial AI Agents at the Edge, announced at NVIDIA GTC Berlin. The agents run on HPE Private Cloud AI, co-engineered with NVIDIA, and on Schneider's Operational Technology Monitoring System (OTMS), so they sit inside the plant instead of in a public cloud.
The companies say running on site tackles three barriers to industrial AI at scale. Operational data stays within the site, which helps with sovereignty. Processing close to the source reduces the attack surface. And cloud inference, data transfer and token costs, which grow with volume, are replaced by compute that is easier to predict. Customers deploy, manage and govern the agents through Schneider's EcoStruxure Industrial Insights apps.
Three agents come first. OT monitoring agents combine live data, equipment configurations, alarms and maintenance history to spot emerging problems and recommend or start a fix. Cybersecurity agents correlate network activity and control-system behaviour to detect abnormal conditions and check that systems return to a stable state. Energy optimisation agents look for savings and verify the result.
The foundation is already in production at CMPC Chile, part of Empresas CMPC, one of Latin America's largest pulp, paper and packaging producers. CMPC has used OTMS for three years to monitor the health of control systems across its continuous operations. Matías Jory, Digital & Process Manager at CMPC Chile, said OTMS has improved visibility into the health and availability of CMPC's control systems. "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," he said. The release does not say the agents themselves are deployed at CMPC.
Gwenaelle Huet, executive vice president of industrial automation at Schneider Electric, said: "The next generation of industrial innovation will be driven by intelligence embedded directly into industrial operations." Alexia Clements, SVP of hybrid cloud solution sales at HPE, said the aim is to let customers expand AI across facilities while keeping security, privacy and control.
Schneider contrasts the approach with physical AI work centred on robots and humanoids, saying process industries need reliability, safety, cybersecurity and energy efficiency instead.
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