🌐 AI is in the Walls: Schneider Electric Gives Buildings Brains

Adoption Archetype: 🧩 Friction Removal — Make it easier

Getting to know Schneider Electric has felt like the proverbial story about touching the elephant. Over the years, I've met employees working on residential energy, microgrids, and building efficiency. Every conversation sounded like sustainability. But I still couldn't answer the basic question: what exactly does Schneider do?

Last Tuesday, at an early-morning breakfast presentation for media to kick off Schneider Electric's Innovation Summit in Las Vegas, the picture snapped into focus.

Schneider is a 190-year-old French hardware, software, and services giant that has embedded itself in over a million buildings globally for decades—and now it’s turning that footprint into an AI operating layer for the built environment.

In 2024, TIME and Statista named Schneider Electric the World’s Most Sustainable Company, an honor Corporate Knights awarded the company earlier this year. A corporation nearly two centuries old now sits at the forefront of innovation and sustainability; I went to Vegas to understand how.

The Summit brought together about 2,500 of Schneider’s North American stakeholders. It was the biggest event the company had hosted in years and felt like a coming-out party as Schneider Electric reintroduced itself to the world.

The Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

A hospital chiller fails at 2 AM. The building "knows" something's wrong — dashboards light up, someone gets paged. But the building can't tell you why it failed, what else is about to break, or whether the backup system you're counting on is ready to kick in.

Buildings consume 40% of global energy and account for roughly a third of all carbon emissions.

And shockingly, 30% of the energy buildings consume is simply wasted.

Despite being packed with sensors, controls, and monitoring systems, buildings still can't answer basic questions like "where am I bleeding energy today?" or "what's about to fail?"

In Vegas, Schneider launched EcoStruxure Foresight Operation, its answer to the problem.

Buildings Have A Lot to Say

Foresight is an AI platform that unifies every system in a building—HVAC, lighting, power, chillers—into a single shared intelligence layer. An assistant to whom operators can ask questions and get immediate answers. A brain that transforms the building from an inert object into a performance partner.

“You ask. It investigates. It tells you what's wrong and what to do next.”

"Give me where the inefficiency is today. What is not working? What are your recommendations? What should I do?" says Manish Kumar, Schneider's EVP of Digital Energy, describing how Foresight works. “You ask. It investigates. It tells you what's wrong and what to do next.”

The proof point is Winthrop Center in Boston, a 1.8–million–square–foot office facility where Foresight is already operating. The building is 65% more energy efficient than comparable buildings in New England.

Drop energy consumption by two-thirds across the world’s buildings, and the carbon, cost, and performance benefits are self-evident. The built environment transforms from climate burden into climate opportunity.

Why This Hasn't Happened Already

Big buildings run on separate equipment and machines from different vendors, installed over multiple decades, speaking different protocols. HVAC doesn’t talk to lighting. Lighting doesn’t talk to power. Building management systems see only unwanted effects, not causes.

“Foresight will break the silos,” Manish told me. “We will be able to unify all the systems. If something happens in one system, it has an impact on the other. Foresight will tell you that.”

At breakfast that first morning, an executive who reports to Manish was discussing Foresight’s rollout plans. The question came up: how do you take this to market?

His answer, delivered almost casually: We’re already in 200,000 brownfield sites.

That’s 200,000 hospitals, hotels, laboratories, airports, data centers, and office buildings. Hardware is installed. Software is deployed. Relationships are in place. Trust is already established.

In those environments, integrating Foresight is not even really a new sales pitch. It’s the next upgrade.

That’s how a global giant launches its AI intelligence layer for buildings. It’s an advantage that most startups will never have. Yet Schneider Electric isn’t trying to box out startups or its legacy competitors.

Open by Default

Schneider built Foresight to be an open platform, like the Linux operating system or an Apache server. It talks to competitors’ equipment. It integrates with third-party systems.

Why? Because it’s the right thing to do for clients, and it’s how you maximize the opportunity.

“The architecture should be very open, flexible, able to talk to everything that is communicable,” Manish says. “If, as an industry, we go far more open, easy to integrate, the pie will increase, and everybody will be able to benefit, starting with the clients.”

Openness makes it easier for customers to say yes. It expands what customers can achieve. And that expands the market.

Manish adds, “We are a very humble company to say we have a part to play. We are a technology company. We will bring innovation. But to get the outcome, we have to bring the ecosystem together."

Everything Should Talk to Everything

Manish’s son spent a day touring Schneider’s Massachusetts engineering labs last summer. At the end of the visit, Manish asked what he thought.

“You guys are in a cool business,” the third-grader said. “You guys are doing automation, these sensors and so forth.”

His son continued, “I told the engineers in the lab, we should be able to talk to all these devices and be able to change things.”

For Manish, his son’s worldview is essential. The next generation won’t tolerate siloed knowledge or vendor-specific interfaces. They’re AI natives. They expect to ask machines questions and get answers. They expect everything to work. with everything.

Foresight makes building ops conversational. You don’t need to know which subsystem to check or which vendor’s interface to log into. You ask the building. The building tells you.

“If we invent it, we’ll also solve the problem of lack of skill,” Manish says. That’s not replacing expertise. It multiplies it—and it makes facility work legible to a generation that might otherwise skip the sector entirely.

The Tenure Advantage

Over two days at the Summit, I kept meeting people who’ve been with the company for over a decade, sometimes two. Not just senior leaders presenting on stage, but product managers running demos and marketers touring us through a local AI data center.

I saw that same tenure advantage a decade ago when I worked at Amazon. Teams remain intact for years, expertise compounds, and culture becomes more than platitudes on the wall—it gets embodied in the work.

Manish himself has been at Schneider Electric for 18 years. He says this is the most exciting moment yet. “There is no better time to be in the space we are in because this space is undergoing amazing innovation, disruption, and transformation.”

🌐 Supercool Takeaway

At a moment when buildings consume 40% of global energy and waste roughly 30% of it, giving buildings brains is one of the smartest decisions we can make about the built environment. For efficiency, resilience, and cost savings. 

Schneider is a 190-year-old French industrial giant with institutional depth, a global footprint, and teams that have been solving hard energy and building problems together for years.

Now it has taken that footprint and built an AI layer on top of it. Buildings stop acting like static assets. They become active partners in energy efficiency and grid reliability.

The business case speaks clearly; Schneider is moving into Winthrop Center as much for cost-efficiency as to embody its highest values.

That’s the picture that finally came into focus in Vegas.

Operator Takeaways

• Choose open platforms. Systems that integrate with any vendor’s equipment protect you from lock-in and simplify future upgrades.
  

• Buy speed, not dashboards. The AI win is faster problem diagnosis and clear next steps, not more data visualization.
  

• Build for the incoming workforce. New operators expect conversational tools, not siloed knowledge and vendor-specific interfaces.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

AI is in the Walls: Schneider Electric Gives Buildings Brains

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all other platforms.

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Stat of the Week: 20%

That’s the amount of global energy currently running through power grids. A number projected to rise to 50% by 2050, driven by electrification, AI, modernization, and the drive toward a net-zero future.

Since 2010, the share of renewables on the grid has accelerated rapidly, most notably for solar — from 0.2% to 7% — and wind — from 1.6% to 8.1% — of total electricity production worldwide.

Quote of the Week:

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🌐 The Climate Adoption Playbook - Module 5

The Offer You Can’t Refuse

If Al Subbloie weren’t slashing carbon emissions along American Main Streets and solving climate change, you’d swear he was cast straight out of The Godfather—as a member of the Corleone family.

It’s how he kicks things off: “I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

That offer became Budderfly, Subbloie’s Energy-as-a-Service company, which hit $200 million in revenue in 2024 while retrofitting thousands of restaurant locations across the U.S. — like your local Five Guys, Taco Bell, Dunkin’, Zaxby’s, and McDonald’s.

Franchise owners run energy-hungry restaurants — late hours, fryers, walk-in coolers, rooftop units that never rest. They know their utility bills are high. They don’t want to write six-figure checks for new HVAC, refrigeration, and lighting systems, or take on debt to do so.

Budderfly takes that off the table.

Budderfly replaces the HVAC, refrigeration, lighting, and controls with high-efficiency, digitally managed equipment — with zero upfront cost to its customers.

Energy use falls by up to 40%. Budderfly gets paid through a share of the monthly energy savings.

Behind that product offering is a financing engine. Budderfly raises the capital and procures, installs, and maintains the equipment under a long-term service agreement. On average, franchisees cut their carbon emissions by nearly 20% just by signing the agreement and letting Budderfly handle the rest.

Today, Budderfly is in over 8,000 buildings. As Al Subbloie frames it: “Find energy-intensive businesses with thousands of identical locations. Crack the code on one. Then rinse, repeat — and scale like crazy.”

Operator takeaway: Climate adoption grows when energy efficiency is delivered as a cost-effective service rather than as a capital expense.

From Module 5 of the Climate Adoption Playbook — Financing as the Unlock. Learn how climate companies win customers by eliminating the "green premium" and making it easy to say yes.

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Related

Schneider’s Summit story plugs into a Supercool arc we’ve tracked since launch: climate as an infrastructure story. It’s the behind-the-scenes coordination that turns our grid and buildings into an intelligent, unified system.

Schneider is building that orchestration layer — Foresight for buildings and the One Digital Grid platform for utilities.

Supercool tracks companies building other critical pieces of this smart, electrified world. Their businesses may look unrelated, but together they help us start to see what the low-carbon future will look like.

Grid flexibility:

• Renew Home — turning everyday devices into grid capacity through virtual power plants.

• Sunrun — making home solar + storage a mainstream, financeable grid resource.

• Enphase — solar + storage at the household level that scales distributed supply and controllable capacity.

• Zum — electrifying fleets in ways that feed value back to the grid over time.

• TeraWulf — flexible Bitcoin/HPC data-center loads that co-locate with clean power.

Building efficiency:

• Budderfly — delivering efficiency through a no-upfront Energy-as-a-Service model.

• BrainBox AI — autonomous HVAC optimization that cuts building energy use by predicting demand and tuning systems in real time.

Home electrification:

• Quilt — heat pumps designed like a consumer product, making home electrification simple and native.

• Copper — battery-buffered induction cooking that avoids panel upgrades and makes electric appliances plug-and-play.

• Dandelion — accelerating electrified heating and cooling with standardized geothermal installs.

Distributed generation:

• Husk — distributed clean power at the grid’s edge.

Grid infrastructure:

• Camus — distribution-grid software helping utilities unlock capacity and connect new loads and clean energy faster.

• Siemens Energy — utility-scale hardware expanding and modernizing the grid's backbone for the electrified era.

Buildings:

• Alloy — developer of NYC's first all-electric skyscraper.

Find these previous podcast episodes and newsletter features.

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Where Supercool Traveled This Week

Here are several quick videos I created covering the Schneider Electric Innovation Summit, hosted in Las Vegas. 

• Innovation Summit Overall Highlights

• Innovation: Advancing Energy Tech

• Unlocking the Future of AI

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