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A unified platform combines software-defined automation and Azure AI helping to enable more efficient, traceable, and scalable industrial workflows.
Schneider Electric announced new developments in their Microsoft strategic collaboration that focus on improving engineering efficiency and operational resilience across manufacturing lifecycles. These new milestones demonstrate how the collaboration is helping to support manufacturers in modernizing operations, accelerating engineering processes, and improving resiliency. Schneider Electric provides the industrial execution through its EcoStruxure Automation Expert, its software-defined automation platform designed to more consistently operate across on-premises, edge, and hybrid environments. Microsoft provides the foundation with Azure cloud and AI services that help to support orchestration, analysis, and optimization of industrial processes, forming a more unified approach to agentic manufacturing and open automation.
Manufacturers continue to face challenges related to product variability, supply chain disruption, and the need to modernize operations without compromising safety or compliance. This collaboration results in a combined platform designed to connect engineering intent with real-time operational execution, helping to enable teams to standardize reusable logic, validate automation through simulation, maintain lifecycle traceability, and scale interoperable operations across multiple sites and hardware environments.
Key to this approach is EcoStruxure Automation Expert, which helps to enable automation logic to be developed, simulated, validated, and deployed once, and then reused across different environments without reconfiguration. This supports a continuous workflow across design, engineering, commissioning, and operations, helping to reduce fragmentation that can often be seen in traditional automation systems. EcoStruxure Automation Expert provides:
A unified workflow that integrates engineering design, simulation, commissioning, and operations into a single traceable process.
AI-driven tools that support automation of routine design decisions and early validation of control logic.
Engineering teams with a reported up to 50 percent reduction in time spent on configuration and documentation tasks.
Production changes that have previously required weeks have been reportedly implemented within hours.
The combined platform also extends to industrial deployments. In one implementation, H2E Power reported that the platform supported over 6,000 hours of stable autonomous operation in a high-temperature solid oxide electrolysis environment for green hydrogen production. The deployment was reported to have contributed to a reduction in the levelized cost of hydrogen by up to 10 percent for a typical 10 MW plant.
This work was demonstrated at Hannover Messe 2026, where both organizations showcased early-stage co-innovation capabilities, including AI-enabled engineering workflows and open-standards-based industrial ecosystems.
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