Publicis Sapient and Schneider Electric Collaborate to Advance Sustainable Digital and AI Service Design

Publicis Sapient, a technology company that provides enterprise AI platforms and services, today announced its collaboration with Schneider Electric to help assess and reduce the environmental footprint of Schneider Electric's digital services, including edge and AI-enabled systems, using e-footprint, an open-source modelling solution developed by Publicis Sapient and hosted within the Boavizta ecosystem.

Unlike traditional approaches that assess the life cycle of individual products, e-footprint evaluates the current and projected environmental impact of an entire digital service—from field devices and end-user equipment to networks, cloud infrastructure and data centers—giving organizations a more complete picture of how technology design decisions affect sustainability. This can include AI-enabled systems, helping assess the environmental implications of running workloads in the cloud, at the edge or across hybrid architectures.

As part of this collaboration, Publicis Sapient worked with Schneider Electric to evaluate different technology designs for energy management systems. Notably, Schneider Electric now makes extensive use of industrial computers to manage electrical power, allowing for replacing function-specific hardware with more generic hardware controlled by software. One approach reduced CO₂ emissions by more than 40% compared with the original design, demonstrating the impact of engineering decisions on the system’s environmental impact.

Available to all enterprises, e-footprint enables organizations to:

• Measure the environmental impact of an end-to-end digital service.
• Compare alternative technology designs before implementation, including cloud, edge and hybrid architectures for AI-enabled systems.
• Identify the largest contributors to emissions across devices, networks and cloud infrastructure.
• Incorporate environmental considerations into engineering and architecture decisions.
• Understand the assumptions behind every calculation through transparent, explainable modelling.

"Measuring carbon impact is only valuable if it leads to better decisions. With e-footprint, we are giving organizations a practical way to understand how their technology choices, from how far they virtualize edge systems to where they run AI workloads, are impacting and will impact their environmental footprint, and to use those insights to design more sustainable digital services,” said Lise Malbernard, Country Managing Director, France, at Publicis Sapient. “By making this capability open source, we support organizations to make more informed technology decisions and accelerate the shift toward more sustainable digital services."

Schneider Electric is leveraging Publicis Sapient's sustainability consulting and digital engineering expertise to better understand the environmental footprint of its digital services and identify opportunities to improve them.

The teams analyzed energy management systems that span field devices, buildings, networks, cloud infrastructure and data centers. The work identified the largest sources of environmental impact and showed how comparing different technology designs can help reduce emissions while maintaining functionality. It also reinforced the importance of evaluating the entire digital service (not just individual components) to understand its overall environmental footprint.

"Until now, we had very few benchmarks for assessing the environmental impact of our digital architectures. As software-defined architectures continue to evolve, the complexity of technology design decisions has increased significantly, and understanding their environmental implications has become more challenging. e-footprint gives us an evidence-based understanding of those impacts, enabling us to compare design options, at the level of complexity we need, and make more informed decisions as we continue advancing our digital eco-design strategy," said Roland Bohrer, System Architect at Schneider Electric.

Publicis Sapient, the global technology hub of Publicis Groupe, provides enterprise AI platforms and services. With over 30 years of digital business transformation experience, we enable enterprise clients to transform how they operate and serve their customers, unlocking new value and enabling them to thrive in an AI-driven world. Our platforms Sapient Slingshot, Sapient Bodhi and Sapient Sustain use AI built off this deep enterprise context to help organizations modernize their legacy tech systems, build agentic solutions, and automate their IT operations. The combination of our AI platforms and the expertise of our people enables us to deliver faster and more effective outcomes through solutions that are specific to the unique needs of our clients’ businesses, their industries and their customers.  
For more information, visit publicissapient.com.

Schneider Electric is a global energy technology leader, driving efficiency and sustainability by electrifying, automating, and digitalizing industries, businesses, and homes. Its technologies enable buildings, data centers, factories, infrastructure, and grids to operate as open, interconnected ecosystems, enhancing performance, resilience, and sustainability. The portfolio includes intelligent devices, software-defined architectures, AI-powered systems, digital services, and expert advisory.

With 160,000 employees and one million partners in over 100 countries, Schneider Electric is consistently ranked among the world’s most sustainable companies.
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