BusinessDay
Oladehinde Oladipo
June 21, 2026
Schneider Electric SE is telling oil, gas and mining companies across Africa that the biggest payoff from artificial intelligence won’t come from buying better software, but from finally putting decades of plant records to work.
Elijah Daniel, the company’s country sales director for process automation across Sub-Saharan Africa, said the real edge comes from training systems on a facility’s own process data, maintenance logs, alarm histories and operator actions — information he said most operators have collected for years but never connected to anything capable of learning from it.
“That knowledge is yours. Nobody else has it,” Daniel said, describing the data as a competitive moat that rivals can’t easily copy once it’s linked to AI tools.
The pitch comes as forecasters raise their estimates of AI’s economic impact on the continent. The African Development Bank has projected AI deployment could add as much as $1 trillion to Africa’s GDP by 2035, with oil and gas, mining, energy and manufacturing expected to capture much of that growth.
Early adopters elsewhere are already citing sizable returns. Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. has said it generated $500 million in AI-driven value in 2023. Norway’s Equinor ASA reported $130 million in AI-related savings in 2025. Rystad Energy has forecast that digitalisation and AI will generate close to $500 billion in cumulative value for oil and gas companies worldwide between 2026 and 2030.
Schneider Electric and its software unit AVEVA are marketing a “connected worker” platform designed to give field technicians the same live data control-room operators see, delivered through handheld devices rather than radios and paper checklists. Daniel described a scenario in which a technician sent to repair a pump could query a system trained on that specific machine’s history and get a diagnosis before opening it up — a capability he said is already in use, pointing to an operator on the company’s Bunga floating production, storage and offloading vessel as an example.
The push comes amid survey data showing a widening gap between companies that have adopted AI and those that haven’t. PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer found industries most exposed to AI saw revenue-per-employee growth of 27 percent, roughly three times the 9 percent rate in less-exposed sectors. Stanford University’s AI Index found 78 percent of organisations reported using AI in 2024, up from 55 percent the year before.
Daniel pushed back on concerns that the technology threatens jobs in a region with high youth unemployment, pointing to an OECD survey across seven countries in which 83% of firms that had adopted AI reported no change in staffing levels. He argued the goal is to remove friction for skilled workers, not replace them.
Schneider Electric, based in Rueil-Malmaison, France, took full ownership of AVEVA in 2023, combining the French group’s industrial hardware business with AVEVA’s plant-operations software.
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