How Schneider Electric Canada is Driving Industries into the Future
September 17, 2025
By Krystie Johnston
Automation, digitalization, IIoT, and AI. Data. Cybersecurity. Sustainability. These are some of the biggest trends in automation that are affecting industries in Canada today and are bound to shape their future, along with such imperatives as labour shortages, and reshoring. Schneider Electric is a leader in technology and was by both Time Magazine and Corporate Knights as the world’s most sustainable company. For decades Schneider has empowered everyone to make the most of their energy and resources. This article explores how they are helping industries in Canada leverage technologies that enable them to be competitive and resilient today and into the future.
Hugo Lafontaine, Vice President of Automation, Energy, Digitalization, and IoT at Schneider Electric Canada, says that technology adoption is key to securing the intelligence, connectivity, and sustainability industries will need for the future. Lafontaine is an Electrical Engineer and has over 20 years of systems and automation experience in both industrial and commercial sectors. According to Lafontaine, Schneider is all about how to help their customers implement technology to optimize energy consumption and increase productivity for factories and buildings.
A reality check
Lafontaine knows the challenges industries across the country are dealing with today. “We are going through a reality check, in terms of industries and what we need to do to stay competitive and ensure our products and solutions can reach the right places in the world. Close partners and so on are not a sure thing anymore. Companies are feeling the pressure to maintain a product that can be viable around the world in terms of cost, technology and support.”
There are a lot of uncertainties, and businesses across industries are being affected and reacting in different ways. Lafontaine says that larger companies are focused on ESG, or Environmental, Social, and Governance reporting and improvement. They are concerned with maintaining commitments to investors and staying transparent on key performance indicators or KPIs.
He says smaller to medium sized businesses are concerned about retaining their workforce and adopting technologies that can help them be more competitive and productive. Everyone is feeling the pressure.
“And companies of all sizes are really focusing on trying to figure out, ‘How do we become more resilient? How do we manage the supply chain? How do we make sure we have the right products at the right time? How do we make sure that we can manage power requirements in the regions where they operate?’,” Hugo says. “Many provinces – many regions – have limitations on power. When you want to expand your process, sometimes the power is not available. So, you have to figure out how to optimize your operations and do more with the same amount of power,” he adds.
The pressure is on
Lafontaine says there is a lot of pressure – and a certain amount of urgency – that companies are facing when it comes to adopting technologies that make their operations more efficient. One is from the government. “I would say in the last couple of months, I do not think there is a day where there are not multiple requests being made by the government, or to the government, with regards to figuring out how software and technology can be made available to more companies,” he says.
“Is it through policies and funding? Or programs? There are a bunch of programs coming out now that are aligned with helping technology adoption in different companies. And managing the workforce. The workforce and rescaling are very important.”
Another pressure comes from within the businesses themselves when they set ESG goals. Lafontaine says he sees this primarily in larger organizations, but all companies can gain efficiency by adopting technologies.
Digitalization, and optimizing data with tools like digital twins and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems can help alleviate some pressure. “SCADA and data are key in terms of being able to holistically monitor that operations. To be able to attain something, you need to measure it. And to be able to measure it, you need to generate information and have visibility first,” he says.
Lafontaine says that larger companies – especially those with many plants or different factories – have hundreds of thousands of data points. They can also have hundreds of different nuances for the different products they build, or the way they build them. There could be data points for energy metering, production output, temperature fluctuations, quality control. Essentially any measurable metric can produce data that can be leveraged to optimize these processes. “You need to measure it. Once you measure it, you create all this data – and then this data ends up being messy. It ends up being siloed. The challenges around data management are real,” he says.
Leveraging technology is making a real impact
Schneider knows that making the most of our energy and resources requires transparent data and digital tools to make operations as efficient as possible, and they are experts in technology and sustainability. In fact, they have been recognized year-over-year as one of the most sustainable companies in the world. “At a company like Schneider, we realized that first we need to make sure we have the measurement. We need to organize our data. We need to make it safe and viable. Then, we need to be able to make sense out of it. We need to take it and align it with our operations’ effectiveness,” he says.
Evidence exists that it is possible to leverage technologies like data, AI, and cloud solutions to achieve sustainability goals. Lafontaine points out a mining company that relies on huge generators to power its operations. They needed to expand, but they were not going to have enough power. Schneider helped them make the most of their energy and resources so they could. “We implemented digital twins on both the process and power sides, and we merged them together. We did the correlation between what is happening on the process side, and what is happening in terms of power generation and consumption, and with digital twinning, we modeled a different way of doing things,” says Lafontaine.
Lafontaine points out another example where technologies are driving industries into the future and Schneider is helping them make an impact. Utility companies, for example, need to figure out how to generate more electricity, and use the electricity they have more efficiently as energy demand increases across the country. “These utility companies have large infrastructure, and a long history of analog information that needs to be leveraged,” he says. “We work hand-in-hand with utilities in Canada, and are seeing an impact on the optimization of being able to develop new plans faster by being able to leverage a holistic approach to design.”
Adoption rate and AI
With each customer they work with, Schneider is helping Canadian industries make an impact on their operations, using technologies to drive sustainability. But he says Canada’s success in reaching our net zero targets on time depends on the rate of adoption, and how the country responds to global pressures, like tariffs, supply chain issues, and pandemics. Again, Lafontaine sees technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous operations helping here. He says there needs to be a better understanding of what types of AI are out there, and how it can be used to optimize operations.
“AI is a very vague term,” Lafontaine says. He says a lot of people want AI, but they do not know what type – and it keeps changing. “If you go back about 20 years, AI was more rule based. There was coding that said, ‘If this is happening, and that is happening, then this is the output.’ About 10 years ago, we started doing a lot more machine learning and deep learning, which required tons of data,” he explains. The need for quality data intensified as AI was increasingly relied upon to respond to prompts by analyzing data to produce reports. “And in the last two years, we started pushing the limits of generative AI even more.”
Lafontaine says that today, generative AI can be used to do more with the minimal of prompts. Someone can ask it to build a report or a drawing or code with simple commands. “Now, we are starting to see the evolution of what we call ‘Agentic AI,’ and that is synonymous with the word ‘autonomous.’ AI will take all the information it gathers and then start acting on your behalf. Hence the word, ‘agent.’ They are acting as an agent on your behalf,” he explains. “This is where the adoption – the question of, how fast are you going to adopt this – comes in. Is there a fear relating to this?”
The reality is that companies in industries across Canada are facing labour challenges. There is turnover, people are retiring, and knowledge is leaving. Lafontaine sees technologies like agentic AI being implemented to mitigate some of these challenges and help companies be resilient in the future. “Agentic AI is going to help guide more junior operators in some decisions. That will be beneficial. And it is going to help us increase and maintain some of the production,” he says.
“And autonomous can also be robotics. Currently, many workplaces face challenges in attracting employees to hazardous environments, or roles involving repetitive tasks. As a result, both small and large companies are increasingly deploying robots to address these needs. And I think these two trends are going to continue tracking positively. And I already see a positive outcome for the Canadian market,” Lafontaine says. And Schneider can help companies adopt these technologies because they have these solutions and partners that can support them.
How can Schneider help?
“From Schneider’s perspective, first, we are developing a rich ecosystem of partners that can be in many places, offering very niche expertise. That could be around the machines, the robots, or more around the AI support, software, or services. You name it. Second, and this is something that we have started being asked about a lot, is the consulting aspect,” Lafontaine says. Customers are asking for help with knowing where to start, and Schneider can help them. “Being able to take their hand and say, ‘Let’s start from zero.’ And talk about what outcomes they are looking for, understand where they are trying to go, and build a roadmap together that sets attainable goals over time.”
Lafontaine says it can feel overwhelming for some companies to adopt technologies they are not familiar with, to achieve outcomes they do not understand. But they do not need to do too much too fast. “A lot of these companies do not have the culture right now to adopt technology too fast. They do not have the people profiles. Or they have perhaps had bad experiences with technology,” he says. “There is the time factor that we can help them with, by building a plan over time. We have awesome products and software that can be leveraged and customized as per their needs.”
What does he recommend? “Any of our automation offers. So, our cobots, our automation PLCs, our partnership with AVEVEA from a SCADA standpoint; and all of our energy metering and energy optimization tools; all of our cloud solutions around analytics platforms; and then all of our sustainability enterprise level solutions and consulting services are helping both small and large companies around the world to optimally operate portfolios of buildings and so on to reach their ESG goals. These are just a few. There are many, many, many different offers we have, and together with our partners, we work with the customer to align on the right solutions for them.”
Conclusion
Lafontaine says that companies need to embrace technology. Schneider can help them do that by acting as a partner that can help them identify their needs – not just push technologies down on them – and figure out how they can build a plan for you.
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