London Tech Week 2025: Schneider Electric's Chief AI Officer

Billed as the country’s biggest tech event, London Tech Week took place from 9 to 11 June 2025 at London Olympia and drew more than 45,000 participants.

The event launched with a keynote speech by Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who was soon joined on stage by Nvidia Co-Founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

Philippe Rambach, Chief AI Officer at Schneider Electric, joined Energy Digital's sister title Technology Magazine at London Tech Week 2025 to discuss the power of AI across areas such as energy efficiency and sustainability.

What is exciting you in the AI space at the moment, especially as CAIO of Schneider Electric?

As always, AI is moving so fast.

At Schneider, we’re trying to help customers be sustainable, helping them decarbonise and impact the environment less. 

AI is such a tremendous tool for that, helping them use less energy and use more green energy. 

Now, with Gen AI, doing all of that is even easier and faster.

What are you hoping people take away from your talks at London Tech Week?

Although we’re at London Tech Week, I will recommend to never think tech first, but business first — not doing AI just because AI is fun. Not using an LLM because a new LLM has been released. 

It’s about asking what you want to achieve, what you want to provide in terms of value to customers and employees and then finding the right touch.

My second message is that now’s the time to move into the energy transition, time to move into electricity — and AI will make that more efficient and easier.

What AI trends do you think people should really listen to? 

Today, if you look at the energy landscape and the fast transition happening from concentrated production to decentralised production and decentralised demand, we need to leverage AI to optimise this complex organisation and ecosystem of energy. 

People need to think of new ways of doing things, leveraging AI to use less energy and use more green energy as well as optimise their operations. 

This is the time now, the technology is ready. 

Think scale, think production, think deployment, think impact. 

What message do you have when it comes to implementing AI? 

Spend time understanding AI and going beyond the smokes and mirrors and fascination.

Let’s face it, it’s very, very impressive what’s happening now in the world of AI, but take enough time to understand what it does and what it does not do. It does probably much more than what you think it does. 

Meet startups, meet large companies like us, meet technically-savvy people so that you can bring your own understanding, merge that with your knowledge of your business, your customers, your company, and see what fits your needs. 

What do you hope to take away from London Tech Week yourself?

I hope that what I am recommending people do, I will do myself. 

I’m looking forward to going around, understanding what’s happening and seeing what is moving, what is trending and what is new — identifying a few startups we could work with and seeing the core things that are moving. 

Here, there’s a unique opportunity to see, in a few hours, a lot of what is happening in the world of AI. It’s great to encourage people to look at AI for energy, energy optimisation and help them make their operations more sustainable.