Interview with Philippe Rambach

Philippe Rambach, Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer of Schneider Electric, provides insights on how to drive AI innovation at scale in organizations. With over 20 years of experience in strategy, innovation, and business responsibility across several industries, he shares his knowledge on how to prepare for an uncertain future.

What do you see as the most significant opportunities and challenges in harnessing the power of Gen AI?

GenAI brings a lot of opportunities in democratizing AI by providing immediately easy-to-use solutions to people without the need for specific development, as seen with ChatGPT, Claude.ai, and similar tools. It also opens new possibilities in terms of man-machine interaction and access to knowledge that can be used by companies in their products. However, a careful assessment before using GenAI is always key: What business problem or opportunity do we want to address? Is GenAI the most efficient solution in terms of performance, cost, and carbon footprint? These are exactly the questions that need to be asked.

How can organizations effectively incorporate their AI strategies with the overarching strategy to ensure long-term success and well implementation?

Make sure to always start from the business need, the business opportunity, the business case. Never start from technology. Also, ensure that you have a continuous process that guarantees complete alignment from your strategy to the use case execution. AI is here to support the strategy; it is not an ambition in itself.

What would be one advice you would give leaders in terms of GenAI who want to proactively prepare their organization for an exciting yet uncertain future?

Train your people and demystify AI. Everyone in your company needs to have some understanding of what AI is, what it can do, what it cannot do, the possibilities, and the limitations. This will help remove unnecessary fears and unfeasible dreams.