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
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