Andre Marino, Senior Vice President of Industrial Automation for North America at Schneider Electric, has extensive experience in industrial automation, software, and digital transformation. He joined Schneider in 2010 after helping build SoftBrasil, an industrial automation and manufacturing software company.
Marino argues on the Manufacturing Matters podcast that AI needs useful industrial data, much of which is proprietary and unavailable online. Manufacturers should first build open, software-defined systems that organize their data before scaling AI. He also believes companies can gain significant improvements by retrofitting existing equipment instead of replacing everything.
His approach for smaller manufacturers is simple: identify the problem, digitize, automate, optimize, and repeat. The discussion also covers AI data centers’ energy demands, digital twins, the manufacturing skills gap, and why humanoid robots should be chosen based on the task rather than their human-like design.