Publicis Sapient & Schneider test AI footprint tool

Publicis Sapient and Schneider Electric have begun working together to assess the environmental impact of digital and AI-enabled services using the e-footprint modelling tool, including Schneider Electric's energy management systems.

The collaboration focuses on an open-source tool developed by Publicis Sapient and hosted within the Boavizta ecosystem. It is designed to model the environmental impact of an entire digital service rather than only individual products or devices.

This allows engineering teams to compare different technology designs across field devices, end-user equipment, networks, cloud infrastructure and data centres before systems are built or changed. The approach can also be applied to AI-enabled systems, including workloads running in the cloud, at the edge or across hybrid setups.

In one example, Schneider Electric compared designs for energy management systems that use industrial computers to manage electrical power. According to the companies, one approach cut carbon emissions by more than 40% compared with the original design.

The case reflects a broader shift in industrial technology design, with software-controlled general-purpose hardware replacing more specialised equipment in some settings. That can create trade-offs in energy use, infrastructure demand and system design, making it harder for companies to judge the environmental impact of architecture decisions.

Design choices

Publicis Sapient said the tool is intended to help organisations measure end-to-end environmental impact, compare alternative designs before implementation and identify the biggest sources of emissions across devices, networks and cloud systems. It is also meant to show the assumptions behind its calculations so engineering teams can understand how results were produced.

For large companies under growing scrutiny over emissions reporting, that level of detail may become more important as digital infrastructure accounts for a larger share of operational footprints. Systems linked to AI, edge computing and cloud services can spread resource use across multiple technology layers, making measurement difficult when businesses rely on separate tools or product-level assessments.

"Measuring carbon impact is only valuable if it leads to better decisions. With e-footprint, we are giving organisations a practical way to understand how their technology choices, from how far they virtualise edge systems to where they run AI workloads, are impacting and will impact their environmental footprint, and to use those insights to design more sustainable digital services," said Lise Malbernard, Country Managing Director, France, at Publicis Sapient.

"By making this capability open source, we support organisations to make more informed technology decisions and accelerate the shift toward more sustainable digital services," said Malbernard.

Publicis Sapient also linked the Schneider Electric work to growing reporting expectations in Australia, noting that many businesses still lack tools to connect emissions data to specific system design decisions.

"With mandatory climate disclosure, Australian boards can no longer treat their technology footprint as someone else's problem. Most organisations still lack the tools to break that footprint down to the level of an actual system design choice. e-footprint does exactly that, and it's openly available to any enterprise. It gave Schneider Electric the evidence to compare different technology designs and cut emissions by more than 40% in one case, exactly the kind of evidence that will help Australian companies build a credible picture of their footprint as reporting expectations rise," said Angela Robinson, Country Managing Director, Australia, at Publicis Sapient.

System view

Schneider Electric said the work helped it understand the footprint of digital services spanning physical equipment, buildings, networks and remote computing infrastructure. The analysis identified which parts of those systems contributed most to environmental impact and showed how different architecture choices changed the result.

The project also highlighted a challenge for companies trying to reduce emissions from digital operations: the biggest gains may come from redesigning the service as a whole rather than improving one component in isolation. In complex industrial systems, changes in one layer can shift demand to another, obscuring the overall outcome without whole-system modelling.

"Until now, we had very few benchmarks for assessing the environmental impact of our digital architectures. As software-defined architectures continue to evolve, the complexity of technology design decisions has increased significantly, and understanding their environmental implications has become more challenging. e-footprint gives us an evidence-based understanding of those impacts, enabling us to compare design options at the level of complexity we need, and make more informed decisions as we continue advancing our digital eco-design strategy," said Roland Bohrer, System Architect at Schneider Electric.