Schneider Electric (SE) will acquire industrial data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) software company Cognite for US$3.1 billion to create a unified data model and bolster its Agentic AI capabilities across plant operations, asset management, and engineering. The deal will also strengthen SE’s AVEVA software business by expanding the CONNECT industrial intelligence platform, putting it squarely in line to compete head-to-head with a range of industrial incumbents including Honeywell Technologies, Rockwell Automation, and Siemens.
Cognite’s 800 employees will be integrated with AVEVA and reported as part of SE’s Industrial Automation business.
IMPACT
Cognite Adds Depth to SE's Breadth
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SE’s CONNECT platform spans applications horizontally across four domains: design, build, operate, and optimize.
Cognite provides a three-set solution stack oriented vertically: 1) an industrial data foundation to ingest and contextualize data from Information Technology (IT)/Operational Technology (OT)/Enterprise Technology (ET) sources to create a unified knowledge graph (Cognite Data Fusion); 2) a low-code industrial AI workbench that allows customers to deploy AI agents on top of their data (Atlas AI); and 3) an execution layer to build and deploy production-ready AI-native workflows (Cognite Flows).
SE has spent years enriching its data insights position through the acquisitions of AVEVA (completed in 2023, US$10 billion) and OSIsoft (2021, US$5 billion). Cognite is the next logical step to these ends, with the most significant emphasis being on data contextualization throughout the four-domain lifecycle that is SE’s focus. Data contextualization capabilities are profound not just for customers to derive advanced insights and capitalize on AI, but to support SE’s strategic prerogative to provide an open ecosystem that promotes digital transformation in brownfield environments.
RECOMMENDATIONS
Customers Benefit, Competitors Beware
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The benefit of an SE + Cognite tie-up to AVEVA’s 23,000 customers is to bring greater analytics depth and AI authority, plus expand the potential for SE to better support customers in life sciences and other industries beyond pure Process verticals. Cognite’s cloud-native Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) architecture also aligns with overall portfolio modernization efforts that will support customer agility and faster time-to-value for agentic solutions in the long run. Cognite customers benefit from access to SE’s extensive support network geared toward successful implementations, in addition to the broader AVEVA/SE product suite.
For competitors, the Cognite acquisition is a direct attack on existing insights offerings, including several recent market developments.
First is Siemens, which acquired Altair for US$10.6 billion in 2024 (see ABI Insight “Siemens Acquires Altair Engineering for US$10.6 Billion to Advance Simulation, AI, and Digital Twin Services, and to Stand Above the Competition”), and last month announced the launch of Intelligence Center X (see ABI Insight “Siemens and HighByte Partnership Bolsters Intelligence Center X Proposition for Agentic AI”). Intelligence Center X is the more mature, market-ready incarnation of what SE looks to achieve with Cognite, and both developments could have a longer-term impact on how the companies jockey for position in the operations segment around real-time insights, simulation, and AI.
Second is Honeywell Technologies, which recently established itself as a dedicated entity focused on industrial automation, process technologies, and building automation (see ABI Insight “Honeywell Technologies Hones Automation Focus Following Split of Honeywell”). Honeywell has been early and assertive in supporting customers with agentic solutions in Forge, the parent brand for connected services (Digital Prime) and autonomous operations (Experion Cognition), and it has a keen eye on the operate and maintain part of the production lifecycle, like SE.
Rockwell Automation is another notable mention, but for slightly different reasons. The company has a large and sticky installed base of customers, especially in the United States, and is buoyed by a range of digital analytics solutions across FactoryTalk Analytics, Plex Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and DataReady. It also made an aggressive move into Physical AI with its ~US$600 million acquisition of Clearpath Robotics in 2023. However, the company lags behind in certain areas where SE competes, such as Software-Defined Automation (SDA) (see ABI Research’s AI in Software-Defined Automation (SDA) report (AN-6583)), where it has less than 1/3 the market share of SE and Siemens. Adding Cognite to the SE equation could tip the scale for Rockwell Automation in the long run, particularly as the open versus closed ecosystem war continues to take shape.
