Veolia to harness GenAI for water, energy management
Image: Veolia
Veolia is partnering with French startup Mistral AI to harness generative AI (GenAI) for water management, waste recycling and local energy production at its industrial sites.
The partnership is aimed to integrate Veolia’s data and knowledge base with Mistral’s large language model to have a conversation with a plant – a world first, as the companies describe it in a statement.
With this employees and stakeholders should be enabled to co-pilot water, waste and energy plants through interactive discussions, the statement continues, adding that it represents a further step towards the realisation of Industry 5.0 and the emergence of augmented employees, where technology directly supports human expertise.
“This partnership with Mistral AI marks a decisive step in our commitment to accelerate innovation and better respond to all the challenges caused by global warming,” says Estelle Brachlianoff, CEO of Veolia.
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“Veolia plans to increase the efficiencies brought about by digital and AI in particular to optimise its customers’ water and energy consumption, waste sorting and recycling, and strengthen predictive maintenance. By integrating GenAI into the management of our sites and industrial processes, we are strengthening our ability to innovate and optimise our know-how in order to decarbonise, depollute and regenerate resources.”
Veolia counts more than 3,800 drinking water production plants under management and more than 3,200 wastewater treatment plants, 865 waste treatment facilities and 48,745 thermal facilities worldwide that could benefit.
Expected advantages include simplified automated access to knowledge bases and critical data by technicians and operators and greater transparency with stakeholders able to interact with systems in natural language, enabling real-time recommendations and proactive problem-solving.
With this the operational efficiency of these plants should be improved with new standards of performance and sustainability.
Arthur Mensch, CEO de Mistral AI, says the partnership highlights how GenAI can help make plants smarter.
“Over the past few years, plants have increasingly integrated digital sensors and tools. Our models enable these rich data streams to provide more valuable insights for operators and Veolia’s customers.”
Veolia Secure GPT
The initiative complements the recent launch of Veolia Secure GPT, a GenAI tool developed in-house for the group’s 218,000 employees to optimise daily tasks while ensuring the confidentiality of the company’s data.
Developed in just two months by Veolia’s IT teams, this GenAI tool offers writing, translation, search and information synthesis functionalities.
Most recently Veolia has entered an MoU with Abu Dhabi energy company ADNOC to collaborate in the field of water management, including analysis of water cycles, development of water management solutions and studying and proposing advanced monitoring systems.
Particular emphasis is due to be placed on reducing water consumption.
