A concrete vision: Saint-Gobain and Microsoft Discovery build for the future

PARIS — Saint-Gobain’s business is construction materials. It got its start in 1665, when King Louis XIV charged the company with making the mirrors for his lavish new palace in Versailles. And he needed a lot of mirrors.

The idea was to break the monopoly that glass-making power Venice had at the time, cutting costs and improving efficiency.

These days, Saint-Gobain has 161,000 employees in 81 countries making construction materials — glass is still important, but there’s also gypsum for plaster board, insulation and concrete admixtures and cement additives.

These last elements — products for cement and concrete — represent one of the company’s most important product groups, and like glass in 1665, one of the most challenging. Cement production uses a lot of energy, and accounts for around 7% of annual CO2 emissions globally. Saint-Gobain is looking for chemical elements that could reduce those carbon emissions and improve the strength of cement.

“It would have taken our researchers a year to create the knowledge base. Using AI, it took us a couple of hours.”

Mojdeh Rastgoo-Lemaitre, a digital acceleration program manager at Saint-Gobain, said that using Microsoft Discovery saved months of time for researchers working to improve an additive for cement. Photo by Chris Welsch for Microsoft.

So, when the company’s researchers collaborated with engineers from Microsoft earlier this year in using Microsoft Discovery, a new AI-powered agentic platform for scientists and engineers, to find solutions, the results stunned them.

“We actually gathered 62,000 patents and 44,000 abstracts,” says Mojdeh Rastgoo-Lemaitre, a digital acceleration program manager overseeing the project to find lower-carbon, less expensive options. “Without using this technology, it would have taken our researchers a year to create the knowledge base. Using AI, it took us a couple of hours.”