2026 EPC Show

The United States is entering the largest energy infrastructure investment cycle in a generation. As AI data centers, manufacturing reshoring, and electrification drive unprecedented demand, the industry faces a defining question: is the way we design, deliver, and operate energy infrastructure actually built for what the market now demands — or are we simply building a more expensive version of what we have always built?

In this opening main-stage fireside, Schneider Electric’s André Marino sits down with Forbes senior energy contributor Gaurav Sharma — joined by validating voices from Capgemini and Occidental’s 1PointFive — to confront how the industry must evolve. The conversation moves past the theory of digital transformation and into the real decisions that determine whether the next wave of LNG, power, and industrial projects deliver on their promise.

Topics include:

• The $9.1 trillion question. Why the U.S. energy buildout is constrained less by capital or steel than by the delivery and operating model itself — and what must change while the investment window is open.
• Resilience by design, not by retrofit. What changes when electrification, automation, and digital intelligence are co-designed from the front end of a project — and what the industry pays when they are bolted on at the end.
• Speed to power and reliability as one architecture. Why time-to-power and long-term operating reliability are not competing priorities — and how the same integrated approach delivers both.
• Closing the gap between ambition and execution. Where digital and AI adoption genuinely move the needle on live projects — and why the barrier is so often organizational and structural rather than technical.