Construction and real estate / Building materials
Saint-Gobain: AI agent analysis of literature and patents and generation of new ingredient hypotheses for cement additive research (Microsoft Discovery)
- Company
- Saint-Gobain
- Country
- France
- Adoption stage
- Pilot
- Source published
- In use from
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
According to an article Microsoft published on October 20, 2026, products for cement and concrete are one of the most important product groups for Saint-Gobain, a construction materials company. Cement production uses a lot of energy and accounts for around 7% of annual CO2 emissions globally, so the company's researchers are looking for chemical elements that could reduce those emissions and improve the strength of cement. Creating the knowledge base needed for this research would have taken the researchers a year.
Technology and data
Saint-Gobain was one of Microsoft's first clients to use Microsoft Discovery, an AI-powered agentic platform for scientists and engineers, in its private release in March 2026, and teams from both companies worked on fine-tuning the platform. Discovery lets scientists orchestrate AI agents to search literature, connect information, generate hypotheses, design experiments and run analyses. The researchers gathered 62,000 patents and 44,000 abstracts to build a knowledge base and searched domains outside the construction industry to form hypotheses about new ingredients for cement additives.
Results
Mojdeh Rastgoo-Lemaitre, a digital acceleration program manager, said that building the knowledge base, which would have taken the researchers a year, took a couple of hours with AI, and that the team came up with several hypotheses about new additive ingredients worth testing in about six weeks. The scientists found molecules they otherwise would not have considered and are now testing them for the behaviors and chemistry they are looking for.
Limits and open questions
The molecules are still being tested, and the performance of a new cement additive or its effect on carbon emissions has not been confirmed.
Sources
- A concrete vision: Saint-Gobain and Microsoft Discovery build for the futurenews.microsoft.com, Accessed
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.