As a business-to-business company, Xylem may not be a household name for many consumers. Still, its mission to help customers solve the world’s toughest water challenges has profoundly impacted millions worldwide.
The global water technology company also operates at the crossroads of many of the Kogod School of Business’ top interests and priorities, Kogod dean David Marchick said as he welcomed Xylem’s top executive to campus on February 13.
“Xylem is actually a company that is at the perfect intersection of everything we’re trying to do at Kogod because they’re one of the most innovative, dynamic companies at the nexus of sustainability, AI, and analytics,” Marchick said.
His remarks kicked off the first fireside chat of 2024 held as part of the Gamechangers in Sustainability speaker series, which explores how the world’s most innovative leaders work to create a more sustainable world.
Over the course of an hour-long discussion, Xylem CEO Matthew Pine explained how he, at the helm of this multi-billion dollar, DC-based conglomerate, does just that.
Launched in 2011, Xylem has built something of an empire around water, leveraging acquisitions to gain a foothold in seemingly every facet of cleaning, pumping, treating, analyzing, and delivering the world’s most precious resource.
Its client portfolio ranges from private companies to utilities and governments worldwide, and its responsibilities are equally vast in scope, from building large-scale water systems to honing in on problems and inefficiencies with commercial processes.
“Across the water chain, it gives us a competitive advantage over our competition because we can go to our customer and think holistically about services we provide, instead of just a specific product in the process,” Pine told the audience.
That versatility naturally means the company’s work takes many forms.
Xylem has, for instance, worked with technology companies to figure out how to recycle and reuse the average 1,500 gallons of water it takes to make a computer chip, helping them achieve net-neutral water usage reducing their costs and environmental footprint in the process.
Its analytical prowess helps it diagnose and predict leaks, whether working on a single building or a regional water system, reducing water waste in areas where, Pine noted, leakage rates can top 60 percent.
Increasingly, the company is supplementing its work with artificial intelligence.
A key example: the company does acoustical analysis to pinpoint leaks within a water system. The analysis process can take six weeks. Today, AI can analyze the data in as little as one week, allowing Xylem to deploy its human workers to other tasks.
“We’re using AI to remove bottlenecks and get the data to our customers more quickly,” Pine explained.
Xylem has also deployed digital twin technology, which works by essentially creating a virtual model of a physical object, Pine explained. This technology, combined with other processes used by Xylem, helped the company, through a joint venture partner, save four million cubic meters of water in the city of Valencia, Spain.