Now as all these global companies converge in Shanghai to show their technologies. Let's hear from Silicon Valley correspondent Mark Niu. He reports on a startup at the event that uses AI to cut energy consumption.

At the Blue Sky innovation center, employees at the international company Jabil put components onto circuit boards. With more than 250-thousand employees working on products in more than 100 locations around the globe, Jabil is looking for new ways to get a handle on its energy consumption.

DAVID WAHL General Manager, Jabil Digital Office "We consume around 200 million dollars of electricity each year across our global footprint. So, if you start doing the math around that, any savings is a substantial material contribution to our bottom line and profit margin. We know how much a building is consuming from the electrical meter on the outside. Once we go on the inside, we really don't know what parts of the building or where we are consuming it."

That's why Jabil is experimenting with a system called Verdigris, which can measure exactly how much energy each piece of equipment consumes.

MARK NIU Mountain View, California "Verdigris' headquarters is right here in Silicon Valley. And it's located in a very special place – the NASA Research Center -- a place where NASA collaborates with numerous startups to build innovation of the future."

Inside the Verdigris lab, team members are testing the internal parts of their internet of things smart meter. Chief technology officer Jon Chu shows me how the chain of sensors and the smart meter are installed in a typical electrical panel.

JON CHU CTO, Verdigris "You can see no conduit needs to be routed. Typical electrical work all requires its own separate boxes. But this just attaches natively to a panel and you don't have to worry about wire management as much."

CEO Mark Chung says traditional measuring tools require people to come in and look at what each sensor is connected to. Their system instead uses artificial intelligence.

MARK CHUNG CEO, Verdigris "If you want to do this across a billion square feet of portfolio, that you have no idea where everything is connected to, you need a much more automated way of collecting all this information. So, the first layer of AI for us is actually a classification engine almost like an image recognition where we listen to the high-frequency electrical information. We can tell you what kind of equipment is inside the building."

Verdigris' AI is also able to forecast what will happen down the road in terms of energy usage and cost. It can even send out intelligent alerts.

MARK CHUNG CEO, Verdigris "If something deviates from that forecasted model, it won't know if it's a safety issue or if it's just wasting electricity, but it will tell you this thing is happening on this piece of equipment and this is what it looks like. From there, oftentimes you might be able to find things that could be a security threat."

Chung believes their smart IOT meter can lead to energy savings of between 20-50%, helping companies stay leaner while keeping the environment cleaner. Mark Niu, CGTN, Mountain View, California.