Pharma
Industrial Technology

70% adoption in the first few months.
€1.2M in productivity gains a year.

A RAG-based chatbot trained on equipment manuals and historical tickets answers technical support queries instantly, built inside a governance framework that turned a hesitant board into active sponsors.

70% adoption across
3,500 employees
80% positive rating
on AI responses
€1.2M annual productivity
gain
40% faster ticket
resolution

Client

An Italian, family-owned multinational conglomerate with more than 5,500 employees spanning healthcare, consumer goods and industrial technology.

Goal

Roll out enterprise Generative AI across the group to close the AI knowledge gap at leadership level and prove measurable productivity gains — targeting 50% adoption within two months, 75% positive response ratings, and at least one high-value use case within six months.

Staff were already using AI. Leadership hadn’t said yes.

The DPO and CEO were wary of enterprise AI on privacy and information security grounds, even though 30% of employees were already using ChatGPT from work and 10% were using it regularly with no governance in place at all.

Meanwhile technical support for industrial machinery still ran on manual searches through documentation. External vendors charged per ticket, and resolution depended entirely on how well someone phrased their search — slow, inconsistent, and expensive at scale.

Three constraints were non-negotiable:

  • 30% of staff already using ChatGPT at work, ungoverned
  • CEO and DPO blocking enterprise rollout over data risk
  • Support tickets billed per query, resolved by manual document search

Win the board first. Then fix the support desk.

A workshop for CEOs and senior leaders brought in external experts to lay out GenAI’s risks and its realistic upside. Showing leadership hard data on the uncontrolled ChatGPT use already happening inside the business reframed the conversation from whether to adopt AI to how to adopt it responsibly — and secured backing for a controlled rollout with clear guardrails.

The question stopped being whether to adopt AI and became how to adopt it responsibly.

On the technical side, a RAG-based chatbot called Techmate was built and fed with equipment manuals and historical ticket data. A one-month pilot with technical support teams cut ticket resolution time by 40%. That result was enough to justify building a production-grade version and integrating it directly into the support workflow.

Adoption was backed by more than 40 hours of training and an intranet learning module, rolled out to build AI literacy across every company in the group.

Adoption beat the target. So did the returns.

70% adoption 3,500 employees onboarded within the first few months — well above the 50-60% typical for enterprise AI tools.
80% positive Feedback on AI responses, ahead of the 75% target set at the outset.
€1.2M a year Productivity gain from around 500 active users saving 3-4 hours a week each, equivalent to 20 full-time staff.
€100k saved, €2M opened up Techmate cut external technical support fees by roughly €100k a year and created a new subscription service worth up to €2M annually.

The programme delivered what it set out to: a governed AI rollout that leadership actively sponsors, a DPO-approved framework balancing productivity with privacy, and a high-value use case in industrial support that paid for itself several times over. It also left the group with a repeatable model for rolling AI out responsibly to every other business unit.

* Case studies reflect work undertaken by our Heads of AI either during their tenure with Head of AI or in prior roles before they were part of the Head of AI network; they are provided for illustrative purposes only and are based on conversations with our Heads of AI.

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*Case studies reflect work undertaken by our Heads of AI either during their tenure with Head of AI or in prior roles before they were part of the Head of AI network; they are provided for illustrative purposes only and are based on conversations with our Heads of AI.