Knowde

"We're trying to create tools to meet our customers where they are. Some customers prefer our eCommerce platform. Some prefer to pick up the phone. Others email us. How do we give them an amplified experience across each of those channels?" During last month's Knowde Executive Summit customer panel, Formerra's VP of Digital Transformation, Anthony Borovica, shared how he sees technology as an opportunity to create a better customer experience without leaving behind customers who prefer more traditional ways of doing business. Success is delivering the same high level of service, availability and consistency across every touchpoint. This omnichannel approach gives customers the flexibility to engage how they prefer while ensuring every interaction is seamless. How are you meeting your customers where they are?

The clearest line from our Executive Summit at Pebble Beach didn't come from us. It came from Accenture: "Trapped, incomplete data keeps AI in the pilot. Clean, structured data gets it into the P&L." That's the difference between the ~$100M in profit leading chemical companies are unlocking and the pilots that never scale. Not the model. Not the use case. The foundation underneath both. You can't scale what doesn't have a foundation. Build the platform first. Grateful to Chaitanya Geddam and the Accenture team for being in the room and saying it plainly.

The 2026 Gartner MDM Magic Quadrant is out. Not one platform on it was built for chemical data. Generic MDM assumes a product is a product. In chemicals it isn't. A single grade carries technical properties, regulatory claims, SDS and TDS references, application data. And a different name in every ERP instance. Horizontal platforms give you a shell product. They don't hand you the taxonomy, the attribute libraries or the data models the industry actually runs on. Defining attributes, building the data dictionary, finding and mapping the data ends up on the desks of your most expensive people and initiatives stall or die. Clean, structured product data is the foundation every AI initiative, every digital channel and every sales team is waiting on. Buy the shell and you still have to build the foundation. Start from a data model built for industrial data, and the rest finally works. We are the node that connects knowledge.

We talk a lot about dirty data, but what does that mean? Ali Amin-Javaheri, co-founder and CEO of Knowde, sat down with Accenture's Dan Haas to explain exactly what we mean when we say the industry's data problem is holding your business back from AI-readiness. Give us a follow for more insights on how to fix it from Ali and Dan.

Your reps aren't underperforming. They just can't find the technical info for the other 780 of your products. Your most tenured sales rep knows the top 20 SKUs cold. But even they can’t see the other 780 products in your catalog. 780 products buried in spec sheets, disconnected databases and institutional knowledge. Reps sell what they know. Cross-sell and upsell opportunities never materialize, not because they’re lacking the skill, but because of bad data. The result = flat revenue per account, quarter over quarter. Fix the data, fix the revenue - we're the node that connects knowledge. https://lnkd.in/g8z2XyQ4

Less time on admin. More time selling. "Digital tools really help us organize and go to market in a fashion that our sellers have less administrative burden." That's how Mark Spirnak, VP, Principal Management Americas at Omya Specialty Materials, described it to a room of industrial leaders at Knowde's 4th Annual Executive Summit. One of those tools: Omya Specialty Materials’ digital product finder, powered by Knowde. The catalog is home to 5,000+ products where customers can learn about their catalog, request quotes and samples instantly, and reach out to their team — all from the same screen. Check it out here: https://products.omya.com/

Some IFT First food for thought ( 🥕 😉 ) from your friends at Knowde: 🤖 AI isn't just a buzzword anymore, it's a business tool. We're hearing how the leading food science companies are leveraging AI to accelerate formulations, improve product dev, make technical information easier to access and more. Shoutout to the Ingredion Incorporated team showcasing their new conversational AI assistant this week! 🚄 Speed-to-market is the new competitive advantage. R&D teams are looking to reduce formulation cycles, source ingredients faster and bring products to market with higher confidence 🍄🟫 Functional ingredients continue to dominate. Gut health, cognitive wellness, protein innovation and next-gen nutrition are once again the most active areas of product innovation. 🫧 Clean label expectations are evolving. It's not enough for ingredients to be "clean" anymore. Manufacturers are looking for ingredients that deliver performance, scalability and cost effectiveness. 💬 We want to hear from you! Let us know what you're hearing on the floor at Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) First by commenting below. --- Hilan Kaplan Charlie Beall Nicole Donahue (Famularo) #IFT #IFTFirst #DigitalTransformation #FoodScience

Ask Ingredion, a new conversational AI assistant for R&D and technical teams, marks a new standard for customer experience in the industry. The purpose-built tool accelerates a customers’ time from problem to ingredient decision. Customers describe any formulation challenge - a texture target, a clean label requirement, a cost constraint - and get back ingredient options they can instantly compare and actually test. It works because the technical data sheets, product specs and formulation knowledge behind it are clean, organized and structured. Together with Ingredion Incorporated, we built the data foundation and the AI platform to meet the unique needs of their customers. “An AI assistant is only as good as the data underneath it,” said Ali Amin-Javaheri, co-founder and CEO of Knowde. “Ingredion has decades of formulation and application expertise. Our job was to make that expertise usable in a conversation, not to replace it.” “There is never a shortage of information,” said Chris Regan, head of the Digital Marketing Center of Excellence at Ingredion, in an article by Food Ingredients First. “The challenge is understanding which sets of information to pull from, which factors weigh more heavily on these decisions, and how to get to a place where they can test something.” — Check out Ask Ingredion this week at Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) FIRST in Chicago. It's a preview of what every industrial company's AI initiatives need: a clean data foundation and thoughtful use of AI technology. Special shoutout to some of our champions at Ingredion who helped make this launch possible: Chris Regan, Nachi Adaikalavan, Larry Fernandes, Jay Krish. https://lnkd.in/gtcBD5Mn

"Within the chemical industry, AI adoption has begun but remains uneven and materially slower than in many downstream industries. This creates a growing capability gap at precisely the moment when speed and precision matter most." --- Accenture's recent report, 'The reinvention imperative in the chemical industry', posits that, for the chemical industry, "AI is the critical enabling technology of this next reinvention wave." So what's holding the industry back from adopting AI solutions that can redefine the way manufacturers and distributors do business? Or rather, AI as an opportunity for operations to refocus on their fundamental strengths: innovation, production and selling. The core problem is the industry's dirty data. Years and years of unstructured R&D notes, disorganized/duplicate documents, multiple/disparate ERP systems, out-of-date CRMs. Get this data fixed now, so you can start to scale AI tomorrow. Accenture puts it best: "Companies that combine foresight with speed will be best positioned to capture it. AI-based reinvention is no longer optional; it is the defining growth challenge of this decade for the chemical industry." AI-ready, clean, structured data is your foresight. https://lnkd.in/eYXNpqKP

Ask Ingredion removes the bottlenecks from the R&D process, enabling faster problem solving and ultimately, accelerated innovation. And it works because the data underneath it does. Collaborating with a team like Ingredion Incorporated, who understands the importance of the data foundation for AI solutions, shows there is a shift happening in the industry — get your data AI-ready or be left behind. Be sure to stop by Ingredion Incorporated at Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) First next week to see it for yourself. Special shoutout to the Knowde MVPs who helped Ingredion get this into the hands of R&D and technical teams around the globe: Nicole Donahue (Famularo), Stephen Taylor, Sean Fahey and our entire engineering team.