Statement: Ewout van Jarwaarde, CEO, Brenntag Essentials

The chemical industry is facing one of the most challenging periods, which require a willingness to embrace change and also invest in fundamentally improving our business. At Brenntag, our mission is to become the easiest to do business with—for our customers, our suppliers, and our employees, in our industry and beyond. We started several years ago to invest in strengthening our business foundations, our sustainability agenda and our digital, data and technology capabilities.  

We are committed to investing in digital, data and technology projects that seamlessly connect our processes with our supply partners and customers. A perfect example of our data-driven approach, leveraging our insights, is our awarded customer Growth Engine. This AI-driven tool provides our sales teams worldwide with recommendations to be there, right when our customer needs us. It supports our product managers in their procurement decisions by using predictive intelligence to forecast demand. We use our various purchasing and sales data and enrich it with external information to predict how much of each product we should buy to optimize inventory.

We have a dedicated team working on many AI use cases, some of which are already in place. For example, we leverage AI in our customer service, our sales and our supply chain and sourcing processes. We are for example the first in Germany to implement their autonomous AI agents in our Salesforce platform to simplify tasks in services, sales, marketing, and commerce.

Through our investments, we strive to become a stronger data- and technology-driven company, leading our industry in terms of digitalization and data utilization.