CDO Magazine Podcast Series · CDO Magazine

PODCAST | What Does it Take to Make AI Work Inside a Global Enterprise like Henkel?

April 7, 2026·19 min·1 clip

Henkel pairs retiring experts with younger employees in generation tandems lasting up to two years.

1. The CDO Magazine Podcast Series episode examines what it takes to make AI work inside global enterprise Henkel. 2. Katrin Boten, Henkel's head of data and AI, explains the company's transformation priorities, while Julian Schirmer hosts as an academic director at ATC Paris for AI transformation and co-founder of OEO. 3. The interview asks why AI matters to Henkel and how data and AI can support sustainable growth across a complex global business. 4. Boten says Henkel has 150 years of heritage and more than 47,000 employees worldwide. 5. Henkel operates two major businesses: adhesive technologies and consumer brands in beauty, hair, laundry, and home care. 6. Boten says Henkel's adhesives are used in products including phones, laptops, shoes, furniture, aircraft, and car batteries. 7. Henkel seeks sustainable growth across B2B and B2C customers rather than serving one customer segment. 8. Boten connects growth to R&D, innovation, customer understanding, faster market access, and a globally sourced supply chain. 9. Henkel treats sustainability as both a customer demand and a strategic pillar called the purposeful growth agenda. 10. Sustainability work covers raw-material purchasing, production-site water use, greenhouse-gas emissions, data analytics, reporting, and related obligations. 11. Boten says Henkel begins AI initiatives with business problems and then develops digital solutions, applications, or use cases. 12. In R&D, Henkel wants AI to identify better recipes and experiments instead of relying on scattered trial and error. 13. In customer-facing work, recommendation engines can help users identify adhesives for specific materials and applications. 14. Henkel's finance assistant combines dashboard information, SQL queries, and internal definitions to answer regional finance questions. 15. The finance assistant is integrated into Teams and is available across regions, languages, and time zones. 16. Boten says preserving expertise requires digitalizing information stored in people's heads, notebooks, drawers, paper records, and R&D recipes. 17. Henkel's generation tandems pair employees approaching retirement with newer employees for periods ranging from one to two years. 18. The interview format is a structured executive conversation that moves from Henkel's business context to AI use cases, knowledge transfer, and future threats. 19. Enterprise AI leaders managing global operations and legacy knowledge. 20. Listeners seeking hands-on machine-learning implementation tutorials.

As heard by us

Enterprise AI matters here only when it works across scale, regional complexity, and mixed business models.

Henkel's AI story is treated as an operating problem, not a showcase. Katrin Boten walks through a global company with deep history and shows how AI reaches supply chain work, finance, procurement, and customer recommendation tools.

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Why you'd press play

You want to hear how Henkel fits AI into a global company.

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