More than 25,000 AkzoNobel employees are leveraging Moveworks
Painting a future of possibilities using agentic AI to drive operational excellence and productivity across the enterprise
Founded in 1792, headquartered in Amsterdam, and with a presence in 150 countries, AkzoNobel has been supplying the innovative paints and coatings to color people’s lives — for more than 230 years. Their portfolio of brands include Dulux, International, Sikkens, and Interpon.
Challenge
Employees struggled to find the right information across disparate systems in their language of choice
Result
>25K employees (which translates to 72% of the total workforce) are now actively leveraging AI to find information across business applications, thereby improving productivity.
The Problem
Enterprise search along with secure access to ChatGPT
In 2023, AkzoNobel embarked on its IT transformation journey with a vision to enhance product experience, improve business processes, and elevate how people fundamentally work. The CIO had a clear mandate: Bring AI into the organization to drive employee productivity and operational efficiency.
With close to 35,000 employees spread across 150 countries, the company wanted to give its workforce one central place — a single screen and a single window — to access information and automate basic tasks.
“We wanted to limit it to Microsoft Teams to give the end user both control and flexibility,” explains Malabika Mukherjee, Architect for Automation & Touchless at AkzoNobel. “We did not want to overpower or overwhelm people with a bot popping up on every platform.”
In addition to enterprise search, one of the primary use cases of the paint manufacturer was to provide its employees with safe and secure access to ChatGPT — the ground-breaking technology that ushered in a new era of conversational AI. The team required correct security compliance and an enterprise license to eliminate the risk of exposure of sensitive information and make sure the data was not used to train the model itself.
Thus, began the search for the right tool. With every tool and platform claiming to deliver on the promise of AI, the selection process involved a rigorous evaluation.
The Solution
Xara: Moveworks Copilot for all employees
AkzoNobel assessed at least four other vendors for an AI-powered solution before selecting Moveworks for its agentic AI capabilities, integrations, scalability, and company vision.
In evaluating Moveworks, AkzoNobel also reached out to an existing Moveworks customer, Broadcom — a company of similar size facing similar challenges of search and automation. The conversation with Broadcom, particularly the FTE data point alone almost finalized the deal. “When most solutions required a dedicated team of 25-40 full time members, Broadcom was able to pull it off with just half FTE,” shares Malabika.
Soon after, the team at AkzoNobel got a clearance from security, compliance, and the various works councils from different countries in Europe which in itself “speaks volumes” given its stringent rules and regulations.
Besides, rolling out a copilot and integrating it with the many business applications is almost always time consuming and challenging. But with Moveworks, it was a breeze. “We gave Moveworks access on a Thursday evening and on Tuesday morning, we were testing ServiceNow. That blew me away; I have not seen anything like that happen before,” Malabika recalls. “The native skills, security compliance, and the solid encryption process of the Moveworks Copilot — are all incredible.”
In December 2023, AkzoNobel rolled out Xara to take enterprise search and automation a notch up. Xara’s agentic AI capabilities powered by the Moveworks Reasoning Engine allow it to parse employee requests, devise intelligent plans, and execute actions to get the work done. Built with advanced guardrails, the Moveworks Reasoning Engine combines the world’s most advanced LLMs with Moveworks’ proprietary large language model, MoveLM™. It uses agents to drive action across different systems and has the ability to handle the most complex of workflows.
“Xara, our Moveworks Copilot, is helping us paint a better and a brighter future. It’s helping us align with our vision of providing top notch customer experience along with sustainability and reducing our carbon footprint. We no longer need to create content in different languages.”
Adoption rate within the enterprise
Languages supported across 150 different countries
Knowledge base articles served over a eight-month period
The Result
Leading IT transformation at scale while logging a 87% CSAT score
The CIO’s IT transformation initiative is going in full swing. With over 9,000 employees using Moveworks on day one, AkzoNobel could not have asked for a better opener. The results have been equally impressive — they’re reflected in a customer satisfaction (CSAT) score of 87%, a new high which broke all previous records.
The paint manufacturer has seen a significant impact on mean time to resolution (MTTR) with a majority of support tickets raised within Xara. This has led to a 40-50% reduction in MTTR which has resulted in huge productivity gains.
Today more than 25,000 employees at AkzoNobel trust Xara, the Moveworks Copilot, to help them find information, automate tasks, and take action. From creating distribution lists for campaigns and proactive password reset notifications to ServiceNow ticketing and accessing ChatGPT through Moveworks, Xara is becoming the employees’ new best friend at work.
In fact, distribution list creation happens to be the top use case at AkzoNobel with more than 150 tickets every month. The ServiceNow ticketing integration allows Xara to create tickets in the ServiceNow system and perform various ticketing actions in Microsoft Teams itself. And, the public version of ChatGPT came with limitations and risks of data exposure. Moveworks’ enterprise tier agreement with OpenAI provided the team with the much-needed enterprise guardrails to freely use ChatGPT for ideation and strategy.
Furthermore, Xara unlocks a vast repository of marketing assets scattered across systems with Moveworks’ powerful enterprise search capabilities. By simply querying Xara, Creative, Sales, Marketing, and other teams can easily tap into and reuse great design work, preventing redundant efforts.
What started as an IT use case has expanded to every department with the organization with an incredible adoption rate of 72%. The company is also growing its usage of the Creator Studio, a platform that empowers enterprises to build AI workflows at scale. Tasks like printer configuration, reloading Outlook, resetting a Windows password or updating a mobile number are all fully automated with Creator Studio.
Additionally, Employee Experience Insights or EXI has been a runway success at AkzoNobel. The operations team has complete end-to-end visibility now — they’re able to drill down to ticket level information, track critical indicators of employee experience, and filter by department, cohort, and timeframe.
All this was made possible by a stellar adoption strategy that included leadership buy-in, a well thought out bot name, playbooks, instructional videos, office hours, employee notifications via lock screen prompts, and of course creating a “wow factor around the ChatGPT use case.” The company hopes to take its adoption to 80% by the end of FY 2025.
AkzoNobel is well on its way to painting a better, brighter, and sustainable future with Moveworks, an AI Copilot for all employees.
Key integrations
