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From Data to Insight: How Sika Became Information-Driven with AI-Powered Search
The Knowledge Challenge in Specialty Chemicals
In the specialty chemicals industry, competitive advantage lives in knowledge — in formulations, application data, technical documentation, regulatory filings, safety data sheets, patent portfolios, and the accumulated expertise of scientists and engineers distributed across global operations. The ability to access that knowledge quickly and reliably is not just an operational convenience; it is a direct driver of product development speed, regulatory compliance, customer service quality, and commercial success.
Yet most chemical organizations face a paradox: they have more data than ever before, and less ability to use it. Knowledge is fragmented across trade databases, scientific publications, patents, ERP systems, cloud-based collaboration platforms, product management tools, and internal repositories — each holding a piece of the picture, none connected to the others. The result is that researchers duplicate work already done elsewhere, sales teams give customers incomplete product information, and engineers spend hours chasing documents that exist but cannot be found.
How Sika AG Solved It
Sika AG is a global leader in specialty chemicals for construction and automotive applications, headquartered in Baar, Switzerland. With operations in more than 100 countries, over 33,000 employees, and a product portfolio spanning adhesives, sealants, coatings, mortars, and concrete additives, Sika operates one of the most complex knowledge environments in the industry. Connecting that knowledge — across languages, systems, geographies, and business units — is an enterprise-scale challenge.
In this 40-minute on-demand webinar, Mark Capell, IT Project Manager at Sika AG, shares the story of how Sika approached that challenge: the genesis of their AI-powered search initiative, the steps taken to move from fragmented data to a unified, intelligent knowledge platform, and what the journey to becoming information-driven looks like in practice for a global specialty chemicals organization.
What You’ll Learn
The session is structured across two complementary parts:
- Part 1 — Sika’s Journey: From Data to Insight: Mark Capell walks through the origins of AI-powered search at Sika — why the organization recognized it had a knowledge access problem, how it evaluated and selected a solution, and what implementation looked like across a complex, multilingual, globally distributed enterprise. This is a practitioner’s account of what it actually takes to become information-driven — the organizational decisions, the technical steps, and the outcomes that made the investment worthwhile.
- Part 2 — The State of AI-Powered Search and the DTI–Sinequa Partnership: Bert Frei, Chief Customer Officer at DTI AG, and Patrick Métaireau, EMEA Channel Director at Sinequa, broaden the conversation to the wider enterprise search landscape — covering why organizations across every industry are now investing in AI-powered search platforms, and what makes the difference between a successful deployment and a stalled one.
Specifically, they address:
- Why large organizations in every industry need AI-powered search — the scale of the knowledge access problem, the cost of fragmented information, and why traditional search tools fail at enterprise complexity
- The added value of the DTI–Sinequa partnership — how DTI AG’s deep expertise in enterprise information management and Sinequa’s AI search platform combine to deliver implementations that are faster to deploy, better adopted, and more tightly aligned to the specific knowledge workflows of each customer.
AI-Powered Search in the Chemical Industry: Why It Matters Now
Specialty chemicals is an industry where knowledge has always been the primary source of competitive differentiation — in formulation expertise, application engineering, regulatory knowledge, and customer-specific problem-solving. What has changed is the scale and velocity of that knowledge, and the complexity of the systems it lives in.
For an organization like Sika, operating across more than 100 countries with products serving dozens of distinct application markets, the ability to give every employee — from a field sales engineer in Brazil to a formulation chemist in Switzerland — instant, reliable access to the full depth of the organization’s product knowledge and technical expertise is a transformative capability.
Sinequa’s enterprise AI search platform connects to the full range of data sources typical in specialty chemicals organizations: product data management systems, ERP platforms, document management repositories, collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, patent databases, regulatory filing systems, safety data sheet libraries, and scientific publication databases. All content is indexed into a unified, multilingual, AI-powered knowledge layer — searchable by any employee, in any language, with results ranked by relevance to their specific role and context.
The result is what Sika’s journey demonstrates: an organization that moves from spending time searching for knowledge to spending time acting on it.
About the Speakers
About Sika AG Sika AG is a global specialty chemicals company headquartered in Baar, Switzerland, with a leading market position in both the construction and automotive industries. Sika’s products are used in the construction of buildings, bridges, tunnels, and other infrastructure projects, as well as in the manufacture and repair of motor vehicles. With operations in more than 100 countries, a workforce of over 33,000 employees, and annual revenues exceeding CHF 10 billion, Sika is one of the largest and most geographically distributed specialty chemicals companies in the world — making enterprise-wide knowledge access a mission-critical capability.
About DTI AG DTI AG is a Swiss IT consulting and systems integration firm with specialized expertise in enterprise information management and AI-powered search. As a certified Sinequa implementation partner, DTI has helped organizations across the DACH region and beyond deploy intelligent search platforms that connect complex data environments and enable information-driven decision-making at scale.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sika AG implemented Sinequa’s AI-powered enterprise search platform with support from DTI AG, a Swiss enterprise IT integration partner. The project began with identifying the core knowledge access challenges facing Sika’s global workforce — fragmented data across trade databases, internal collaboration platforms, product systems, and scientific sources — and building a unified, AI-powered search layer that connects all of these sources into a single, intelligent interface accessible to employees worldwide.
Specialty chemicals companies manage exceptionally complex knowledge ecosystems: product formulation data, safety data sheets (SDS), regulatory compliance documentation, patent portfolios, application engineering records, customer project histories, and scientific literature — across multiple languages and geographies. Most of this knowledge is distributed across disconnected systems, making it difficult for employees to find the right information quickly. AI-powered enterprise search solves this by indexing all sources simultaneously and returning ranked, contextually relevant results regardless of where the data lives.
DTI AG is a Swiss enterprise IT consulting firm specializing in information management and enterprise search. As a certified Sinequa implementation partner, DTI AG designs, deploys, and supports AI-powered search projects for organizations across the DACH region. The DTI–Sinequa partnership combines Sinequa’s enterprise AI search technology with DTI’s deep expertise in information architecture, systems integration, and change management — enabling faster, more successful deployments for complex enterprise customers.
Global manufacturing and chemical companies typically operate with large, multilingual, geographically distributed workforces and data environments that span dozens of systems. Traditional search tools fail in this context — they don’t connect across systems, don’t handle multiple languages, and rely on keyword matching that fails for complex technical queries. AI-powered enterprise search addresses all of these challenges simultaneously, giving every employee fast, reliable access to the full depth of organizational knowledge regardless of where it lives, what language it’s in, or what format it takes.
Sinequa connects to the full range of data sources common in manufacturing and specialty chemicals environments, including ERP systems (SAP, Oracle), product data management and PLM platforms, document management systems, Microsoft SharePoint and Teams, safety data sheet (SDS) libraries, patent databases, regulatory filing repositories, scientific publication databases, and custom internal knowledge bases. All content is indexed into a unified, permission-aware search layer that respects existing access controls while making knowledge discoverable across the organization.
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