IMCD Accelerates AI Innovation and Boosts Customer Experience with a Solid Data Foundation

With its global partnerships and market expertise, IMCD helps companies navigate complex chemical choices and develop forward-thinking solutions. Working with approximately 3,000 chemical suppliers, IMCD connects customers across multiple industries to a catalog of 52,000 different products.

In a business that revolves around supplying customers with technical expertise, regulatory guidance and market knowledge, the specialty chemicals distributor understands that allocating time for customers is key. However, as it has grown through numerous mergers and acquisitions, IMCD found its data stack was becoming overly complex.

To simplify its data estate and create a platform for future innovation, IMCD deployed Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud. After building a solid foundation for data innovation over the last few years, IMCD was able to deploy 8 new AI use cases in a single year — helping improve the customer experience, boost operational efficiency and create new revenue opportunities.

Representing thousands of suppliers across the specialty chemicals industry, IMCD manages vast and varied volumes of data. While much of its operational data — such as ordering, finance, and logistics — is stored in structured formats, the company also deals with highly complex technical and regulatory documents. These often include a mix of unstructured information like text, tables, and diagrams, posing significant challenges for consistency, analysis, and insight extraction.

“Handling technical documents at this scale means we're constantly navigating through different formats, languages, and levels of detail,” says Jip Koning, Group Product Owner for Data, Analytics and AI at IMCD Group. “Our goal is to make sense of all this information quickly and reliably to support smarter decisions.”

In addition to this, IMCD continues to grow through numerous mergers and acquisitions each year — a process that brings its own set of challenges, especially when aiming to onboard new companies in a highly governed, automated, and fast way.

However, with new advancements in AI, and a new platform to power them, IMCD found a way to empower its teams and customers with the very best product information.

After rolling out a global ERP and a global Unified Customer Engagement Platform, IMCD set its sights on building a single, unified data lake to support consistent, company-wide data access and analytics. With operations spanning multiple regions and teams relying on different tools and platforms, the goal was to create a central, scalable environment that would make it easy to work with data across systems like Salesforce.

“We had already made big strides by moving to one global ERP and CRM,” says Koning. “The next logical step was having one global data lake — and after an extensive evaluation process, it became clear that Snowflake was the right platform to bring everything together.”

The chemicals distributor first began working with Snowflake in 2020, taking its time to carefully integrate Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud with tools like Salesforce, Syndigo, Hyland, Tableau and OneStream. This gradual journey helped IMCD lay a solid foundation to solve its data challenges — and take advantage of the latest AI innovations.

With its foundation in place, IMCD has been able to develop new AI use cases in a short span of time. One major use case is a generative AI-powered document search function on IMCD’s website and B2B portal. Leveraging Snowflake’s Cortex Search for hybrid search, IMCD teams and customers alike can now perform full semantic searches of all chemical documents instantly, allowing them to rapidly identify the products they need. This helps deliver a smoother customer journey, and improves product discovery and upsell potential.

Snowflake data and AI features also help power IMCD’s SalesAssistant: a guided sales enablement tool for IMCD teams to help them quickly find relevant products. By using extensive data drawn from IMCD’s chemical documents, IMCD’s SalesAssistant offers a complex recommendation engine that can identify where a chemical or ingredient could be used in different situations (such as for flavoring or in a medicine) or combined with other products for completely different applications. This is another use case that helps open up upsell and cross-sell opportunities, potentially increasing revenue and customer lifetime values.

Beyond this, IMCD is using AI in Cortex Search to quickly and accurately optimize tens of thousands of product descriptions for search across its portfolio. With data from Snowflake, IMCD could ensure its AI models remained grounded, reducing any risks of hallucination and enabling it to deliver high-quality product descriptions — and saving countless person hours compared to manually rewriting all these summaries. “As we can now extract unstructured data from our documents with the AI Data Cloud, we could ground our AI models with trusted data to ensure the outputs would be accurate and improve product discovery," Koning says.

IMCD has developed an AI-powered solution to structure its master data and prepare order data for automated creation in its ERP systems. While the workflow is highly automated, every order is still reviewed and validated by a human before being entered into the ERP — ensuring both accuracy and oversight. Snowflake’s Document AI powers these intelligent processes by providing the trusted data foundation and AI capabilities. Now this feature has been developed, IMCD plans to begin scaling it in future.

With a strong data core and a new suite of AI tools, IMCD has been able to optimize key processes, deploy new innovations and maintain a strong focus on delivering the best possible customer experiences.

Thanks to its AI use cases, IMCD can automate common data and administrative processes to reduce processing times across the business. By freeing up its teams from manual tasks, IMCD has created more opportunities for employees to get closer to customers and suppliers

From there, IMCD’s AI search and SalesAssistant use cases help connect customers with new products, increasing upsell opportunities, improving customer satisfaction and offering significant time savings, as compared to manually searching through product brochures and documentation.

IMCD achieved all these benefits quickly and safely thanks to Snowflake. “The pace of innovation is much faster,” Koning says. “We have the data we need and can quickly spin up analytics for anyone that needs it. And with Snowflake’s disaster recovery and time travel features, we know we’re safe — even when we’re moving quickly.”

Having deployed so many new use cases around AI and automation, IMCD’s data team is now looking to continue scaling them up, while investigating new AI opportunities. One area of focus is rapidly exploring technologies like conversational AI to better support customers in developing new formulations — helping them find the right solutions through more interactive and intelligent digital experiences.

Koning and his team are also looking into using Agentic AI to further automate processes across IMCD. From rapidly fulfilling document requests or queries around customer orders, to automatically answering technical and regulatory questions around products, there are plenty of opportunities to find new efficiencies with AI agents.

“The Snowflake team has consistently helped us improve our platform and get the most from it,” Koning says. “We get so much support from them that this is truly a combined success story. That’s why we’re all in on Snowflake.”