The Commercial Acceleration Agency
Hempel
The Hempel AI Hub — scaling AI-enhanced marketing through a governed knowledge platform
Strategy
In 2024, Hempel won silver at the Danish Digital Awards for Specified to Last — an insight-driven ABM program targeting specifiers in the Middle East that delivered 17% volume growth. Its success drove internal demand from regional and product teams across Marine, Energy, Infrastructure, and Decorative, who all wanted the same quality of insight-driven marketing for their own markets. Fulfilling each request individually would multiply resource needs tenfold, and most incoming requests deviated from Hempel’s core marketing strategy in subtle but meaningful ways. Marketing leadership recognised this as a preview of a much bigger problem: AI was about to make it easy for every team to produce campaigns, analyses, and content at speed — but without a shared foundation, speed would just amplify inconsistency. More output, without alignment. That is not scale. That is chaos. Rather than racing to deploy AI tools and chase quick wins, Hempel made the harder, less visible choice: to build the strategic foundation first, structure the knowledge, and codify the business.
“Throughout this process, the focus has been on defining marketing’s role in a world where the analysis and content previously created manually can now be delivered faster — and in many cases better — with AI.”
Solution
The Hempel AI Hub ingests reports, presentations, campaign performance data, technical briefs, and commercial documents accumulated over decades — and distils them into structured marketing intelligence that both people and AI agents can act on. The architecture has two layers, and their order matters: the strategic knowledge layer first, then specialised agents that execute on top.
Structured and centralised decades of marketing intelligence into a governed, machine-readable knowledge base in partnership with BirdieStudio — persona profiles, competitor positioning, technical product data, regional market dynamics, campaign playbooks, and brand guidelines — validated and aligned across marketing, product, and commercial teams with a human in the loop, so autonomous agents can query, cross-reference, and flag conflicts across datasets.
Built the platform on fine-tuned open-weight models adapted to Hempel’s domain using LoRA and QLoRA, preserving general capability while embedding industry-specific knowledge. Each model is evaluated through automated metrics, frontier-model-as-judge assessments, and blind human reviews by domain specialists, with feedback incorporated via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF).
Designed the platform as a living system that continuously absorbs new signals and reflects changes across active programs — industry developments feeding competitive positioning, persona profiles evolving based on actual buyer behaviour, and sales teams receiving real-time prompts during customer meetings, with insights validated and returned to the knowledge base.
Deployed specialised AI agents that execute on top of the foundation: autonomous agents that generate competitive positioning reports and SWOT analyses grounded in verified market data, a content repurposing and SEO engine that turns a single whitepaper into a full ecosystem of channel assets mapped to validated personas, and a translation engine maintaining technical accuracy across languages — currently live on Hempel’s eBusiness platform.
Rolled out globally under the same strategic guardrails so a team in Singapore, a team in Houston, and a team in Copenhagen all draw from the same source of truth — now in its second rollout phase.
Results
The Hempel AI Hub delivers execution efficiency at scale: more programs at the same strategic quality as the original, with zero additional headcount — a 300% increase in output capacity across segments and markets. Localised campaigns, competitive analyses, and multi-channel assets that previously required months of agency briefing cycles now deliver in weeks. The first full-scale deployment was Avantguard — a two-year digital marketing initiative targeting consulting engineers and steel fabricators across 3 regions and 20 markets, executed simultaneously. A program of this scope would not have been feasible without the Hub. €130,000 in media investment contributed to €5M in documented incremental revenue (a 38x return), 17% volume growth year-on-year (roughly three times the market growth rate of ~3%), and a 49.5% volume surge in the Middle East where the program was most concentrated. Every campaign executed, analysis generated, and market entry completed adds to the knowledge base — the platform becomes more capable the more it is used. By codifying their business and structuring decades of knowledge so AI agents operate from verified sources rather than generic patterns, Hempel built a foundation not for 10% savings but for 10x impact.
“For us, AI is not an efficiency project; it is the foundation for working in a more focused and customer-driven way.”
Key Results
- 300% increase in output capacity — no added headcount
- 38x ROI — €130K media → €5M pipeline
- 49.5% volume surge in the Middle East
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