01
Bottom-up rollout
Employees activate their AI account on their own and experiment at their own pace
Case study · Aug 25, 2026From zero to all in: Griesemann Gruppe brings AI into the daily work of 300 heavy users with the neuland.ai HUB
A recent MIT study (“The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025”) shows that around 95 percent of all company-wide AI pilot projects fail to deliver measurable economic value. Griesemann Gruppe shows how to do it differently.
Initial situation
Griesemann Gruppe is one of the largest engineering companies serving the German process industry and one of the key players in industrial services. For 50 years, the owner-managed family business headquartered in Wesseling near Cologne has supported the chemical, petrochemical and energy industries across the entire life cycle of industrial plants, from engineering and plant technology to lightning protection. With around 1,670 employees at more than 45 locations in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, Griesemann Gruppe works for well over half of the German and Austrian process industry.
- 300+colleagues already count as “heavy users”
- 1,670+employees at more than 45 locations
In an environment shaped by safety, the highest requirements and expert knowledge built up over decades, Griesemann Gruppe faced a clear question: how do you introduce artificial intelligence without putting the people-centered company culture and the industry's high safety standards at risk?
Together with neuland.ai, Griesemann Gruppe chose a consistent AI-first approach: AI not as an isolated tool, but as a strategic capability that develops the company's existing knowledge, processes and collaboration. The choice was the neuland.ai HUB, because the platform offers exactly what a safety-critical industrial company needs: a data-secure, GDPR-compliant environment “made in Germany” with full control over data and processes.
Why it works at Griesemann
Three factors explain the difference from the 95 percent that often fall by the wayside:
Without deep integration into corporate IT, AI remains an isolated experiment. The “Griesemann-KI” is connected where Griesemann Gruppe actually creates value: close to the projects, documents and processes of the process and energy industries.
“For the AI rollout, we deliberately chose a ‘bottom-up principle’. It matters to us to give our colleagues the opportunity to try out AI applications, understand them, and put their first ideas of their own into practice. Only then do we take the next step together as a team and transfer them to larger projects.”
Oliver Schulz
Solution
Instead of mandating AI from the top, Griesemann Gruppe deliberately chose a bottom-up rollout of its own “Griesemann-KI”, built on the neuland.ai HUB. Every employee with an office workstation was given the opportunity to activate their own AI account independently, experiment with the chatbot and agents at their own pace, and discover new applications. Only when an approach has proven itself on a small scale does Griesemann Gruppe transfer it to larger projects together as a team.
This open approach is made possible by the technical foundation of the neuland.ai HUB: a data-secure, GDPR-compliant environment in which employees can experiment independently without Griesemann Gruppe giving up control over sensitive company and project data. The company's own brand “Griesemann-KI”, made possible by the white-label capability of the neuland.ai HUB, turns an external platform into a familiar, company-owned tool. The guiding principle is safety first, no matter how powerful the technology becomes: at Griesemann Gruppe, there is always a human at the beginning and at the end of every process.
Customer benefits
The response to the “Griesemann-KI” clearly exceeds the original expectations: around three out of four colleagues with an office workstation have already activated their AI account on their own, IT now counts around 300 of them as true heavy users, and the list of possible new use cases grows every day. The first concrete benefits are already visible in daily work, for example in the first review of contracts or in handing over ongoing tasks around vacation periods. What started as a small experiment now provides noticeable relief in day-to-day business.
The next step at Griesemann Gruppe: find out, use case by use case, where AI creates the greatest value, not only internally, but above all for its own customers in the process and energy industries. The goal: to move their projects forward even better, more safely and more efficiently.
How the AI transformation succeeds at Griesemann Gruppe
02
Scale only once proven
Successful approaches are transferred to larger projects together as a team
03
Safety first
A data-secure, GDPR-compliant environment as the foundation for open experimentation
04
People at the center
AI extends employees' experience, creativity and judgment instead of replacing them
05
Own brand, own trust
As “Griesemann-KI”, the white-label platform becomes the company's own tool
06
Open company culture
Openness to change and a love of experimenting as the foundation for innovation
“We are anchoring AI in our company step by step, with the right balance of safety and innovation, and with one clear goal: to create real added value for us and our customers.”
Griesemann Gruppe
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