What happened
STADLER, a 230-year-old family-owned maker of automated waste sorting plants, has adopted OpenAI's ChatGPT across nearly every function for its 650+ employees. It has created more than 125 custom GPTs, with strong use in translation and email workflows.
Why it matters
The company reports 30–40% time savings on common knowledge tasks, 2.5x faster first drafts (up to 6x for high-volume work like social media), and over 85% daily active usage. Co-CEO Julia Stadler says a solid draft now takes 20 minutes instead of half a day.
What to watch
The next phase is moving AI from assistance to execution by integrating AI agents into core workflows. Whether this succeeds hinges on how well those agents can gather information, validate against standards, and route work for approval.
Summaries like this, in your inbox every morning.
STADLER's adoption of ChatGPT began in 2023 with a simple principle: every employee working on a computer should use AI. The company chose ChatGPT after evaluating alternatives, based on output quality, speed, and immediate usability. Leadership supported the rollout with company-wide access, training, and guardrails, while employees explored use cases from the bottom up.
The results show a shift in how work gets done. Beyond efficiency metrics like time savings and faster drafts, employees use ChatGPT to clarify thinking and structure complex problems—what started as a productivity tool became a cognitive one. The most telling signal, according to Head of IT Raphael Fricker, is that people return to it multiple times a day without being asked.
The next phase is more ambitious: moving from assistance to execution. Integrating AI agents into core workflows could change how work is routed and approved, but the outcome hinges on whether those agents can reliably validate outputs against standards and gain employee trust in critical processes.
Pick your industry and the AI tools you use, and get news related to your work every day.
Free · 30 seconds with Google · unsubscribe anytimeWhat is AIToday? →
Ask AI anything about this article. The AI reads this article, earlier AIToday articles, and Wikipedia, and cites its sources. Q&As are published on this page for other readers too.
Chunghwa Telecom president Rong-shy Lin said the shift from conversational AI to autonomous AI agents is resha…
Apple and Meta said they would jointly release a new open-weight AI model designed to run on high-end Macs, ai…
A writer and entrepreneur opened his daily to-do list and found 156 items, and concluded that an AI assistant…
A Zenn contributor sorted AI use into three modes — AI as an assistant, AI running alongside people, and AI th…
A non-engineer operator says one person ships four smartphone apps on Google Play, three on the App Store, wit…
The walkthrough points the CLI at a local mock via the ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL environment variable
