STADLER, a family-owned company with more than 230 years of history that builds automated waste sorting plants for the recycling industry, has embedded OpenAI's ChatGPT across its roughly 650 employees, according to an OpenAI case study published in March 2026. Under Co-CEO Julia Stadler the company has followed a principle since 2023 that every employee working on a computer should use AI to improve speed, quality and collaboration, because teams were spending too much time summarising, translating and drafting.
STADLER chose ChatGPT after evaluating alternatives, citing its output quality, speed and immediate usability. The rollout combined bottom-up experimentation with top-down support: employees were encouraged to explore use cases while leadership provided company-wide access, training and clear guardrails. Engineering and data teams use it for analysis, code support and performance evaluation; project and management teams use custom GPTs to structure processes and improve documentation; and marketing uses it to translate complex technical knowledge into clear communication for global markets. Employees have created more than 125 custom GPTs, with the strongest adoption in translation and email workflows.
OpenAI reports 30-40% time savings on common knowledge tasks such as summarising and documentation, 2.5 times faster time to first draft on average and up to 6 times in high-volume work such as social media, and daily active usage above 85%. Julia Stadler said teams moved from needing half a day for a decent first version to having a solid draft in 20 minutes. Raphael Fricker, head of IT, said the strongest signal is how often employees come back to the tool without being asked.
The next phase is integrating AI agents into core workflows: systems that gather information, generate outputs, validate them against standards and route work for approval.
Details
- City
- Altshausen
- Organization
- STADLER Anlagenbau
- Continent
- Europe
- Country
- Germany