STADLER reshapes knowledge work at a 230-year-old company

From industrial legacy to digital leverage

STADLER is a family-owned company with more than 230 years of history, specializing in automated waste sorting plants for the global recycling industry. With over 650 employees operating worldwide, the company plays a critical role in helping countries advance their sustainability and circular economy goals.

Under the leadership of Co-CEO Julia Stadler, the company has taken a forward-looking approach to modernization—embedding AI into everyday work as a core productivity layer. Since 2023, STADLER has pursued a clear principle: every employee working on a computer should use AI to improve speed, quality, and collaboration.

“In many teams, people were spending too much time turning raw knowledge into usable output—summarizing, translating, drafting. We knew there had to be a better way.”

—Julia Stadler, Co-CEO

Turning AI into a company-wide productivity layer

STADLER adopted OpenAI's ChatGPT to remove this friction, selecting it for its output quality, speed, and immediate usability.

After evaluating alternatives, ChatGPT consistently delivered more structured, context-aware, and practically useful results. Just as importantly, it enabled immediate value—teams could start generating usable outputs from day one.

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.

Today, ChatGPT is embedded across nearly every function:

• Engineering & data teams use it for analysis, code support, and performance evaluation

• Project and management teams use custom GPTs to structure processes and improve documentation

• Marketing teams translate complex technical knowledge into clear global communication

• All teams use it for drafting, summarizing, research, and structured thinking

STADLER has created more than 125 custom GPTs, with particularly strong adoption in translation and email workflows.

Key outcomes include: