Ilham Kadri, CEO of Syensqo, joins Knowde to share about how it’s only a matter of time before widespread adoption of digitization in our industry revolutionizes research, discovery and innovation. There is a demand for visibility between the supplier and the customer, and this transparency will help the customer buy better, buy on time and have clarity around areas such as sustainability and carbon neutrality.
Read the Transcript.
Ali Amin-Javaheri: Hello and welcome everyone. I’m your host, Ali, CEO and Co-Founder of Knowde, the leading digital customer experience platform for chemicals. Our goal with this series is to share the perspectives you need to navigate the changing digital landscape in our industry. We have yet another amazing guest with us today, someone that I’m sure many of you already know – so let’s jump right in.
I’m thrilled to welcome Ilham Kadri, CEO of Syensqo. Prior to that, she was the CEO of Solvay. For those that may not know, Syensqo is now a stand alone company after completing the spin off from Solvay, and yet is still one of the largest specialty companies in the world. Syensqo is committed to technologies that advance humanity while protecting the planet. They have a global team of experts focused on key platforms such as battery materials, green hydrogen, thermoplastic composites, renewable materials and biotech.
Ilham, is there anything I missed about the company and your background that you want to share with others before we get started?
Ilham Kadri: Thank you, Ali, for having me. It’s a great pleasure to be part of your interviewees. I looked at your podcast. Thank you for what you are doing for the industry.
Ali: One thing that our audience loves to learn about our guests is: what got you into this industry? What brought you here? What keeps you excited about this space?
Ilham: It all started in my youth with my passion for sciences. I was fond of science since I was little. I grew up in Casablanca, in Morocco, in a very humble home. We didn’t have potable water. With the scarce resources we had, we didn’t have the luxury to waste – so circularity was part of our daily agenda and not a choice. There were frequent power cuts in my district.
My grandma was my first role model. She was a cleaner, illiterate, and raised me by herself. She gave me the most precious tool to succeed: unconditional love. She used to say to girls what she was told when she was a girl, that girls have two exits in their lives. One to the husband’s house and the other one to the grave. She invited me to find my third exit and changed my life. That third exit was education, and sciences in general. I got passionate about science very early on and this has followed me throughout my career. Thanks to Moroccan French scholarships, I could pursue my higher education and passion for science in France, where I eventually became a chemist. But I started with everything – mathematics, physics and chemistry.
I often say to my mentees that the journey is more important than the destination. My journey brought me around the world to four different continents, from Africa to the Middle East to Asia to the U.S. and to Europe where I’m sitting today. I worked for multinational companies in different roles: sales, marketing, the digital world, etc. I realized that when you go to the industrial world, and the chemical industry specifically, you can live different lives – you can combine all sciences, right?
My first CEO role was in the U. S. for Diversey’s hygiene and cleaning company where I could pay tribute to my grandma, who was a cleaner. Five years ago I became the CEO of Solvay and we worked on a massive transformation. This culminated into the split into two different entities about a month ago. Now Syensqo is built on the 160-year legacy of the Solvay Company and I have the honor to bring this new science company to new heights.
Ali: I’m not sure how much of your backstory that you’ve shared publicly, but it’s a story that needs to be told. It’s incredibly sweet. And maybe – hopefully soon – some more of that story will be told by you.
Okay. Let’s talk digital. We’re seeing a lot of change in the industry – I think more change now in the past 2-3 years post-pandemic than we probably saw in the 15 years prior to that. I think suppliers are definitely increasing their investments and their digital capabilities, especially those that are customer-facing.
From your perspective, what do you see as some of the opportunities within Syensqo when it comes to digital, and do you have any key digital initiatives kicking off soon?
Ilham: Let me start first with the industry. Obviously, there are some industries which are more advanced than others, right? Like life sciences, for example. Then the chemical-related industries. I think in this podcast, you’ve been interviewing some of the leaders, or proof-of-concept-makers.
I see different pockets of AI – or acceleration of AI – in our own industry. You can see it from material discovery, to innovation, to optimization: AI can be used to improve product performance. Sustainability is important and is dear to my heart. When I started as a chemist in the lab, I was asked to do life cycle analysis and sustainability circularity when it was not embedded in the molecule design. Now the chemists are asked to build it by design, right? AI and material reinvention will bring a lot of acceleration and optimization of the properties of the material for a specific application, which can lead to safer and more environmentally-friendly products and compounds.
The second area is discoveries for new applications within an existing product, or fine-tuning products. I think this approach can be even a low hanging fruit, to be honest with you. This approach has resulted in a tenfold increase in the volume of unique dictionaries for a product, three times more efficient extraction of new applications, and double the number of new applications discovered. I believe that this is an area which will go faster.
Number three – and I think in one of your podcasts you touch base on it – is predictive maintenance and supply chain optimization. Our usage of AI can reduce downtime and make logistics more efficient to address the industry’s demand for novel raw material sourcing and eco-friendly practices in a cost-efficient manner.
The fourth one is research and development. GenAI would significantly accelerate the R&D process, reducing timeline costs and avoiding failures. In my time, I would do a hundred experiments, maybe reject 80, then do the 20, and then open another box, right? Here, GenAI will make us smarter, and maybe I can avoid doing 50 out of my 100 experiments immediately – so it will enable more rapid discovery of new molecules and materials. If I’m younger in the lab, at the bench, GenAI will be part of my ammunition tools, right?
Then the last one, which is important to our strategy as Syensqo, is compliance and contract analysis. GenAI can aid in parsing through compliance issues in contracts with significantly less effort, enhancing legal and operational efficiency, and procuring rights efficiently.
So there’s a large horizon for the chemical industry and the specialty materials industry. I believe that many companies in my space are still in the proof of concept period, yet need to engage in consistent deployments.
We just launched Syensqo on December 11th [2023] so we’re entering into a new era. How can digitalization support us? We’re not a digital company, we will never be, right? We will be using digital to accelerate our strategy and to accelerate the customer obsession criteria that we set for ourselves. So we are doing a bit of all of this. The biggest opportunity is to mine data with various types of AI to help us develop more and better solutions to solve the pressing needs of our customers, and even their unmet needs.
In this context, we are seizing the opportunity of our massive amount of data. Frankly, it’s wasted. I truly believe it. You have to do more with it – you have to make us more intelligent while making decisions and use the data to gain insights on our customers’ technology trends, anticipate their needs and work on enhancing that with AI CoPiloting capabilities to boost data driven sales.
An example is making our carbon footprint information for our products available for our customers, so they can make the right sustainability decision and reduce their carbon footprint – because we are their Scope 3, and I need it from my supplier. So we engage with 450 suppliers to make it digital and have trust along the value chain.
I can go on and on with several examples – but these examples will stay anecdotes in my language, in my playbook until it becomes mainstream. And that’s what we will be accelerating at Synesqo: making those good anecdotes. We see there are proofs of concept and we will accelerate them to make an impact inside our organization and out.
Ali: All five of those opportunities that you mentioned are massive. The second one in particular, even though you mentioned it as a low hanging fruit, can be just as big as the other four. So much of this industry’s knowledge is locked in PDF s, presentations, brochures, and all these various documents that are distributed throughout the org. That knowledge isn’t centralized and used effectively across the whole go-to-market organization. And that is such a powerful unlock for growth because you’ve got all the scientists and experts in these orgs. They’re writing papers on the suitability of these products and all these various applications – but that knowledge doesn’t get to the right people, whether it’s the sales reps or the customers. It just sits there idle and it’s just such a big opportunity to bring not just to existing products, but new applications and new thoughts and ideas to customers.
Ilham: Absolutely, Ali. We have the opportunity today to tap on the trough of this historical data set that exists and the daily data we are generating and sitting on in Google Drives, PDFs, Word documents, Excel sheets and files extracted from many decades. Even all the equipment we’re running – we’re digitizing our manufacturing assets, right? We’re connecting sensors to the equipment and getting the preventive maintenance data – I did it with Diversey when I was doing robot cleaners.
So just make the basics right. We still need to develop a profound evolution in the way we handle data and get accuracy in the data – precision. Pricing the data with a structured approach is a foundational step to support any company’s ambition, but definitely Syensqo, who is a pure play science company like it’s name carries. We want to be at the service of the customer. We don’t have time to waste. I think there is an opportunity to win and to try and to be the first one using all this data to actually accelerate and not reinvent the wheel.
So I’m with you. I call it low hanging fruit, but it is typically complicated to do in an established organization because there is resistance to change. Sometimes those tools are seen by some people like, “yeah, it’s hype, it’s techy.” At the end of the day, there is a syndrome of “if I didn’t do it myself, and I didn’t invent it myself, it’s not good enough.” They should see GenAI and ChatGPT as a tool, just like their equipment. It’s just a tool to allow you to go further faster and avoid mistakes.
Ali: I think the mindsets are starting to change, though. I agree that most folks have a “we have to build it here” type mentality, but this is a completely different capability, a completely different skill set – and you have to leverage what’s available.
Are you thinking about your digital initiatives differently at Syensqo than you were at Solvay?
Ilham: Yes. So now that Solvay is separated into two branches, one branch is more commodity-type technologies, like soda ash for blazing, silica for tires, or hydrogen peroxide for disinfection. And in a way, they need to run with simplification standardization at heart, delivering large SKUs to customers very efficiently. Their digitization efforts will bring that simplification and standardization.
They feel a lot of complexity, while Syensqo is the service of sustainability and meeting needs from lightweight to electrification, etc. Customers are ready to pay for complexity. They are keen to bring differentiation with our products and specialties. But you need to manage this complexity really well. You have multiple technologies in one pot. You have customers who are buying small grams to large tons of product, so you need to manage this complexity efficiently.
We have a vitality index which is the number of products sold in the past five years which are protected by patents. So to give you an idea, 50% of our company sales are protected by IP or long term contracts and 20% is the vitality index – our products which were born less than five years ago. And you need to manage all of this.
So Syensqo will be investing in more GenAI capabilities, be it in research and innovation, from an electronic notebook to having digital and robot chemistry assistance in China. I launched this back in September when I visited China and it was crazy because our chemists now have robots as the chemical assistants following them. As a chemist, it’s mind blowing, right? The robot assistant is doing everything you don’t need to do, making you more efficient so you have time to think and reflect about new ways of discovering materials. I think it’s going to revolutionize research and innovation.
Ali: Oh, it’s just a matter of time.
Ilham: A matter of time, and it’s happening: in the supply chain (I’m not going to cover that because I think you had a nice podcast on it), in finance and data management, and in our relationships with our clients. I think it goes from ERP to ERP and just knowing what’s in the inventory. When we talk to investors every quarter, the big question is: what’s in the inventory? Nobody knows. The venue changes because we are serving most of the industries, from automobile to aerospace to home and personal care, and sometimes it’s three or four players down the road before it gets to the consumers.
And nobody knows what’s in there in the value chain. So I think it’s important now with the very volatile markets and with the short terms of the quarter, because we are a publicly-traded company. We need to have that visibility, from our suppliers to our customers. That transparency helps our customers buy better, and buy on time.
Sustainability, the digitization of our plants and carbon footprint are very close to my heart because we declared carbon neutrality. Without digitalization, we’re not going to get carbon neutrality. So we need transparency. Those are areas where we’re focusing our efforts now on investing in digitization.
Ali: That brings up another point, and it’s actually my favorite topic to discuss.
As a leader, you’re always trying to balance short-term quarterly expectations from shareholders and others vs. what you know is right for the business long term, that does cost a lot of capital and time and pulls resources away from day to day duties.
How do you try to balance short term expectations vs. long term investments?
Ilham: It’s the billion dollar question. I think you need to have both. You need to have an eye on the microscope and an eye on the telescope. And obviously you need to deliver today. You need to be performing on the quarter, on the year – because without a quarter and a year, there is no midterm or long term for publicly-traded companies. So it’s a tough balance to find and each company needs to find its own way.
Obviously, affordability is always there. My role, my management team and my executive committee are all about allocating the available resources – which are not unlimited – to the best opportunities available to the company. Each day I make these judgments with my leadership team. But that’s one of the reasons why we exist.
I think it’s the top-down belief that this is the right investment that creates value. You need to challenge yourself because there is always this syndrome, “it’s hype” – that is when we say, tighten the belt. If there is a crisis like COVID, or if there is an inflationary environment, or there is a tough year, people start looking where to cut costs – and this is one of those that people start cutting.
At Syensqo we are a science company; the name carries it – we are an innovation company. And we’re actually increasing our spend in research and innovation. We went from the 3% we used to have against peers (which were around 2.8%) to now 5%. When I say research and innovation, digital and GenAI are part of it.
So I think you’re right, but I believe in the power of the end. You need to work on those long-term investments and they should not be in conflict with reaping short-term value in the digital space. On the contrary, it’s about building agility in your delivery and cutting the weight by making the invisible visible to be able to deal with all the various variances around us. I think it’s about the choices. I’m not a digital native, obviously, so you need to have that team around you – the digital natives – to build that new innovation pipeline and make your priorities inside of it. You cannot do it overnight. I think it’s essential to build a close interaction between the business and your digital GenAI team to determine the value propositions and which ones are going to really impact the customers. At the end of the day, I am a customer obsessed.
Ali: That last thing you said is probably the most important takeaway for our audience – which is that there needs to be a marriage between the business and these digital folks. The business needs to clearly communicate the use cases and the problem statements, and then the digital folks need to roam outside of the organization to find different ways to solve them. A lot of times what we see is that these digital orgs are separate and distinct from the business and they’re out trying to solve problems that don’t need to be solved and thus the business doesn’t take them seriously.
It needs to be business led: “this is the problem we’re trying to solve, and we can’t continue to solve it the same way we always have. Digital team, what ideas do you have?”
Ilham: Absolutely. It’s like sustainability – it used to be headquartered in the 10th, right? With sustainability teams while at Solvay, we were very successful with Solvay One Planet over five years because I made it part of the business unit strategy. So my presidents were hit in their pocket, in their compensation – like mine – on sustainability. The same for digitalization or for GenAI: you need to embed it. It needs to be at the service of the strategy and part of the strategy. I don’t like to talk about sustainability strategy – I call it a roadmap. And this is the same – we call it a GenAI-type road map. It has to be part of your business strategy.
Ali: Totally agree. Last thing, are there any words of encouragement or messages you want to relay to folks at your company that are working on any sort of digital initiatives or transformation initiatives?
Ilham: I’ve been on the road 30 years looking at the chemical industry and all industries we serve. The chemical industry is the mother of all industries. In a way, I’ve seen it transforming; baby steps. And now I believe that never have we seen the conversions of various megatrends. You name them. Electrification, EVs – look at the transformation of the Tesla-syndrome in automobiles: the hydrogen, the green or the blue, and the super alphabet of colors, which are going to revolutionize and probably be one of the energy mixes in the future. Lightweight, bio technologies, right?
We’ve never seen the convergence of those mega trends with the incredible leaps in technology like AI or GenAI or potentially future AGI, and all of this is coming together at the same time. It’s massive, it’s really massive – and I believe this will create massive opportunities as well as threats. And don’t get me wrong. Everybody’s looking at cyber, and we double down on doing the right thing and investing. But I see the glass half-full because I’m human. It’s scientific and I’m an optimist by design, so I see it creating massive opportunities.
I think my only advice is to think big. Dream big. You need to have dreams which are scary and bigger than you. Take the bull by the horns, right? I’m not a digital native, so I’m reverse mentoring myself, and this team – they are my babies almost. But it’s great because they can tell me things I don’t see and I can use it as wisdom to impact the strategies and the future of the Syensqo company.
Digital transformation is just not a task of one team, but the entire company. We are all in this together as a digital people. The more it is woven in the fabric of the organization, the better it is and the better it is for our customers. So it’s an exciting and essential part of the journey, and whilst the technology seems to be at the heart, it’s still about the people. We started talking about the mindset when we kicked in. People need to make it happen. They need to shift from “no, we can’t do it” or “it’s too expensive” to “I need to relearn.” I learn and relearn. It’s a new space, and our people are truly at the heart of this transformation.
Ali: I can’t agree with you more. This is certainly the mother of all industries, so even though we’re behind others, little changes in our industry have dramatic impacts across the rest of the world. And thinking big is an absolute must.
Ilham, thank you so much for your time. Everyone loves these sort of short informal conversations, especially with folks like you that are helping shape the industry. You gave very in depth, thoughtful answers to each of these questions which our audience certainly appreciates, and it sheds light on how important this topic is for you- even though you consider yourself non-native, you know more than you give yourself credit for. Thank you for helping move this industry forward and I can’t wait to see where Syensqo goes next.
Ilham: Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation. And best wishes.
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