Knowde Executive Summit 2025 | Ali Amin-Javaheri Keynote Address

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At the Knowde Executive Summit 2015, Knowde co-founder and CEO Ali Amin-Javaheri addressed the most trending topic in chemicals and ingredients today: AI.

Every function — Commercial, Marketing, Finance, Regulatory, Supply Chain, and Digital — benefits from a single source of truth for product, customer and vendor data. Every major initiative across the industry — from cross-selling to BI to Pricing Optimization to AI Readiness and ERP Consolidation — is tethered to the data foundation.

In his keynote address, Ali emphasized the urgency of AI adoption and how Knowde is uniquely positioned to build the infrastructure that enables chemical companies to unlock their data’s full value. By empowering teams across the organization, Knowde helps companies move faster and operate smarter in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Read the full transcript below.

Ali Amin-Javaheri: Today, I’m going to talk about the trends and transformations we’re seeing in our industry, and then we’ll zoom out to look at how AI is evolving more broadly across the global landscape.

Let’s start here:
Last year, I presented to a well-known venture and hedge fund. These are some of the top tech investors in the world, and they always start with a big-picture visual. This year, they showed how each era of the U.S. economy has been dominated by a single theme—first it was finance and real estate in the 1800s, then industrials, then energy, and now: it’s all about AI.

This same shift is reflected in technology adoption trends. We’ve gone from networking, to desktop computing, to the internet, then cloud—and now the fastest-growing wave of all: AI.

AI has quickly become one of the fastest-adopted technologies in history. For example, ChatGPT added over 100 million users in just a few months. But this isn’t just a consumer trend—it’s hitting the enterprise just as fast.

Within the enterprise, AI is becoming increasingly verticalized. You’re seeing specialized AI companies emerge rapidly—built just for legal, healthcare, finance, manufacturing and more. These companies are going from zero to sixty at a pace we’ve never seen before.

What This Means for Us

At Knowde, we talk to about 10 companies a day, typically at the executive level. From those conversations, we’ve identified the most common digital transformation initiatives, which I’ve grouped into six categories:

Commercial, Marketing, Finance, Regulatory, Supply Chain, and Digital.

Here are a few examples:

• Commercial: Companies are trying to better organize their sales teams to improve cross-selling and upselling. A big obstacle? Sales teams often lack the technical product knowledge they need to sell across a portfolio.
  
• Finance: Business intelligence and reporting capabilities are a major pain point. Most finance teams are producing reports that are insufficient to support modern decision-making.
  
• Supply Chain: With global volatility, companies are asking: How do we optimize our cost of goods sold? How do we manage global demand more efficiently?
  
• Digital/IT: Topics like ERP consolidation, AI readiness, and knowledge management are top-of-mind. These projects all require the same foundation: structured, clean, reliable data.
  

And that’s the key message today: No matter what the initiative is—whether it’s pricing optimization, sales enablement, or digital transformation—if the data isn’t clean and structured, it won’t work.

The Data Problem

Let’s break down the types of data that matter most for cross-selling:

• Vendor data
• Material data
• Product data
• Customer data
  

Let’s talk product data first. This includes:

• Technical attributes
• Regulatory info
• Manufacturing data
• Features and benefits
• Applications and end uses
  

Sales teams need this information to sell effectively. But where does this data live today?
In documents. In ERPs. In Salesforce. Scattered across the organization.

The reality is: our industry still runs on documents. PDFs, Word files, technical data sheets—all of which contain the information customers need to buy, and sellers need to sell.

It’s incredibly difficult to train and enable a sales team when the knowledge they need is buried in documents spread across departments. This is a huge barrier to growth, and one that executives often overlook.

Now, let’s talk about customer data.
Salespeople need to understand:

• What industries their customers operate in
• What brands they manufacture
• What markets and applications they serve
  

Unfortunately, most of that information doesn’t exist in CRMs. Maybe 50% of it is there—if you’re lucky. And because reps don’t love inputting data, critical customer insights are often hiding in Word documents, email attachments, or tribal knowledge.

Again: unstructured data is the issue.

So put yourself in the shoes of a salesperson. This is why they only sell a handful of products to each customer—they can’t find the data they need to map products to customer needs.

Even something as basic as a CRM record is often incomplete. You might know the plant address, a contact name, and the parent company—but not what brands they’re manufacturing, what markets they serve, or what products they should be using.

The Solution: A Single Source of Truth

The data you need does exist—it’s just unstructured. It’s trapped in PDFs, spreadsheets, and Word docs. Master data teams try to clean it up manually, but it’s slow, tedious work. And let’s be honest—no one’s getting promoted for doing this work well.

Our goal at Knowde is to unlock this data—both what you already have and what you should have—and turn it into a single, structured, searchable source of truth for both products and customers.

Imagine:

• A product record that includes everything you know about a material—technical specs, regulatory info, applications, and sales collateral.
  
• A customer record that includes not just shipping details but what they manufacture, what markets they serve, and what chemicals they should be buying.
  

When those two datasets are structured and connected, you can start to map product to customer.

So if I’m a rep selling a portfolio—say, Aerosol, Aflex, TegoVet—and I know exactly what a Henkel plant is producing in Cleveland, I can connect the dots and say: “These are the materials that match their needs.”

That’s the foundation for cross-selling. And right now, most companies can’t do this because their data isn’t organized.

Why This Matters

This is why so many strategic initiatives—pricing optimization, customer self-service, procurement transformation—fail or stall. Because the underlying data isn’t in place.

When our internal team engages with customers, we don’t just ask about the initiative—we ask about the data layer underneath it. Because if the data isn’t clean, that initiative isn’t going to succeed.

Sometimes the executive gets it right away. Other times, we’re introducing a concept they hadn’t thought through. But once they realize data is the blocker, they bring in the right people to help us move forward.

That’s the hard part: identifying and extracting all the information from across the organization—then harmonizing it into structured knowledge.

That’s exactly what Knowde is building:
A platform that ingests data from across your systems—SharePoint, Salesforce, ERPs, PDFs, emails—and transforms it into clean vendor data, material data, customer data. And from there, it feeds the applications that run your business.

Because every system—pricing, procurement, product management, sales enablement—relies on data. And if the data isn’t there, those systems simply won’t perform.

The Industry Challenge

McKinsey runs a global survey each year across chemical and ingredient companies. In the most recent one, executives consistently identified their top 3–5 strategic initiatives—and nearly all of them had 3–5 year timelines.

Despite that long runway, the vast majority of initiatives were delayed. Why? McKinsey’s final slide put it plainly:

“The ugly truth: For many companies, progress is still blocked by poor data.”

Executives leave, strategies change, but if the data problem isn’t solved, those initiatives don’t move forward.

In Closing

At Knowde, we’ve been focused on solving the hardest part of digital transformation: getting your data right. Once we’ve structured your product and customer data, unlocking strategic initiatives becomes possible.

Is there still change management required? Of course. But if you solve the data foundation first, everything else gets easier.