Henkel Invests in Chemistry-Focused Agentic Research Tool
Henkel, which has a consumer goods arm that manufactures such brands as Loctite, Pritt and OSI, is tapping into an agentic chemistry-native AI model called Ask Albert. It can parse through scientific data and execute research tasks within enterprise R&D operations.
The company is using the tool for various use cases, including finding raw material alternatives, analyzing past experiments and drawing connections between different projects.
Ask Albert combines the company's scientific history and content from CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, into an intelligent system with a custom retrieval model trained on chemistry. Employees can ask questions and quickly automate complex workflows within areas such as data analysis and formulation design.
Scientists can access structured records and be taken directly into a formulation worksheet or raw material inventory item from the tool, which provides them with a consolidated worksheet from which experimental details are linked.
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According to Albert Invent Corp., Henkel has already reaped benefits from the tool, including identifying that more than half of the formulations surfaced to scientists originate from projects outside their own, and nearly 80% of the recommended raw materials are net new to the scientists receiving them.
Because of this, more than 90% of chemists across Henkel's global teams said they plan to use Ask Albert on a regular basis.
“One of the hardest problems in a large R&D organization is simply knowing what you already know. Ask Albert helped our scientists discover relevant work and raw materials they may not have found on their own," Houda El-Haddad, head of digital and innovation solutions at Henkel Adhesives Technologies, said in a statement. "The strong engagement and positive feedback we’ve seen so far tell us we’ve only scratched the surface of what this capability can unlock across R&D."
The tool stores both structured and unstructured data with enterprise-grade security and permissions-aware access and establishes a governance structure over how automated actions are managed and versioned across the enterprise. It uses a zero-data approach, deleting prompts and outputs after generation while also providing a reasoning audit trail for each response so users can validate the logic and answers.
The effort builds on Henkel's consolidated R&D approach. Earlier this year, the company announced it would streamline its research and development efforts in North America, creating a Center of Research & Development.
Martina Spinatsch, SVP of R&D for Henkel Consumer Brands North America, said the new center would add to ongoing digital investments in AI and automation.
