Following the Money: How a Global Industrial Player Turned Digital Ambition into Commercial Reality

At E-Connect Europe Business Platform 2026 – Power of 50, Thomas Areskoug of Atlas Copco shared insights from the company’s six-year transformation. Moving from ambition to impact required rethinking ownership of product data, restructuring governance around business outcomes, industrialising e-commerce, and treating AI as an efficiency engine.

The principle guiding the transformation journey is that if a company cannot follow the money from digital interactions to cash in the bank, it will struggle to remain competitive in the next decade.

From Offline to Outcome-Driven: Anchoring Digital in the Business  

The transformation did not begin with technology. It began with a shift in mindset: digitalisation would be driven by the business, not IT. That distinction is more than organisational semantics.

Instead of defining success as deploying features or platforms, the digital function was measured on business outcomes. Targets were anchored in:

• Revenue influence: Leads, opportunities, and orders generated or supported through digital channels.  
• Sales productivity: The contribution of digital to helping existing sales resources sell more, not just work differently.  
• User satisfaction: For both internal users (sales) and external users (customers on the web and in portals).

This outcome-first logic also shaped investment. In the first year, the central organisation funded the foundational digital capabilities as an investment, with depreciation over time. In subsequent years, individual divisions were expected to fund and apply for new features once value had been demonstrated. This created a disciplined mechanism that rewarded proven impact.

The approach is particularly notable given a decentralised business structure. While the broader organisation operated in autonomous divisions, digitalisation for sales, marketing, and service was centralised in a centre of excellence. That centre was built deliberately with a high share of external talent new to the company, and with clear domain focus across small parts of the customer journey. Trust was created by repeatedly delivering tangible gains for frontline stakeholders.  

Owning Product Information: The Structural Shift That Unlocked Everything Else  

One of the most consequential decisions in the journey was centralising ownership of digital product information.

Initially, product managers owned product content. This is common in industrial organisations, but it leads to a predictable pattern of websites and digital catalogues structured according to internal organisational charts rather than how customers search, compare, and buy.

Recognising this, responsibility for product data was moved into a dedicated central function. That team was tasked with owning and curating all digital product information, including:

• Technical data and specifications;  
• Images, videos, and brochures;
• Cross-links between related tools and products;  
• Structures that support search, comparison, and guided selling.

This change was underpinned by implementing a Product Information Management (PIM) system early in the journey. By investing in PIM as a first step, the organisation ensured that the foundational data layer could actually support a modern, self-service digital experience.

This resulted in better data quality, but also a structural decoupling of product content from internal organisation. Product information could now be modelled according to how customers think, buy, and maintain, not how factories and business units are arranged. For mature industrial companies with complex portfolios and legacy structures, this is an uncomfortable but vital shift.  

Designing Around the Buying Experience, Not the Sales Process  

A large share of overall customer experience across acquisition, usage, and even end-of-life, is determined by the buying journey. If purchase is painful, everything else feels worse.

The transformation therefore placed the buying experience at the centre. The goal was to make it significantly easier to do business, particularly in spare parts, tooling, and related aftermarket offerings. The aspiration was even quantified internally as doubling the sales of the salesperson through:

• Self-service content and tools that reduce low-value enquiries;  
• Digital lead generation that converts into tangible opportunities;  
• E-commerce that enables zero-touch transactions;
• CRM flows that allow sales to quote, close, and connect seamlessly into ERP.

Not all of that vision has been fully realised. The targeted doubling of sales productivity has not yet been achieved, but internal estimates put the improvement at around 30%. At the same time, the commercial environment has evolved, with more complex automation and solution sales requiring additional experts rather than simply more transactional efficiency.  

Still, the direction is clear and highly relevant for other industrial players. Digital should not merely mirror the sales organisation, but absorb and automate everything that does not require human judgement, freeing sales to focus on complex, value-creating work.  

One Web, Not Two: Merging Brand, Content, and Commerce  

A recurring debate in B2B manufacturing is whether to separate corporate websites from e-commerce platforms. In many organisations, webshop and corporate sites are treated as distinct environments, often run by different teams, using different technologies, with different priorities.

On their journey, Atlas Copco moved to one web. The same site carries:

• Product and solution information;  
• Thought leadership and brand content;  
• E-commerce functionality;  
• Customer portal capabilities once a user logs in.

The public, anonymous view and the logged-in customer view share the same foundation, with commerce and portal capabilities unlocked for authenticated users. This allows:

• Consistent UX and navigation from inspiration to transaction;  
• Shared investment in search, performance, and design;  
• A single source of truth for product content via PIM;  
• Gradual personalisation, first at account level, then based on behaviour.

In this case, purchasing online requires an existing customer relationship due to export controls, credit checks, and regulatory constraints. Account set-up takes time. However, once an account exists, login-based personalisation becomes powerful. Customers can see key contacts (service engineers, sales, inside sales), manage quotes, and access tailored information without wondering who to call. 

Following the Money: Visibility Across the Digital Funnel  

Perhaps the most defining characteristic of the company’s transformation is its insistence on financial traceability. Every meaningful digital initiative is expected to show how it links to revenue.

A structured funnel is used to track:

• Digital marketing and campaign activities;  
• Leads generated;  
• Lead conversion into opportunities;  
• Orders created; 
• Deals closed and revenue recognised.

The ability to follow the money from a banner click or portal interaction through to closed-won business is a direct import from B2C practice into B2B. In consumer markets, players that failed to build this traceability often did not survive the rise of digital-native competitors. Many industrial manufacturers now face a similar situation.

By aligning digital metrics with commercial outcomes, organisations can avoid celebrating feature releases that do not move the economic needle. Teams are not measured on the number of new functionalities launched, but on adoption, satisfaction, and financial impact.  

Measuring What Matters: From Sales Adoption to Web Satisfaction  

To align digital efforts with everyday reality, a small number of pragmatic KPIs that sit close to the business should be defined.

For sales, two indicators stand out:

• Internal NPS (Net Promoter Score) from sales teams using CRM and tools. If salespeople dislike the system, adoption will remain superficial regardless of management pressure. NPS feedback also becomes a continuous improvement engine.  
• Forecast accuracy alignment between CRM and finance. If the numbers in CRM do not match what sales tells finance they will sell, then CRM is not being used as the primary planning tool, and data quality cannot be trusted.

For external users, web satisfaction is measured through structured surveys triggered across a large global user base. Customers are asked whether they could complete their task and how they rate their experience. While response samples are a fraction of total visitors, they are statistically meaningful across a million-plus unique users annually.

What is particularly noteworthy is how feedback is operationalised at Atlas Copco. An AI-driven approach is used to categorise open comments at scale, enabling the team to identify patterns and systematically prioritise improvements. One year, web satisfaction increased from the mid-50s to above 60, a shift the team considered one of its most significant achievements, given how notoriously difficult such metrics are to move.  

From Best-of-Breed to Disciplined Integration  

Like many enterprises, the organisation initially pursued a pure best-of-breed architecture across its digital ecosystem. Over time, this resulted in complexity that became increasingly difficult to manage.

The subsequent evolution was not a return to monolithic systems, but a more disciplined hybrid, still best-of-breed, but with a stronger reliance on a core commercial platform to simplify integration. The lesson for other manufacturers is not that one architecture philosophy is inherently better than another, but that unchecked proliferation of tools can become a value-destroying distraction.

Industrial companies should expect a similar journey. Early enthusiasm for assembling the best of everything often yields to a more sober assessment of what can realistically be governed, integrated, and maintained.  

Extending Digital to the Indirect Channel: Closing the Loop with Distributors  

A critical question for many manufacturers is how to manage distributors and channel partners in a way that supports transparency and growth without creating administrative overhead or eroding relationships.

If half of total sales flow through distributors who have their own CRM systems and processes, it is difficult to track what happens to opportunities once they leave the manufacturer’s hands.

The solution is to use the existing web shop and portal as a bridge between the manufacturer’s CRM and the distributor’s world. A new capability allows:

• Opportunities generated in CRM to be flagged as assigned to the distributor; 
• Distributors to receive a notification and access the opportunity via their web portal;  
• Distributors to accept, reassign internally, progress stages, or decline the opportunity; 
• Final win/loss status, order number, sales amount, and comments to be fed back automatically into the manufacturer’s CRM.

This is achieved without giving distributors direct CRM licences, which is an important financial and governance consideration. Instead, the portal acts as a lightweight interface to specific slices of the underlying data.

Doing so reduces manual follow-up workload for internal teams that would otherwise chase distributors for updates. It also creates a much clearer picture of channel performance and partner engagement, allowing more sophisticated steering of the indirect network.  

Scaling with Global Delivery: Building a 100-Strong Digital Engine  

Behind the visible tools and portals, Atlas Copco is a sizeable digital organisation. Over time, the team has grown to around 100 people, including 50–60 developers. Most development capacity has been moved to India, with business analysts, product owners, and scrum masters largely based in Europe.

This model allows a significant cost advantage while retaining close business proximity for product management and process ownership. However, it requires sustained investment in travel, alignment, and governance to ensure distributed teams remain connected to actual business needs.

The lesson for industrial leaders is that serious digital transformation is not a side activity. It demands a material build-up of specialised capabilities, often best served through a mix of internal talent, external hires, and global delivery models.  

Industrialising AI: From Hype to Process Efficiency  

When responsibility for AI across sales, marketing, and service was consolidated, it became clear that early efforts had been spread too thinly, that there were too many broad ambitions, but insufficient depth in any one process.

The revised company approach built on three principles:

• Focus on specific processes with clear owners and measurable efficiency targets.  
• Accept that there may eventually be hundreds of narrow, purpose-built AIs as long as each has a clear business case.  
• Defer complex AI-to-AI integration until later, prioritising value creation today over architectural purity.

A dedicated AI product owner role was established, combining deep data expertise with strategic understanding of industrial use cases. Governance frameworks were deliberately kept simple and adjustable, with the expectation that they would evolve as experience accumulated.

The AI use case that stands out is the use of CRM-based AI to predict opportunity win probability. When the AI’s probability estimations were compared against those manually assigned by salespeople and then tested against actual outcomes, the AI outperformed human estimation by a significant margin.

More importantly, the AI also highlighted which factors were driving low or high probability, such as insufficient number of engaged contacts at the customer compared with previous wins. This turned the AI into an embedded coaching tool for sales, guiding more effective pipeline management and account strategy.

E-Commerce as a Lever on Manual Work  

As e-commerce matures, one of its most direct and measurable contributions is the reduction of manual order processing. At Atlas Copco, e-commerce now accounts for roughly 37% of orders, with strong adoption among distributors and rapid growth via punch-out integrations into large customers’ procurement platforms such as Ariba or Coupa.

Reducing manual orders is not just about cost. It also:

• Minimises errors and rework;  
• Shortens cycle times for routine purchases;  
• Frees internal resources to handle complex inquiries and solution sales.  

For industrial leaders, tracking the share of automated versus manual orders should become a core operational metric in its own right.  

What This Journey Means for Industrial Leaders  

Several themes from this six-year transformation are broadly applicable across industrial manufacturing, aftermarket, and equipment businesses:

1. Treat digital as a commercial engine, not an IT project. Digital must be embedded in the business and measured on revenue, margin, satisfaction, and productivity, not on uptime and feature counts alone.
2. Centralise ownership of digital product information. As long as product content is fragmented and structured around internal hierarchies, customer-centric e-commerce and self-service will remain out of reach.
3. Commit to one web thinking. Customers do not distinguish between corporate sites, portals, and shops. Industrial companies should move towards unified digital experiences that cover the full journey.
4. Design KPIs that align behaviour. Internal NPS, CRM forecast alignment, web satisfaction and funnel traceability are practical, grounded indicators that force focus on adoption and value.
5. Use distributors’ portals as bridges, not barriers. Smart portal design can bring distributors into the digital ecosystem without imposing expensive systems on them, while still closing the loop on opportunity management.
6. Industrialise AI through narrow, owned use cases. AI should be deployed where processes, owners, and outcomes are clearly defined, then scaled through replication, not grand, all-encompassing visions.
7. Invest in capability and delivery models. Building a 100-person digital organisation is not an outlier. It reflects the scale of effort required for global manufacturers to remain competitive in a digital-first market.  

The Next Wave Will Be Built On Foundations Already Laid  

Digital transformation is not a finite programme but an ongoing capability that must outlive any single leader or roadmap.

The hardest work is in the foundations, in cleaning and owning product data, unifying web and commerce, embedding outcome-based governance, and creating traceability from click to cash. These are the preconditions for whatever comes next, whether that means more advanced AI, deeper servitization, or new business models around uptime and performance.

The market is moving towards a world where customers expect the buying and ownership experience of consumer-grade platforms, but with industrial reliability and regulatory discipline. Meeting that expectation requires more than surface-level digitisation. It demands that organisations learn to follow the money, redesign around how customers buy, and treat digital not as an accessory but as the operating system of the business.