STIHL – AI Fundamentals Training: Opportunities & First Steps

Starting point

More than 30 participants from production, engineering, logistics and office — many of them with hardly any prior exposure to AI. Across all areas, the same three problems surfaced: downtime and rework cost money, knowledge is not systematically available (whoever wants to know something asks colleagues), and duplicated effort caused by tool breaks between Excel, SAP and paper.

Solution

Two compact AI training sessions in one day (in cooperation with the IHK): AI fundamentals, strengths and limits, GenAI live demos and, above all, hands-on group work on real processes and pain points. The teams developed their own use cases — from a shopfloor knowledge assistant (setup instructions and fault diagnostics on a tablet terminal) to warranty intelligence (pattern recognition in warranty returns with forecasts for spare-parts planning) to a personalized search agent for the intranet.

Technology stack

• LLM tools in practice: ChatGPT, Claude & Co. (prompting, limits, hallucinations)
• GenAI demos: image generation for product-related use cases
• Automation demos: n8n / Power Automate / Lovable for STIHL-related use cases
• RAG concepts for knowledge assistants on the shopfloor

Result & Impact

• More than 30 employees from all areas practically enabled for AI
• Concrete, prioritized use cases with measurable impact directly from the business units
• Shared understanding: AI delivers value where repetitive tasks, missing knowledge and fragmented data slow down processes