How Holcim Is Bridging the AI Productivity Gap Across 45 Markets

with Gloat’s Mosaic and Ascend

Many organizations face an ‘AI productivity gap’: significant investment without commensurate ROI. Holcim, a global leader in sustainable building materials, is proving that closing this gap requires treating AI as a people transformation, not just a technology deployment.

Under the leadership of Group Head of Talent Fatma Hedaya, Holcim partnered with Gloat to fundamentally rethink how work gets done. Using Mosaic’s work orchestration capabilities to break down projects into tasks and Ascend’s talent marketplace to match the right people to those tasks, Holcim has built the infrastructure for AI-era workforce agility in a century-old industrial company.

The results speak for themselves: nearly one in two projects are now cross-functional, half span multiple geographies, and the company has reduced its dependence on external outsourcing by deploying internal talent more effectively.

“If you look at two or three years ago, if I went to my CEO and said I want to build an agile workforce where people can work on different things, I wouldn’t have been taken seriously. But today we actually have data that proves that people want to work on projects that are outside of their function.”

Fatma Hedaya, Group Head of Talent, Holcim

The Company

Holcim is the global leader in innovative and sustainable building solutions. With operations spanning Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, Holcim offers high-value end-to-end building materials and solutions, from foundations and flooring to roofing and walling. The company is driven by a purpose to build progress for people and the planet, with sustainability and decarbonization at the core of its strategy.

The Challenge: The AI Productivity Gap

Like many organizations investing in AI, Holcim recognized that technology alone wouldn’t deliver results. The challenge wasn’t access to AI tools; it was ensuring the workforce could actually use them to drive business impact.

Work was defined by job titles, not tasks

Projects were framed around traditional job descriptions rather than the actual work that needed to be done. This made it impossible to identify where AI could augment human effort or which employees had the skills to work alongside new technologies.

Talent was siloed by function and geography

Employees couldn’t easily contribute to projects outside their immediate teams, even when they had relevant skills. This limited the organization’s ability to rapidly redeploy talent as AI transformed certain roles and created demand for new capabilities.

No infrastructure for AI-era workforce planning

Without visibility into work at the task level, leaders couldn’t anticipate how AI would impact different roles or create pathways to redeploy talent to emerging needs.

“If you look at two or three years ago, if I went to my CEO and said I want to build an agile workforce where people can work on different things, I wouldn’t have been taken seriously. But today we actually have data that proves that people want to work on projects that are outside of their function.”

Fatma Hedaya, Group Head of Talent, Holcim

The Goals

Holcim set out to build the infrastructure for an AI-augmented workforce with three primary objectives:

1. Break down work to the task level

Move beyond job-title-based thinking to understand work as discrete tasks and activities. This would reveal where AI could augment human effort and enable more precise matching between work requirements and employee capabilities.

2. Enable cross-functional and cross-geographic mobility

Create pathways for employees to contribute to projects across the organization, breaking down the silos that prevented talent from flowing to where it was needed most.

3. Prepare the workforce for AI-driven change

Build the organizational muscle for continuous adaptation, ensuring employees could develop new skills and shift to emerging roles as AI transformed the nature of work.

The Solution

Holcim partnered with Gloat to implement an integrated approach combining work orchestration with workforce readiness capabilities.

Work Orchestration with Mosaic

Using Gloat’s Mosaic, Holcim gained the ability to break down projects into their component tasks and match each task to the right mix of people, technology, and AI. This revealed a critical insight: work that appeared to belong to one function often required capabilities from multiple disciplines.

A finance project that initially received no applicants illustrated this perfectly. When decomposed into its component tasks, the project revealed nine distinct activities, with only one actually requiring traditional finance skills. The rest demanded expertise in data science, machine learning, business development, and other areas.

“To accomplish one seemingly finance project was actually nine activities. Maybe one of them required financial skills, and all of the rest required skills that do not sit in finance. The work is going to dictate who works on what and at what percentage.”

Fatma Hedaya, Group Head of Talent, Holcim

Workforce Readiness with Ascend

Gloat’s Ascend powers Holcim’s talent marketplace, giving employees visibility into opportunities across the global organization and empowering them to raise their hands for projects that match their skills and career aspirations. The platform recommends personalized growth opportunities including roles, projects, mentors, and learning, helping employees develop the capabilities needed for AI-era work.

This combination of work orchestration and workforce readiness creates a virtuous cycle: as Mosaic breaks down work into tasks, Ascend matches the right talent to each task and surfaces development opportunities to close skill gaps.

Driving adoption through meaningful conversations

Rather than relying on top-down mandates, Hedaya took a consultative approach to building buy-in. She held individual conversations with executive committee members to understand their specific business challenges and demonstrate how the platform could address them.

“I would sit with our ExCo and talk about our business problems in the meeting. But then I would go speak to every single ExCo member about their angle of the business problem. Some people are interested because they want visibility over everybody. Others want to create very cool things and don’t have the capacity within their organization.”

Fatma Hedaya, Group Head of Talent, Holcim

The Results

• ~50% of projects are cross-functional
• 50% of projects span multiple geographies

Holcim’s implementation demonstrates that bridging the AI productivity gap is possible even in traditional industrial companies:

Cross-functional collaboration at scale

Nearly half of all projects are now staffed by employees from different functions. By breaking down work into tasks rather than jobs, Holcim can match the right skills to each piece of work regardless of where those skills sit in the organization.

Global talent mobility

Half of all projects involve team members from multiple geographic locations. Employees across Holcim’s 45 markets can now contribute to work anywhere in the organization, dramatically expanding the talent pool available for any initiative.

Reduced external dependency

By orchestrating work more intelligently and matching internal talent to emerging needs, Holcim has reduced its reliance on external outsourcing.

“Certain things that we used to send to BPOs, the external outsourcing like call centers and so on, we are now not leveraging them as much.”

Fatma Hedaya, Group Head of Talent, Holcim

Data-driven confidence in AI workforce strategy

The platform has provided Holcim with concrete evidence that employees want to work on cross-functional projects and can adapt to new ways of working. What was once dismissed as unrealistic for a conservative industrial company is now backed by data.

Bridge Your AI Productivity Gap

Holcim’s transformation demonstrates that closing the AI productivity gap requires more than technology. It demands strategic insight into where AI can deliver the greatest impact, the infrastructure to orchestrate work between people and AI, and a prepared workforce ready for AI-driven change.

As Hedaya’s experience shows, organizations that treat AI as a people transformation, not just a technology deployment, are the ones achieving real impact.

“If we never try, we’ll never know. Let’s do it.”

Holcim Senior Leader

Ready to turn your AI investment into real workforce impact?