Customer Stories / Engineering, Construction & Real Estate

2025
holcim logo

Holcim Upskills Workforce and Improves Invoicing with Generative AI and AWS Skills Guild

Holcim is transforming its business with the cloud and empowered its staff to innovate by launching a cloud upskilling program, the I&O Skills Guild.

85%

participation rate in the I&O Skills Guild

38%

growth in teams trained on AWS in just 1 year

90%

reduction in manual invoice processing using generative AI

100

cloud practitioners sharing cloud skills across the organization

Overview

Holcim is a global leader in innovative and sustainable building solutions. Based in Europe and operating in more than 70 countries, Holcim’s 63,448 employees are driven by the purpose of building progress for people and the planet across regions and improving living standards for all. As part of Holcim’s vision of maintaining industry leadership and being ready for whatever the future holds, it embarked on a cloud-first strategy, modernizing its infrastructure and business applications and utilizing generative AI to drive innovation and enhance efficiency.

Leaders at Holcim recognized that, in the face of rapid technological change, the shift was about more than just new infrastructure and applications: Holcim would also need to build internal cloud expertise and start a cultural shift toward collaboration and innovation.

With that aim in view Holcim partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AWS Training and Certification to launch the I&O Skills Guild. This comprehensive upskilling program was based on AWS Skills Guild, which helps businesses develop a culture of learning to accelerate cloud adoption and digital transformation. The program delivered cloud training and enablement to help Holcim unlock new levels of efficiency and innovation with AWS and cloud technology. Once teams were confidently collaborating with their new cloud skills, Holcim saw virtually immediate business impact through a transformative generative AI solution called Omnivore.

Opportunity | Modernizing Infrastructure for Digital Transformation

Becoming a cloud-first organization and embracing the possibilities of generative AI offered Holcim the opportunity to enhance agility and operational efficiency. By addressing the limitations of traditional data centers, Holcim wanted to position itself to deliver more innovative, scalable services and foster sustainable growth.

With the aim of creating a lasting cultural shift toward innovation and collaboration, Holcim offered nearly 500 IT employees the opportunity to upskill in AWS and cloud technologies. By empowering its existing workforce to confidently drive change rather than outsourcing, Holcim has been able to more quickly and cost-effectively make use of the cloud and adapt to new challenges, thus securing its competitive edge in an evolving market.

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The I&O Skills Guild helped us build AI-powered solutions that have reduced 90 percent of manual processing, freeing up focus for strategic priorities.”

Craig Doroserwicz
Global Head of Infrastructure and Operations, Holcim

Solution | Building the I&O Skills Guild Program

Using the AWS Skills Guild model, Holcim customized the framework to fit its business requirements and launched the I&O Skills Guild. The program was structured to provide both technical and nontechnical employees with the knowledge needed to confidently and effectively utilize the newly available cloud technology. In the first 2 years, more than 50 training sessions were delivered on topics ranging from generative AI and machine learning to data engineering and cloud security.

The program achieved impressive engagement, with an 85 percent participation rate and a 38 percent increase globally in teams trained in AWS services. Holcim also cultivated a network of over 100 cloud practitioners, who served as champions for cloud adoption across the organization. Those champions, drawn from both technical and nontechnical roles, helped foster a culture of collaboration and innovation at the ground level. By sharing cloud best practices and a common cloud language among different business groups within Holcim, they helped drive interest in the cloud and more successful adoption across the company’s operations.

The I&O Skills Guild emphasized hands-on, collaborative learning environments that allowed employees to immediately apply their newfound cloud and AI skills. By tailoring sessions to suit varying levels of expertise, the program made cloud knowledge accessible to a wide range of employees, creating a shared understanding of cloud concepts across the business. “The I&O Skills Guild helped us build AI-powered solutions that have reduced 90 percent of manual invoice processing, freeing up focus for strategic priorities,” says Craig Doroserwicz, global head of infrastructure and operations at Holcim. “That has in turn delivered meaningful business impact and improved experiences for our customers.”

Outcome | Empowering Employees and Driving Business Impact Using Amazon Bedrock

The I&O Skills Guild has been instrumental in Holcim’s successful cloud transformation, and the new culture of collaboration and innovation quickly delivered tangible business outcomes with the AWS Cloud and generative AI.

One group of employees, many of whose members had taken part in the program, developed Omnivore, an AI-powered invoice processing system powered by large language models. The generative AI capabilities of Omnivore were facilitated in large part by Amazon Bedrock, the simplest way to build and scale generative AI applications with foundational models. The solution automated the classification and routing of invoices, reducing the manual workload by an impressive 90 percent for approximately 2,000 invoices every month in just a single country. The solution dramatically increased efficiency, and freed up staff for more valuable, strategic tasks, while operating at a substantial reduction in processing costs. “Omnivore has been a game changer, helping us reduce manual work while improving quality and timeliness,” says Carlos García de la Noceda, head of global I&O cloud architecture at Holcim.

With the simple scalability of cloud technology, Omnivore is already set to expand across Europe. The Omnivore solution demonstrates how employee-driven solutions can make a huge impact when an empowered workforce is given permission to innovate and collaborate with cloud skills.

With AWS cloud technology, a skilled and empowered workforce, and an innovative cloud-first culture in the organization, Holcim is poised to capitalize on emerging trends, including increasing demand for sustainable construction materials and the growing adoption of digital technologies in construction. Through the I&O Skills Guild, Holcim is now well positioned to be a forward-thinking, cloud-powered leader in the industry.

About Holcim

Holcim is an international provider of innovative and sustainable building solutions. With over 63,000 employees around the world, Holcim partners with its customers in the shared goal of improving living standards for people in all walks of life.

AWS Services Used

Amazon Bedrock

Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Luma (coming soon), Meta, Mistral AI, poolside (coming soon), Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities you need to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI.

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AWS Skills Guild

AWS Skills Guild is a consultative engagement designed to inspire organization-wide cloud adoption and unlock innovation. It accelerates the cultural and technological shifts necessary for transformation by helping develop and launch a bespoke cloud enablement initiative using the AWS Skills Guild framework.

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AWS Training and Certification

Our downloadable Ramp-Up Guides offer a variety of resources to help build your skills and knowledge of the AWS Cloud. Each guide, features carefully selected digital training, classroom courses, videos, whitepapers, certifications and more to remove the guesswork of learning AWS.

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