Future shaper: Can Dorfner increase sales by 40 percent with AI?

70 meters deep is the open-pit mine in Hirschau. Over an area of 47 hectares - the size of 66 football fields - the company Gebrüder Dorfner extracts white kaolin here. This fine, iron-free rock is used primarily as a raw material for porcelain, cosmetics, in the paper industry, and for particularly opaque paint. The headquarters of the 130-year-old company sits like an island in the mining area. The West and East fields have crept alarmingly close to the main headquarters.

The company will not be able to mine here forever. But thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), Dorfner has managed to use kaolin more efficiently and slow down the mining process. And this is not the only positive effect that Dorfner has achieved through the use of AI. Since 2020, the company has been using artificial intelligence. This way, it can manage with fewer raw materials and extend the mining of the deposit by decades.

This shows that even a raw materials company can shape its future and that of its employees with AI - and the operation gradually emancipates itself from the raw materials. Previously, around one million tons of raw earth were mined per year; this amount has been reduced to around one-third through AI.

More important, however, is what company boss Mirko Mondan says: "At the same time, we have grown in results and sales." The initial situation: "Same products, same industries, same strategy, just more of it." Dorfner mainly extracts kaolin and quartz sand, roughly in a 1:4 ratio.

The quartz sand is refined in special processes, colored, and formulated with additives, for example, for flooring or very durable, polymer-based kitchen sinks, but also for medical glasses and particularly high-quality glass constructions. However, when Mondan joined Dorfner in 2020, right in the middle of the Corona crisis, the supply chains no longer worked, sustainability requirements had increased, and the perspective on mining on site was limited.

As CEO of the company development department, Reinhard Kräuter, who has been with the company for more than 40 years, recalls: "The strategic approach was more focused on gaining more customers abroad." This did not work during the Corona crisis. The break that Mondan made was radical.

Now, they think "cleverly different," formulates Kräuter. The initial spark: More than a treasure trove of raw materials Mondan, who had previously founded and sold two start-ups, quickly realized that the company sits not only on a treasure trove of raw materials but also on a treasure trove of data.

In the company with 300 employees and around €100 million in sales in 2025, recipe data had been collected over decades in various Excel sheets "always in the same format," Mondan recalls, "with far too many pieces of information that we did not really need for our business but are, of course, brutally important for AI." Where AI specifically helps: Faster, more targeted, less material Thanks to AI, the many laboratory records made sense.

The lifting of the data treasure could begin. In the first step, the AI had to be fed with the data. In the second step, customer wishes were identified, which then became recipes with the help of AI in the third step. Now, Dorfner is already at the fourth step, says Oliver Drum, head of application technology coatings:

"We no longer have to test many recipes in reality today and can use AI to check very specifically how the properties turn out." What used to take months is now available to customers within a few days. The benefit is not only in speed but also in resource usage.

CEO Mondan calculates that one-third less kaolin is now used for the same color result. This is the core of the new model: less raw material, the same or higher performance - and thus a longer lifespan of the deposit.

Exactly this is the driving force for innovations, says innovation chief Tim Lüken: "My task is to ensure that the 130-year-old company will be at least another 130 years old." He creates the structures for this - with internal and external innovations, including investments in start-ups.

All of this is intended to help optimize the processes in the core business, produce more with fewer resources, and - thought even further into the future - also replace ingredients. Lüken does not rule out discovering entirely new business areas for Dorfner this way.

Independent from mining: Substitution, mixtures, new offers Mondan sees AI as a tool for exactly this: "If I know how my most valuable raw material really works, I can replace it more and more. We have even simulated coming along completely without our own raw materials."

This shifts the offer: away from the pure raw material, towards customer-specific solutions. Strategy chief Kräuter also thinks about further internationalization: "We are no longer tied to the deposit; we can provide the same functions worldwide."

The company plans to supply customers in Asia soon, but "with products - or better - with functions that we will produce there in the near future, with raw materials that are also purchased there." This way, complex deliveries around half the world are no longer necessary.

In addition, German customers who had bought cheaper abroad in recent years will now want to buy from Dorfner again, says Mondan: "We are being received much more friendly by our customers because delivery capability is becoming more important again than the cheaper price of kaolin, for example, from India."

AI as a cultural topic: Leadership, mobilization, ascent Friedrich Arnold, Managing Director Digital at the Hörmann Group and author of the book "Mut zur KI" (Courage for AI), praises Mondan's pioneering spirit: "He is pushing ahead and not talking much but trying out."