Cosentino is a family-owned Spanish multinational based in Almería. It has traveled a path that began back in 1945 when Eduardo Cosentino and Eduarda Justo set up a small marble manufacturing workshop, but it is the couple’s children who, in the 1970s, set up the germ of what Cosentino is today with the creation of Mármoles Cosentino. Today, the multinational has a presence in more than 120 countries, and is known throughout the Globe for the production of high-value surfaces such as Silestone and Dekton, supported by strong investment in R&D and an unwavering commitment to innovation. Proof of this are the levels of automation they have in a good part of their processes, from distribution to the storage of materials, including the innovation department.
However, the company has not only transformed the materials that cover homes and buildings around the world; Now, together with Microsoft, it is leading a digital metamorphosis that places it as one of the first Frontier Firms in Spain. This transformation is not a cosmetic change. Under the direction of its Global CIO, Rafael Domene, Cosentino has embarked on a journey towards an “Autonomous Enterprise” model, an organization where data, processes and artificial intelligence operate in an integrated way to maximize human value and operational efficiency. The objective they pursue is to stop being a company that simply uses technology to become an entity that breathes intelligence in each of its processes.
Decoupling the past to lead as a ‘Frontier Firm’
The pillar on which this ambitious project is based is the radical modernization of its technological infrastructure. For 25 years, Cosentino has been what Domene describes as an organization deeply linked to traditional management systems. “We are mainly SAP users. In fact, we are a reference for SAP in the world, not because we have the largest, but because we have almost the entire SAP portfolio,” explains the Global CIO in reference to the vast implementation of business management software that has governed its factories and logistics. The manager says that the team has been “25 years developing and developing SAP, which is now a giant within the company’s IT infrastructure.”
However, to achieve the agility necessary in today’s market, the company has had to “decouple” this traditional core. The strategy has consisted of migrating its SAP to the Azure cloud, achieving, as Domene assured, astonishing improvements of more than 97% in critical times. This migration is the first step to overcome the limitations of rigid systems. According to Domene, the current approach is to move away from dependence on complex interfaces because although “traditional systems are great, they don’t give you the necessary flexibility or agility.”
One of the most important changes is happening today, with the incorporation of agentic AI. As the CIO of Cosentino stated, the real change occurs by “agentizing” these layers: “What we can now do, what we are doing is with AI, we are agentizing the first two levels and the backend below is being modified to support, not a traditional database.” By “we are integrating AI transversally, allowing decision-making to be smarter and faster.” With this, Cosentino has consolidated itself as a Frontier Firm, going from executing deterministic processes and working with structured databases to non-deterministic processes and unstructured databases: “Now we record conversations, we record videos, we record images and that has content and is processed,” says Domene.
CLAR: The voice revolution that frees commercial talent
One of the most tangible milestones of the multinational’s alliance with Microsoft is the development of CLAR, an artificial intelligence agent designed specifically for Cosentino’s commercial team. The genesis of CLAR arose from a critical need detected by management: the fact that the sales department dedicated, on average, 36% of its time to administrative tasks and data reporting instead of selling.
To solve this, Cosentino did not create another application for the computer, but instead opted for the device that salespeople actually use: the mobile phone. CLAR allows salespeople to manage their agenda, prepare meetings, and track opportunities exclusively through voice. “We remove all the applications and give them a personal assistant, a secretary who is always next to the salesperson… they no longer have to know what is underneath and what tool is being used, neither ERP, nor PowerPoint, nor Excel…” highlights the Global CIO.
CLAR’s impact goes beyond operational efficiency; attacks structural problems of commercial management such as the veracity of the pipeline. CLAR eliminates all subjectivity by constantly accompanying the salesperson and capturing data naturally. In addition, the agent helps to sell better by providing strategic knowledge: “He helps you with knowledge that the salesperson does not always have. For example, he will give you the keys about the client, he will inform you about the competition and what arguments you have to give so that the client does not go with the competition.” This journalist was able to see in a live demonstration how the agent himself worked: “I am Clar, Cosentino’s digital sales assistant… My goal is for the team to be able to concentrate on closing sales and strengthening the relationship with our clients.”
From predictive simulation to the autonomous management of the future
Cosentino’s vision does not stop at the commercial level. The company has adopted Microsoft Discovery, a supercomputing and AI modeling platform designed to accelerate scientific research. This tool allows you to simulate and predict the behavior of new material formulations before their physical production, reducing costs and experimentation times.
This approach is the final piece of the Autonomous Enterprise puzzle. For Rafael Domene, this concept is vital to sustain the company’s dizzying pace of growth, which in some markets reaches 30%. The CIO reasoned graphically about the dangers of depending exclusively on manual processes: “If for every service that Cosentino provides I have to have someone typing for the process to move forward, I have a problem… Because the more I grow I need more fingers to type and more fingers… the bottleneck is formed.”
The goal is to achieve a model where the human factor is not a bottleneck due to repetitive tasks. “Autonomous Enterprise for us is to reduce dependence on people in sections that are not critical,” explained Domenec. The integration of solutions such as Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot reinforces this total productivity strategy. Domene, however, is clear that it is not just about digitizing, since “digitizing does not mean that you are going to improve”, but about automating so that people operate in an integrated manner with AI, optimizing decision-making and accelerating the creation of value in a competitive global environment.
