Linde, a leading global industrial gases and engineering company, serves sectors ranging from healthcare to manufacturing and welding. To meet the high expectations of today’s B2B buyers, Linde set out to unify its fragmented content and commerce experiences into one seamless, AI-powered journey.
Selling industrial gases isn’t as simple as selling consumer goods — buyers also need instant access to technical documentation, safety data sheets, and support content to complete a purchase. With Coveo, Linde is delivering a streamlined path from discovery to selection to support, built for the complexities of B2B commerce.
The Challenge: From Complexity to Clarity
When Pascal Janzik took on the role of leading ecommerce and digital marketing across Linde’s Europe West region — including Germany, France, Switzerland, Benelux, Spain, and Portugal — he brought with him a customer-first mindset shaped by his time at several well-known tech companies.
“My previous experiences taught me to prioritize what matters most: the customer, performance metrics, and delivering relevance at every touchpoint. It shaped the way I approach digital strategy today.”
But at Linde, he inherited a digital experience shaped more by internal structures than customer needs. Customers had to navigate multiple portals to place an order or locate essential information. Product catalogs were isolated from supporting content. Only about 15% of users used search — most didn’t trust it. The result: low digital adoption and continued reliance on manual order entry via phone and email.
“Too much information, or rather, not enough structured in the right way,” Pascal explained. “We needed to shift from an inside-out approach to a customer-first experience.”
What made the challenge even more nuanced was Linde’s complex product environment. With hundreds to a few thousand products per country, even a modest catalog presented significant operational challenges due to logistical processes, shipping sensitivities (e.g., dry ice), and the need for localized handling rules.
Why Linde Chose Coveo
Pascal knew that B2B buyers increasingly expected their experience to match what they knew from B2C. But he also knew that simply adding a search bar wouldn’t be enough. Linde needed an intelligence layer — one that could power discovery across products and content, automate merchandising logic, and reduce dependency on IT-heavy processes.
“Search is one part,” he said. “But the real value is in how Coveo helps us learn from data, automate decisions, and deliver relevance at scale.”
Coveo was selected to unify the commerce experience. By combining product discovery with instant access to supporting documentation — without forcing users to click through multiple sections — Linde aimed to change not just how buyers interacted with the platform, but how much they trusted it.
Importantly, Coveo also promised to relieve internal bottlenecks. “Our commerce system is limited when it comes to tasks like ranking products in a category,” Pascal noted. “So, we’re happy to let Coveo’s AI take care of that automatically.”
Implementation Highlights
Linde rolled out Coveo in phases, starting with AI-search that replaced outdated, menu-based navigation. The system was designed to return unified results across products, technical documentation, and FAQs — ensuring that whether a buyer searched for a product, a specification, or a process question, they would get relevant answers immediately.
Product recommendations were added to help buyers discover additional items, and automated product listing pages (PLPs) are now underway, where AI will sort products based on financial KPIs like conversion potential and margin. This is particularly important for Linde, where merchandising resources are limited and many products require complex onboarding workflows.
The integrated FAQ and product documents are more than post-purchase tools, they are critical touchpoints in the B2B decision-making process. “Customers need to see the spec sheet or safety documentation before they commit.” Pascal emphasized.
Interestingly, Linde also discovered that users preferred search over other tools. “More people are now finding their way to FAQs through search which shows just how much they trust experience.”
Measurable Business Benefits
Even early in the rollout, Linde has seen clear, measurable results:
- Conversion rate increase: Driving significant additional revenue for the business.
- Increased FAQ engagement: Indicating effective case deflection and reduced support center burden.
- Improved UX: Users are showing greater trust in search, reflecting changing user expectations and habits.
These behavioral shifts have also translated into operational efficiencies. More orders are flowing through the digital channel which is in turn reducing manual entry and cutting down on the time staff spend managing support calls or invoice requests.
“If we can prove that customers only need to use search to get what they want, adoption will skyrocket,” Pascal said. “And that’s exactly where we’re headed.”
Looking Ahead: GenAI and Experience Unification
Linde is already looking ahead to the next stage of its work with Coveo. The team is already planning the next phase of transformation: unifying the customer journey even further through AI-powered merchandising and generative experiences.
Smart PLP automation is a top priority, freeing up time by removing the need to manually sort or promote products. Generative answering is also on the roadmap, starting with use cases like summarizing product comparisons or answering complex pre-purchase questions. Pascal envisions a future where a customer can enter a single query and receive a comprehensive, contextual result — whether that’s a product, document, or AI-generated answer.
“Our goal is to have a single input, a search box, that simply finds what the customer needs,” he said. “And with Coveo, we’ve already solved a lot of that.”
Recommended reading | From Search to Intent Box: The Future of Product Discovery
A Passion Project at the Intersection of AI and Search
For Pascal, this initiative is more than just digital transformation, it combines two of his long-time passions — search and artificial intelligence. From building early SEO strategies in the 2000s to experimenting with generative AI in his personal time, Pascal has always been drawn to technologies that remove friction and enhance relevance.
“I love search. I love AI. That’s why I love this project,” he said. “It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve had the chance to work on.”
Final Thoughts
Linde’s partnership with Coveo has helped the company move from fragmented, resource-heavy ecommerce to a smarter, scalable, and more customer-centric digital model. By putting AI at the core of product discovery and surrounding it with relevant content and automation, Linde is building an experience designed for the demands of modern B2B commerce.
Pascal notes: “We’re not at the finish line — but we’re on the path. In the end it’s about the KPIs, and they’re looking great. And Coveo is helping us push boundaries.”