Salespeople live on fast, correct answers. When a customer asks a hard product question and the answer sits in one expert's head, the salesperson waits, the customer waits and the expert gets the same question again next week.
Dräger, a family-run business in its fifth generation founded in Lübeck in 1889, faced this at scale. Its salespeople often spent several days finding answers, spread across more than 6,000 colleagues in product management, sales, marketing and the Dräger Academy.
What Dräger did
According to a customer story published by Starmind, Dräger deployed the Starmind knowledge-sharing platform, used on a mobile device or in a browser. A salesperson asks a question, an AI algorithm identifies and notifies several experts, and the workload is spread among them. Every answer is stored, so a question that was answered once can be found again instantly.
Michael Wylezek, Account Manager at Dräger, describes the result in one line: "I can get high-quality answers in hours rather than days". Florian Volkenand, Head of Global Academy Business & Soft Skills, Dräger, adds: "We started using Starmind to help our salespeople make their work easier and provide more effective customer service, but that's just the beginning."
What it already gives the business
Starmind reports, citing Dräger employee surveys, that salespeople saw a 12 percentage point increase in working time, because they now spend 48% less time searching for experts and knowhow. In the first 15 months, 6,369 questions were asked and answered, and each answer has been reused an average of 5.2 times, as reported by Starmind.
Repeat questions fell too. Starmind reports that only 18% of questions are now raised and answered several times, compared to 50% shortly after implementation. Dräger is far larger than the businesses we work with, and that is the useful part: the model is simple enough for a team of twenty to copy.
The ExValu perspective, a hypothesis
Where a Company Brain could take it next
A Q&A base records answers. The experts' reasoning, the exceptions and the product history behind each answer often stay unwritten.
A Company Brain could connect each stored answer to its source documents and to the expert who approved it, and flag answers for review when a product changes. In a smaller business, the same setup frees the owner, who is usually the expert everyone asks. That is our hypothesis.
What an owner and a buyer would look for
Track how long a question waits for an answer, how many questions repeat and how many reach the owner or one key expert.
A buyer looks for answers that live in the business with a named expert behind each one, plus a log showing they are reused and kept current. Keep customer personal data out of questions and answers unless there is a clear need and a legal basis.
The problem behind this case
Facing the same problem?
About this analysis
* The image is AI-generated and does not show Dräger staff. The facts and figures on this page come from the published source named below.
This is an independent ExValu analysis of a published case. Facts, figures and names are as reported in the source below, which our team checked on October 14, 2026. The ideas for next steps are our own perspective and make no claim about conditions inside Dräger. To request a correction or removal, write to [email protected].
Primary source: Vendor customer story, Starmind, undated. Available at www.starmind.ai/customers/drager.