// Case study · Italian design
Molteni Group

Share the craft. Keep the secret.

How Molteni Group, the house behind Molteni&C, UniFor and Citterio, put ninety years of product culture in the hands of the people who present, sell and specify it every day, across brands, markets and languages. Told with the discretion the house requires.

Molteni Group · Italian design since 1934Brands Molteni&C · UniFor · CitterioHQ Giussano (MB), ItalyReach Flagship stores worldwide
100 +
specialized assistants
80 +
training courses produced
4
languages of training produced
// In short
Company
Molteni Group, one of the houses that wrote the history of Italian design: founded in 1934 in Giussano, in the heart of Brianza, and still guided by the founding family. Three brands under one roof: Molteni&C for the home, UniFor for workplaces, institutions and cultural spaces, Citterio for partition and acoustic systems.
Sector
High-end design, from homes to headquarters: flagship stores worldwide, and interiors for landmarks like the Qatar National Library, the Gran Teatro La Fenice and Fondazione Feltrinelli. A catalogue measured in systems, finishes and made-to-measure rules, multiplied by three brands.
The challenge
Ninety years of deeply technical product knowledge concentrated in a small number of experts, spread across three brands and thousands of documents, and a worldwide network to support and train in several languages.
The solution
An ekory Company Brain organized the way the group itself is organized: more than a hundred specialized assistants, one per product world, plus a training factory producing courses and certification quizzes in four languages.
The pact
This story is deliberately incomplete. Value and scale are real; names, documents and internal structure stay confidential.
// The context

In high-end design, knowledge is the product.

Molteni Group describes itself as an industrial vocation with an artisanal soul, and it is not a slogan: ninety years of turning Brianza's craft culture into industrial excellence, from the Heritage collection that brought Gio Ponti's furniture back into production to the interiors of headquarters, parliaments and national libraries.

Behind that excellence sits an enormous body of knowledge: technical rules, finishes, compatibilities, made-to-measure procedures and a way of doing things refined over decades, across three brands. It has to reach showrooms, dealers, architects and contract teams in every market, in their language, and it has to be right the first time: at this level of the market there is no such thing as a small mistake.

Every day, from every market, the same kind of precise questions arrive:

// Which finishes are available for this system? // What are the rules for a made-to-measure request? // Which configuration fits this layout? // Is there a course on the new collection, in Spanish? // Where is the updated technical sheet? //

Answering used to mean finding the person who knows. And the people who know are, by definition, few.

// The challenge

A catalogue measured in combinations, not products.

The knowledge was real, deep and alive, multiplied across three brands. It just lived in the wrong place: in the heads of a few experts and in thousands of documents only they could navigate.

  • 01
    Complexity that compounds. Systems, finishes, materials, made-to-measure rules, across home, workplace and contract catalogues: the correct answer depends on precise combinations that only a handful of people master end to end.
  • 02
    Every market, its own language. The same question arrives from different countries in different languages. Producing support and training materials in four languages multiplied every effort.
  • 03
    The experts were the bottleneck. The people who know the catalogues best spent their days answering recurring questions instead of doing the work only they can do.
  • 04
    Craft risked staying oral. Decades of product culture passed from person to person. Every retirement, every departure, was a piece of the group's memory walking out the door.
// The objection

Structuring knowledge is not exposing it.

For a house whose advantage IS its product culture, the fear is legitimate: putting knowledge into a system sounds like giving it away. The opposite turned out to be true. A governed brain shares each piece of knowledge with exactly the people who need it, and with no one else. That is the difference between a public chatbot and a Company Brain.

// The solution

A brain organized like the group.

With ekory, Molteni Group built a Company Brain fed by its real materials and organized the way the group thinks: by brand, and inside each brand by product world.

We can describe the shape of it. The contents are theirs.

// product knowledge

A specialist for every product world

Not one generic chatbot: more than a hundred dedicated assistants, each mastering one area of one catalogue, its rules and its documents, and answering in seconds with the source cited.

// sales network

Answers where the sale happens

The people who present, quote and specify the collections, in flagship stores, showrooms and contract projects around the world, ask in their own language and get the correct answer, not the plausible one.

// training

A training factory in four languages

Courses, video lessons and certification quizzes by level, produced from the group's real materials and delivered in four languages. What used to be a production project is now a flow.

// governance

Shared inside, protected outside

Permissions by role, visibility by document, data in Europe, and no AI model trained on the group's content. The brain is shared; the craft stays home.

// What we're not telling you

Everything else is confidential. On purpose.

You won't read the names of the assistants, which documents feed them, how the knowledge is organized or which markets ask what. That configuration is part of Molteni Group's competitive advantage, and it stays theirs.

In a district where everyone knows everyone, the safest case study is the one that tells the value, not the configuration. If you bring ekory into your company, the same discretion applies to you: your setup is nobody's marketing, not even ours.

No assistant namesNo document listsNo internal structureAll the value

Your know-how deserves the same treatment: shared with your people, protected from everyone else.

Start free
// The scale

From a pilot to a working habit.

What we can say, in figures deliberately rounded down:

100 +
specialized assistants built
80 +
training courses produced
4
languages covered

The figures are rounded down on purpose, like everything else on this page. What they show is the part that matters: this is not a pilot with five users in an innovation lab. It is more than a hundred assistants and more than eighty courses, used by the people who sell and support the collections every day, in the languages of their markets.

// Why it worked

Four choices behind the value.

What made this different from “an AI experiment”.

Specialists, not a generic bot

One assistant per product world mirrors how the group itself is organized, brand by brand. People trust an expert; they test a generalist.

Training as an output, not a project

The same base that answers questions also produces the courses and the certification quizzes, in every language the network needs.

Adoption across roles

From headquarters to the sales network, each role sees exactly what it should: nothing more, nothing less.

Discretion by design

What is confidential stays confidential: permissions on the inside, discretion on the outside. Including this page.

// The next step

Your craft is worth protecting. And sharing.

Bring your materials: we build a first Eko on them in about a day, with the same discretion. What's yours stays yours, and your people finally get to use it.

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