Hempel: a working prototype in a single day

The challenge

Hempel's digital leadership wanted first-hand understanding of what AI assisted development can deliver, beyond presentations and vendor claims. Like most global enterprises, Hempel has manual workflows that lack validation, audit trails, and management visibility. Digitising them traditionally requires scoped projects with significant lead time and budget.

The approach

Runah delivered a full-day workshop for Hempel's digital leadership, including the CTIO, the CISO, and others from the digital leadership team. The session followed the full working process of an AI assisted engineer: framing the problem, providing context, setting guardrails, and iterating toward production-shaped software.

A real manual workflow was selected as the case. Stakeholders in the room defined requirements as the application took shape, and Hempel's CISO provided security input directly, with the AI raising its own clarifying questions on access control, data handling, and auditability before implementation.

The outcome

By the end of the session, the team had a fully working full-stack prototype: a digital form with validation, an audit trail, and a management dashboard, running on mock data. Specified, built, and demonstrated in a single day.

The workshop gave Hempel's leadership a concrete, shared understanding of AI assisted development and its implications for how internal solutions can be prototyped and evaluated. It became the starting point for a broader collaboration on modernising core applications.

The first prompt gave us something generic, nothing surprising. But as we layered on the full approach, planning, skills, proper context, the result was quickly transforming into workable software. Seeing a working prototype in Hempel's own design, built in a single session, very clearly demonstrated the capability of AI assisted coding.

Rene Overgaard Jensen, Hempel