Coates cuts bottlenecks and proves value with Optimizely One

For 140 years, Coates has been the company behind Australia's biggest construction, mining, and infrastructure projects — hiring everything from hammers to excavators across 145 branches and nearly two million assets. But when Stuart Freer, Chief Information & Digital Officer, looked at the digital side of the business, the reality didn't match the scale. Marketing, content, and e-commerce teams had to go through IT for every change, and legacy systems were slowing the pace of delivery.

Optimizely's DXP changed that. Stuart and his team selected a headless CMS through a competitive tender process, choosing Optimizely for its capability, reusability, and scalability — not just as a content platform, but as the foundational layer connecting Coates' digital experience to its quoting, hiring, and sales systems.

Since going live in August 2025, organic traffic has already been trending upward, and the team has the self-serve tools to move at the pace the business demands. But for Stuart, this is just phase one. Phase two brings experimentation and Opal AI into the mix, while separate AI pilots — including an agentic "equipment specialist" that responds to customer inquiries in moments rather than hours — are already proving value across the business.

It's a deliberate approach: prove the value in small ways before betting the house. As Stuart puts it, that's not wisdom — it's the lesson from making mistakes.

140 Years of History, and a Modernisation Journey Ahead

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Stuart reports directly to the CEO as Chief Information & Digital Officer, driving the transformation of Coates into a digitally enabled business — across 145 branches, a million assets worth $1.85 billion, and clients ranging from BHP and Rio Tinto to government defence and civil construction
Before Optimizely, marketing, content, and e-commerce teams had to go through IT for every change — a model Stuart describes as "just not palatable" for teams that need to move at the pace of the market
Coates chose Optimizely's headless DXP for the capability to change content, navigation, and search and discovery, but fundamentally because it forms the base layer enabling the broader digital transformation, with this being just the first phase

Selecting a tool like Optimizely really is about giving our teams the tools to allow them to operate. Where we were before meant that they had to come to IT. We had to have development changes made all the time. And that just isn't palatable if you are in the marketing space or you're in content creation or in digital commerce.

Stuart Freer — Chief Information & Digital Officer

From RFP to Phase Two — and Organic Traffic Already Climbing

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Coates went through a formal RFP as part of its ASX-listed governance requirements, distilling the field down to Optimizely DXP — not just for its features, but because it forms the foundational base connecting to other services like Coates Connect and their MySales quoting and hiring platform via APIs
Since going live in August, organic traffic has already been increasing thanks to improved content and SEO capability — and the team is now converging other platforms into the digital experience layer before moving into phase two: experimentation
Coates isn't a typical retailer — success is measured across two channels: a direct revenue channel where customers hire from 145 categories of equipment (hammers to excavators), and a lead gen channel that drives inquiries through to operations centres, branches, or enterprise sales teams

We are seeing positive increases in organic traffic because of the changes we've made to the platform, because of the content we've been able to put out there, because of the SEO capability. So the team's feeling very excited about the future of what we're gonna be able to do with Optimizely.

Stuart Freer — Chief Information & Digital Officer

AI Agents, Sentiment Analysis, and Keeping Up with the Pace

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Coates plans to leverage Opal for content, search, and discovery — but the broader AI ambition goes further, with an agentic "equipment specialist" already in pilot that chains together agents to respond to customer inquiries, find availability, price equipment, calculate transport costs, and respond in moments rather than minutes or hours
AI-powered sentiment analysis across contact centres is replacing traditional NPS programs — gauging customer sentiment instantly, auto-summarising calls, and feeding real-time coaching back to agents on how they could have handled interactions differently
Stuart frames AI across three lenses: growth (hunting for sales leads, responding to tenders faster with a human in the loop), operational leverage and efficiency, and making it easier for his people, while acknowledging that keeping up with the pace of change is the hardest part of the job for any CIO right now

Proof of Value, Not Proof of Concept

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Stuart's biggest lesson came from making mistakes early in his career — thinking IT could deliver a project on its own. At Coates, stakeholder sponsorship and business alignment are set from day one, with his team and the business sponsor's team working in lockstep
Honesty with the board is non-negotiable — Stuart doesn't pretend it's all sunshine and roses, instead having open conversations about resource challenges, pressure points, and what's needed to keep delivery on track
Coates runs "proof of values" rather than proof of concepts — testing the business case in small ways on a single branch, business unit, or product category before betting the house, an approach that's well supported by the leadership team and the board

Test the Value Before You Bet the House

Stuart Freer's approach to digital transformation at Coates isn't built on ambition alone — it's built on alignment. Every initiative starts with stakeholder sponsorship, honest board conversations, and a clear business case before a line of code is written.

That discipline is already paying off. Phase one of the Optimizely DXP rollout delivered a headless CMS that freed marketing and e-commerce teams from IT dependency, with organic traffic climbing since the August go-live. Phase two brings experimentation and Opal AI into the mix. And in parallel, AI pilots across the business — from agentic equipment specialists responding in moments rather than hours to real-time sentiment analysis replacing traditional NPS — are proving value in small, measurable ways before scaling.

For a 140-year-old business with a million assets across 145 branches, the transformation was never going to happen overnight. But Stuart isn't trying to transform everything at once. He's proving the value first, keeping the teams energised, keeping the chairman happy, and building the foundation that makes the next phase possible. As he puts it, if you're silly enough to say it's all perfect, you're gonna fall hard.