Fortune 300 Equipment Leader Transforms Frontline Decision-Making with Natural Language Intelligence
When you manage the world’s largest equipment rental fleet across more than 1,600 branch locations, the gap between data availability and data accessibility can cost millions in delayed decisions. United Rentals has closed that gap by deploying a Business Intelligence Agent built on Snowflake Intelligence—giving branch managers, sales leaders, and regional teams the power to query complex operational data using plain English.
The deployment represents a significant shift in how industrial services companies can leverage AI to empower distributed workforces. Rather than waiting for analyst reports or navigating complex dashboards, employees now ask questions conversationally and receive real-time, governed answers drawn from unified financial, fleet, telematics, and contract data.
Why Natural Language Querying Matters for Distributed Operations
Traditional business intelligence tools require technical expertise or analyst intermediaries. For a company operating at United Rentals’ scale—with teams spread across hundreds of locations making time-sensitive decisions about equipment allocation, pricing, and customer service—this friction translates directly into competitive disadvantage.
The Business Intelligence Agent eliminates this bottleneck. Powered by Snowflake Intelligence, the tool allows users to interact directly with enterprise data while maintaining strict governance controls. Every query respects existing data access permissions, ensuring users only see information they’re authorized to view. Responses aren’t just accurate—they’re explainable, using United Rentals’ established business definitions and metric calculations to ensure consistency across the organization.
“Our innovation vision is to apply technology in ways that strengthen our operational processes and help our people do their jobs more effectively,” said Tony Leopold, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer at United Rentals. “Snowflake helps us build on our existing data foundation with a trusted, governed platform.”
From Unified Data Foundation to AI-Driven Insights
The agent’s effectiveness stems from United Rentals’ data architecture. The company unified disparate data sources—financial operations, fleet management, telematics, pricing, contracts, accounts receivable, and internal documentation—on Snowflake’s platform. This single source of truth enables both traditional analyst workflows and conversational AI experiences to operate from the same governed foundation.
Since launching earlier this year, United Rentals has observed steady adoption growth and repeat usage—early indicators that the tool is meeting genuine operational needs rather than serving as a novelty. This approach demonstrates how AI can enhance decision-making velocity without sacrificing data governance or accuracy.
Accelerating Agent Development with Cortex Code
Beyond the Business Intelligence Agent, United Rentals is using Snowflake Cortex Code to accelerate the development pipeline for additional AI agents. This data-native coding agent automates enterprise development workflows, translating business logic into production-ready applications while automatically building evaluation sets and running performance tests.
The company has already begun developing agents for equipment health monitoring, telematics analysis, and other operational use cases—all built on the same secure, governed data foundation. Cortex Code’s automated testing capabilities allow United Rentals to validate agent reliability before deployment and ensure consistent behavior as usage scales.
“By enabling frontline teams to ask natural language questions and get real-time, trusted answers without waiting on manual analysis, they’re embedding intelligence directly into daily decision-making,” said Mike Gannon, Chief Revenue Officer at Snowflake.
The Operational Intelligence Advantage
United Rentals’ approach offers a blueprint for how enterprise AI should work: grounded in unified data, governed by clear access controls, and designed to augment rather than replace human judgment. By giving distributed teams immediate access to trusted insights, the company is shortening decision cycles while maintaining the data consistency that large-scale operations demand.
As United Rentals continues building additional agents, the foundation remains constant—a secure, scalable platform where AI-driven intelligence flows naturally from enterprise data to frontline decisions.
About Snowflake
Snowflake is the platform for the AI era, making it easy for enterprises to innovate faster and get more value from data. More than 12,600 customers around the globe, including hundreds of the world’s largest companies, use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to build, use and share data, applications and AI. With Snowflake, data and AI are transformative for everyone. Learn more at snowflake.com (NYSE: SNOW).
About United Rentals
United Rentals, Inc. is the largest equipment rental company in the world. The company has an integrated network of 1,639 rental locations in North America, 41 in Europe, 40 in Australia and 19 in New Zealand. In North America, the company operates in 49 states and every Canadian province. The company’s approximately 27,900 employees serve construction and industrial customers, utilities, municipalities, homeowners and others. The company offers a fleet of equipment for rent with a total original cost of $22.82 billion. United Rentals is a member of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, the Barron’s 400 Index and the Russell 3000 Index® and is headquartered in Stamford, Conn. Additional information about United Rentals is available at unitedrentals.com.
