“I am personally going to interrogate it and ask it every question I can throw at it,” Leopold recalls of his mindset before going into the four-hour hackathon. “I’m going to try to break it.”
But with three months of pilot testing preceding his stress testing efforts in December, Leopold felt confident enough to publicly announce on Wednesday the launch of the company’s new “Business Intelligence Agent,” which United Rentals built with cloud-software company Snowflake. The tool is now available to thousands of frontline employees across more than 1,600 branches that rent equipment serving the construction industry, industrials, utilities, and residential customers.
The tool allows employees to analyze financials, customer data, and operational questions using natural-language prompts, such as “which of my sales representatives are discounting the most?” or “which customers should I focus on today to collect revenue?” Previously, this information was shared through corporate reports or dashboards that an employee had to toggle through manually. With AI, United Rentals hopes to speed up the information-gathering process.
Leopold, who joined United Rentals in 2010 and held a variety of leadership roles before ascending to his current title late in 2024, says his framing is key. “We’re calling it the beta phase, because the one thing that’s very important—in particular with AI agents—is they’re not always perfect,” he adds.
United Rentals and Snowflake developed a “thumbs up, thumbs down” feature to encourage consistent user feedback, leveraging Snowflake’s Cortex Code, an AI coding agent designed to speed up the development, testing, and iteration of AI agents. When feedback is positive, the Business Intelligence Agent will surface similar responses in the future, at a faster pace. But for responses that fail to retrieve the right information, Leopold’s IT team works behind the scenes to tweak the prompt engineering and ensure the right data is available to be retrieved to address the user prompts.
This reflects an approach that’s evolved as more businesses deploy AI, especially as more complex agentic applications gain some traction. It isn’t enough to launch a new AI tool and make it available to thousands of employees with a dash of training. On the back end, technologists like Leopold are consistently mining human feedback and pushing through regular updates. Four out of every five users of the Business Intelligence Agent give it a thumbs up. “But we want 100%,” says Leopold. “That’s our aspiration.”
He says that traditionally, it would have taken up to 18 months to reach this level of penetration. AI’s user interface, Leopold says, is “so much more intuitive that I think the adoption potential is so much higher than what we had through traditional web applications.”
United Rentals’ AI investments focus on three core priorities. There is the handling of administrative tasks, data entry, and other business work at the company’s vast rental network. Then, there is an effort to make the online digital experience more seamless for customers, which includes the development of an AI search strategy to optimize content for ChatGPT, Gemini, and other LLMs. AI commerce is in the earliest stages of development and brands like United Rentals are only just beginning to wrap their heads around the concept.
Finally, the company is deploying AI tools for corporate employees. One application currently in the mix is the use of AI to help draft employee performance reviews. United Rentals invested in some training to encourage this use case, coaching 1,500 employees in a single week.
“2025 was really learning how to scale, how to do it securely, how to do it with enterprise data and connecting into legacy systems—not just chatting on an enterprise agent,” says Leopold. “2026 and 2027 is where we’re really starting to harvest some of those wins.”
John Kell
