When Cemex, a multinational building materials company, recognized the need to create an AI tool to increase the agility of their sales force and enable them to adapt solutions to meet their customers’ needs in a matter of minutes, they too understood. that efficient human collaboration within the company was crucial to the success of their plan.
The result of this combination was the creation of a “sales copilot” called Technical Xpert, an AI assistant running on Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service with GPT 4.0 and with a simple interface, working like a chat window in Teams.
Stimulated by a need in operations in Mexico and with support from the technology area, it was possible to create a tool powered by AI with the capacity to increase efficiency in sales of its products and even change the way the company offers holistic solutions to its customers. your customers. That’s how Noel Martínez Pérez and Alan Cortez joined forces to build a solution that would help the sales team quickly navigate Cemex’s vast array of products, ranging from traditional concrete and cement to its new suite of sustainable building materials.
“I think we are at a time where we need to integrate this type of tool into our daily processes, because although we have been working well for a long time, I think that with this innovation we can reach higher levels of quality and efficiency”, says Alan Cortez, head of Cemex México Commercial Information. “And that’s exactly what we’re looking for, to think outside the box and, in this way, evolve our processes”
For Cemex Data Scientist, Noel Martínez Pérez, “quantitative data often provides information that we believe to be enlightening, but this data does not always reflect what the customer needs”, he ponders. That’s why the synergy between the two departments, commercial and IT, was crucial to finding the right co-pilot.
During the development period of the AI tool, Martínez and Cortez tested different elements and enhanced different functionalities to provide the best possible product to their teams and consumers.
“I think the types of details that the bot should look at come from this synergy between the teams, where they tell us which features of the bot are useful, and based on those user recommendations, we program and deploy the tool to do exactly what was intended. suggested”, says Martínez and adds: “we refined the solution until it was ready.”
The result of these efforts, along with the partnership with Microsoft, is a solution that aligns with Cemex’s broader set of digital transformation. Technical Xpert is a co-pilot that allows sales agents to use AI to obtain all pertinent product information – almost like an online newsletter – and deliver the best materials to customers, all in a fraction of the time. The tool was recently launched in Mexico and sales agents are starting to incorporate it with customers, with revolutionary results.
“This new tool is sending us information much faster so we can talk to customers and at the same time ask technical questions like what can I offer this customer based on what they are demanding of me ?” says Cristhian Alday, Commercial consultant at Cemex based in La Paz, Baja, California. “For me, getting this type of information in the past would have taken me to consult at least four people, and the response time would have been around an hour. And now everything is resolved in just nine seconds,” she says.
Cemex has a network of sales agents throughout Mexico, structured to provide potential customers with solutions that work best for them, always considering each specific project. But with so many different construction options available today, even the most experienced agents may be unsure when recommending whether the best option would be a roller-compacted concrete product or cement mortar for masonry, for example.
“Sometimes it is very difficult for the sales force to know all the different product lines, due to their enormous variety, and the technical characteristics of each one of them”, says Fausto Sosa, vice president of Technology at Ida Cemex. “We are constantly launching new products, increasingly sustainable and with different characteristics. So, it becomes a little complex to understand all the details.”
This led the president of Cemex Mexico to suggest building a tool to help the sales force become more agile and effective in its recommendations. “He wanted to have a sales force in which professionals had quick access to relevant information, because they are not in offices, they are on the streets”, says José Luis de Apodaca, global director of Data Science at Cemex. “It’s a role that, generally, the person doesn’t sit at a desk, analyzing panels. So, we needed a very efficient and available tool”
As part of this shift, Cemex turned to Microsoft and the power of AI for help. How could the company create an agile, knowledgeable tool that empowers its sales agents to make more valuable and efficient product recommendations for its customers? On each major construction project, sales agents needed to assemble a complex set of necessary materials, while also providing options that took into account environmental factors, land composition, and costs.
For the Microsoft team involved in creating Copilot, the challenge was to ensure that Cemex had an architecture that met its needs and was highly secure. The back and forth during its development ensured that the project considered all variables and could therefore be flexible as new products entered the Cemex system, increasingly increasing the range of options available.
This custom copilot was built and trained with the right information over four months. This required providing the tool with hundreds of pages of documents and manuals with technical information on a wide range of products that Cemex offers to customers. It also needed to be easy to update, as new developments in materials would allow sales agents to have the latest products available to suggest to customers.
