Faster decisions: How an AI agent is redefining executive workflows at one of the world’s largest building materials companies

Mexico-based Cemex, a global building materials company, is rolling out an AI-powered financial agent that is already transforming how top executives work, plan and make better informed decisions.

About 100 senior leaders already have access to the agent, called LUCA Bot. It is trainedon thousands of internal, often confidential, economic and financial data points - like monthly sales and cement, ready mix and aggregates plants'performance. LUCA Bot is also specifically designed to quickly provide insights into Cemex's finances to help executives act faster on critical business matters.

LUCA Bot supports Cemex's digital controllership strategy by providing access to financial key performance indicators (KPIs) across multiple channels, which promotes a data-driven culture and ongoing business performance analysis, the company says.

Authorized users - from executive committee members to mid-level officers - can interact with LUCA Bot through a natural language chat via web and mobile. The data is granular enough to allow detailed analysis of any business line's performance worldwide.

After a successful trial period, the agent was officially launched last year. Cemex's executives say the tool has been a game changer, saving them precious time and providing access to reliable internal financial information around the clock.

By streamlining internal processes, LUCA Bot makes it easier to get fast answers to pressing problems, boosting efficiency across the company, Cemex executives point out. It also provides them with real-time updates on monthly goals.

"It's an improvement in financial information visibility that enables you to activate operational levers," says Fausto Sosa, Cemex's information technology vice president. "It's a self-service tool that should help to find operational efficiencies."

For Sosa, LUCA Bot represents "an opportunity to interact with information, to have a more enriching dialogue with data thanks to prompts."

Another executive accessed critical financial data during a trip to Madrid - even while colleagues in Mexico were offline. A third received a detailed financial analysis within seconds, providing a solid foundation for a quarterly executive committee presentation.

Before LUCA Bot, executives often relied on phone calls, lengthy email chains or hours - sometimes days - of searching through reports to find the information they needed. Now, it's just a click away.

"It's all about agility, opportunity and simplicity," says Jaime Martínez, Cemex's head of global controllership. "It's far more efficient than having lots of people answering questions, and one major advantage is having a unified source of information- you no longer have to rely on who you ask."