United Rentals Equips 1,600+ Locations with Trusted Answers in Real Time

Before most people eat breakfast, United Rentals has dispatched tens of thousands of boom lifts, excavators and forklifts to construction sites, industrial facilities and municipal crews across three continents. A Fortune 300 company and the world’s largest equipment rental business, United Rentals runs over 1,600 locations with 24/7 support.

At that scale, every deployment decision turns on one question: What does the data say right now? Historically, answering those questions relied on pre-built reports and dashboards, which worked well for standard reporting but weren’t designed to answer every new question that arose. Any question outside the template meant either manually stitching data together in Excel or waiting on an analyst.

Frontline teams who relied on timely data often depended on others to answer new or unanticipated questions. For a company managing billions of dollars in equipment across more than 1,600 field locations, that lag showed up as slower responses and trends no one caught in time.

United Rentals turned to Snowflake CoWork to close that gap, building a Business Intelligence Agent over enterprise data that spans financial operations, fleet and telematics data, pricing, contracts, accounts receivable and internal documentation. Branch managers, sales leaders and regional teams can now ask natural language questions and get answers drawn from governed production data.

Cortex Analyst handles the query layer, and shared business definitions mean every response is consistent, explainable and aligned with how the business runs. Existing access controls carry through to every answer, so each person sees only the data they are authorized to see.

To build and iterate on that agent quickly, the team deployed Snowflake CoCo alongside CoWork. One example: Migrating data from a core business system required validating hundreds of tables, a task CoCo completed accurately and consistently in minutes. CoCo also builds evaluation sets and runs automated tests, so the team can validate changes before new capabilities reach users. The development loop that had once been a bottleneck is now fast enough to run continuously.

The two products strengthen each other. While CoWork delivers governed intelligence to the field, CoCo gives the team building it the speed to rapidly iterate, test and improve.

Today, thousands of questions a month flow through the Business Intelligence Agent at United Rentals, with employees across field locations, sales and finance using it daily.

Without filing a request, competing for bandwidth or knowing code, branch managers and district managers now query operational metrics, sales leaders pull customer activity trends, and regional teams track revenue by location — all using natural language.

Field teams get trusted answers in the moment, so decisions about utilization, pricing and equipment availability rest on live data rather than last week’s report.

With CoCo, the data engineering team has significantly accelerated engineering and development workflows, reducing many development tasks from days to minutes, so new capabilities reach the field faster.

The company is expanding its AI-powered capabilities across analytics, operations and customer experiences, building on a foundation of governed data, clear access controls and self-service intelligence.