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 trained on 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.”
Boosting efficiency in a competitive market
For Cemex, a company with $16 billion in sales in 2024, investing in AI is part of a broader drive for efficiency in a highly competitive environment. The company is a global powerhouse, operating more than 50 cement plants and over 1,000 ready mix plants across four continents and maintaining a strong U.S. presence.
Cemex’s new CEO Jaime Muguiro– who took office last year – has made improving operational efficiency a top priority, executives say. And embracing technologies like AI is essential to staying ahead amid global challenges, from rising material costs to tariffs and intensifying competition.
“Technology is a prerequisite for achieving the operational efficiency strategy set by top management,” Sosa notes. “It’s difficult to reach that level of efficiency without visibility into the productivity of my assets globally that allows us to take decisions.”
The executive-focused AI agent is only the starting point, according to company leaders. Plans are underway to extend its capabilities to lower management, enabling employees like plant operators to track metrics, such as truck idle time, at their facilities. This expansion aims to optimize operational efficiency and, in turn, drive stronger financial performance, Sosa notes.
Cemex also plans to launch a separate agent for all employees, using public company information and verified external data.
“This would give us two advantages: they’d have more information, and we’d learn what they want to know – helping us to be better prepared for the next call. It’s a win-win,” Martínez explains.
The Cemex controllership team, responsible for financial oversight and reporting, played a key role in developing LUCA Bot. Back in 2016, the team introduced Luca – an intranet database that allowed executives to search for thousands of internal operational and financial records. AI offered a way to take the concept further, enabling instant access to data and insights. The AI agent was named after the database, which pays tribute to Luca Pacioli, the 15th-century Italian monk often called the father of accounting.
A member of the team
Built in Microsoft Foundry with Azure OpenAI models, LUCA Bot leverages Microsoft technologies such as Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure App Service, Microsoft Teams and Azure Storage, to deliver advanced data automation and analysis.
Cemex stores data securely in its Azure tenant. The agent applies specific instructions, prompts and Azure OpenAI settings to provide reliable replies and reduce errors. Only basic session data – username, prompts and feedback – is saved.
LUCA Bot processes over 120 key performance indicators, broken down by region, country and plant, covering a decade of data and thousands of data points, according to IT architecture director Carlos Mantilla. Updates occur monthly, with access restricted to each executive’s authorized region and business line.
Mantilla says LUCA Bot’s interface follows the Microsoft 365 Copilot design, which was already familiar to Cemex’s employees.
The agent was trained on more than 35,000 questions and is updated daily based on executives’ feedback. It also includes over 60 preloaded prompts, such as comparing Cemex’s EBITDA by region against budget.
A select group of executives took part in the beta program last year. There was a fair amount of skepticism at the time. Over weekends, executives would gather to put the agent to the test with challenging questions, Martínez recalls.
The tool has since gained traction through word of mouth within the company. At a recent committee meeting, a senior leader used LUCA Bot, prompting curious colleagues to ask about it. They have since become regular users.
Today, LUCA Bot is handling 400 to 500 queries per month, Martínez says, with 82% accuracy for analysis and 92% for data. The team uses a weekly benchmark of 500 predefined questions to assess response accuracy.
“They now see LUCA Bot as just another member of the team,” Mantilla says proudly.
Top image: Carlos Mantilla, Cemex IT architecture director, accompanied by members of his team at Cemex’s headquarters in Monterrey, northern Mexico. Photo by Octavio Hoyos.