When a new packaging redesign lands on his team, Jhojan Rodríguez no longer braces for the most stressful part of the job.

Instead of scanning dense nutritional tables line by line—looking for a mismatched number or a missing comma—the designer on his team now runs a prompt through an AI agent Rodríguez built himself. Seconds later, it flags any discrepancies between the technical documentation and the final label.

“For us, the errors were never about the graphic aspect,” says Rodríguez, creative lead of Cooperativa de Productores de Leche Dos Pinos’ design department. “They were in the nutritional and regulatory information. And those must be precise down to the millimeter.”

This “AI inspector,” as Rodríguez calls it, was built using Microsoft Copilot Studio. The agent compares packaging labels against internal technical sheets and highlights discrepancies before files leave the design team. Since its launch in late 2025, these inconsistencies have been reduced to nearly zero, improving workflows and significantly lowering the risk of regulatory penalties.

The packaging inspector isn’t a one-off, but rather evidence of a broader strategy within Dos Pinos, one of Central America’s largest dairy cooperatives. Across the organization, executives and employees, whom Dos Pinos calls “collaborative people,” are working to evolve into a frontier company—one that embeds AI into everyday workflows at scale.

The cooperative says it has already deployed around 80 AI agents across functions, from packaging review and legal drafting to risk assessments and client engagement. It has also launched an “AI ambassadors” program to encourage and equip employees across roles to build their own agents.

“We see enormous value and potential in AI and agent-based technologies,” says Alejandro Arguedas, Dos Pinos’ chief information officer. “More than just a tool, we see AI as a competitive advantage for both our people and the cooperative. It helps us transform how we work and improves different processes by reducing costs, increasing efficiency and enabling things that were previously complex.”

Based in Alajuela, Costa Rica, Dos Pinos has about 6,000 employees and operations spanning dairy production, processing, packaging, agro-industrial services, logistics and retail distribution. Milk production—some 1.3 million liters per day—comes from roughly 1,500 member farms, many of them small and medium-sized producers, supplying a wide portfolio of dairy products as well as agricultural and livestock inputs.

At that scale, in a business where margins are tight, competition is strong and regulatory scrutiny is constant, even small errors can ripple across operations. A packaging mistake, for instance, can delay manufacturing and push back product launches; incorrect nutritional declarations can trigger legal and reputational risks, including potential recalls.

For Dos Pinos, adopting AI is a strategy to stay competitive and secure long-term business viability, Arguedas says. “We operate in a mass consumer market, and there is no doubt there is enormous pressure around costs, automation, service, process transformation and product quality. We want to maintain our leadership and become even stronger.”

An ecosystem of agents

Over the past year, Dos Pinos has focused on building a growing ecosystem of narrowly scoped AI agents.

Developed using the AI tools Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Chat and Copilot Studio, the agents are designed to mirror specific roles and tasks inside the cooperative—augmenting employees in their day-to-day work.

Alongside the packaging inspector, other agents support the creation of non-disclosure agreements, IT service request handling, risk documentation management and even a “virtual veterinarian” that recommends livestock products to vendors across retail locations.

In some cases, employees use Copilot Chat as a learning tool to automate existing internal processes.

Sales analyst Randall Benavides, for example, used Copilot as a coach to learn step by step how to send sales reports through Microsoft Outlook via Power BI Service, Microsoft’s cloud platform where staff publish, share and interact with reports and data tables across the organization.

“I was spending four hours a day just processing data,” Benavides recalls, describing repetitive work that took up most of his time and left little room for more valuable tasks like analysis. “That’s not what you expect when you hear the word ‘analyst.’”

A core goal for Dos Pinos is to increase productivity by equipping staff with AI tools that expand their capabilities and allow them to focus on higher-value and more strategic work, says Carlos Sandí, head of IT strategy and digital transformation.

“We’re not rolling out AI just because it’s trendy,” he adds. “AI is a tool for transformation, but the real driver is empowering the collaborative people to innovate.”

The results are already visible, the cooperative says.

Since the packaging agent was implemented, inconsistencies in the design stage have decreased by more than 50%, Dos Pinos says, helping reduce the average time to market by roughly 10 days. “In production terms, 10 days is a huge amount of time,” Sandí says. “Cutting that from the cycle makes us far more operationally agile.”

Dos Pinos has rolled out Copilot to more than 1,000 employees in an initial phase, with plans to expand across the entire organization throughout 2026.

“What we’ve learned is that this doesn’t have to be complex,” says Argenis Matarrita, head of AI. “With good prompts and the right information, you can build something useful very quickly.” His team is now working on new agents to optimize delivery processes and systematize information from manufacturing facilities.

Scaling adoption across the organization

To drive and sustain adoption, Dos Pinos has created an internal “AI ambassadors” program: a group of 15 employees and counting, who act as champions within their departments and help train colleagues on AI fundamentals.

Benavides is one of them.

When he first joined the sales team, his days were dominated by repetitive manual work: downloading revenue data, filtering spreadsheets and emailing Microsoft Excel reports to clients one by one. Delivering up to 21 daily reports to more than 100 internal users took about four hours each morning.

After attending an internal AI workshop, he turned to Copilot for guidance on automating report distribution through Power BI Service. “I knew nothing about AI. I told Copilot, ‘I don’t know this tool—guide me step by step.’ And it worked,” Benavides says. “The workload eased up a lot.”

He now focuses on data analysis and building indicators, as well as developing new Power BI dashboards, thanks to the time freed up from data processing. He also supports other teams in expanding Copilot adoption.

Rodríguez had a similar experience when building the packaging agent.

Using Copilot Studio, he defined the task in about 250 words, with clear instructions for how the agent should evaluate information. The tool does not make changes automatically; instead, it provides a detailed analysis for designers to act on.

“This isn’t about replacing our designer,” he says. “It’s about removing the most mechanical, error-prone part of the job so she can focus on design quality.”

On a recent project, a designer on Rodríguez’s team used the agent to review an updated powdered milk package, uploading both the technical specifications and the proposed artwork. The agent produced a detailed comparison, identifying discrepancies and recommending corrections based on internal parameters—from incorrect figures to formatting inconsistencies.

For Rodríguez, the most meaningful impact goes beyond efficiency. Where his team once felt stressed and concerned about elusive errors, they now work with greater confidence.

“Work flows better,” he says. “It’s given me a lot of peace of mind. Now we can focus on the creative side with confidence.”

Juan Montes writes about how AI and digital innovation are reshaping industries and decision making across Latin America and Canada. His reporting spans stories from multinational companies deploying AI agents for executives to public school teachers adopting technology in classrooms. Born in Madrid, he worked as a journalist in Spain and Guatemala and was a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. You can contact him on LinkedIn.

Top image: Dos Pinos has about 6,000 employees and operations spanning dairy goods production, processing, packaging and agroindustrial services. Photo by Dos Pinos.