Coca-Cola Andina modernizes HR operations with AI-powered agent on Microsoft Copilot Studio

Coca-Cola Andina is one of the largest bottlers in Latin America, operating across Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Paraguay. With thousands of employees spread across diverse geographies, delivering consistent and accurate human resources (HR) support can be challenging.

As the organization continues to grow and expand regionally, HR teams were increasingly burdened with routine employee questions while employees, especially those outside headquarters in remote bottling plants, often struggled to find timely answers.

To address this challenge, Coca-Cola Andina set out to reimagine how employees access HR information. The company turned to Copilot Studio to build an AI-powered HR assistant in its Argentinian operation—an agent called “Andi” that meets employees where they work and provides highly accurate answers in natural language.

Personalized agentic responses 

Coca-Cola Andina’s HR environment is complex. Policies and benefits vary not only by country, but also by region, contract type, and other factors. A key requirement when developing the HR agent was that employees only receive information relevant to their specific circumstances.

Copilot Studio played a critical role in addressing this complexity. With its seamless integration to Microsoft Entra ID, Copilot Studio enabled developers to easily connect the agent to an employee’s corporate profile.

When employees sign in with their corporate credentials, Andi is able to instantly access the employee’s work location, title, and other details, combine it with other employee information, and use this to look up the right HR information in a knowledge repository on SharePoint. By working with these multiple data sources, the agent delivers precise answers personalized to the specific requirements and benefits for each employee—like how many vacation days an employee has remaining in the year.

The company also wanted to ensure that employees could easily contact an HR manager if needed. This option is presented to employees after each answer. Andi asks for the message or question that they want to send to HR, combines this information with the employee’s profile, and sends a message via Power Automate flow that creates the ticket in a Power App application which works as the internal CRM system. This triggers a notification to the appropriate HR manager who can then contact the employee to resolve the ticket.

A versatile development platform 

The decision by the development team to use Copilot Studio to build the agent was based on several factors.

Before the HR assistant, the regional AI Team had actually started building agents on another platform, but brought in Copilot Studio to enable connectivity to Microsoft Teams. An early demo caught the interest of an IT manager in Argentina who asked if a similar agent could be developed for the Argentinian HR team—and that’s when the agent “Andi” started to take shape.

A new team combining developers from both the regional and Argentinian operations was assembled to take on this project. They started looking more closely at Copilot Studio as their primary development tool. They were quickly drawn to several core capabilities. “We especially like how documents can be uploaded to Copilot Studio and the system takes it from there—no vector database or embeddings required on our part. It just works,” says Tomas Colla, IT Senior Solution Developer at Coca-Cola Andina.

Another reason for selecting Copilot Studio was speed. “Developing an agent on Copilot Studio has been so much faster than other platforms we’ve tried. This was especially important as our colleagues wanted to go live with their agent as quickly as possible,” says Jose Miranda Valderrama, IT Solution Developer at Coca-Cola Andina. 

During development, the team worked closely with HR specialists to fine tune the AI model driving their agent. This resulted in hundreds of changes to prompts to ensure that the agent answered each possible question from employees exactly as an HR specialist would and aligned with corporate policy. “We expected to make a lot of changes to the model, especially in the early days of development, and we were so pleased at how easy it was to make these changes in Copilot Studio. It really helped move our development process along,” says Valderrama.

Yet another key requirement from HR was that the agent be integrated with WhatsApp. For employees who work in the bottling facilities, WhatsApp is one of their primary communication channels for daily work and personal interactions. Unlike office-based employees, many don’t often have access to Microsoft Teams. The development team was able to use the Direct Line API in Copilot Studio to publish the agent to WhatsApp, enabling broader accessibility to the agent for all employees. 

A successful deployment 

The agent was originally tested in Argentina across four regions and today it is used actively by over 300 employees. 

The team is also tracking rapidly growing use of the agent by these employees—and the HR team is definitely noting the benefits. “With our agent, Andi, we are spending a lot less time answering basic, routine questions and that gives us more time to address more complex HR issues for our employees,” says Rocio Duarte, Product Manager of HR at Coca-Cola Andina.

To expand usage even further, the HR team is actively promoting the agent, reminding employees during each one-to-one meeting that the agent is often a faster way to get the information they need. The plan is to soon roll out the agent to all employees in Argentina—and then to other countries across the corporate network. 

Expanding development opportunities 

The team continues to expand and improve the capabilities of the agent in several ways. First, the team is finishing up integration of the agent inside Microsoft Teams, making it even easier for office-based employees to use the agent.

There are also plans to integrate Andi with Azure AI Document Intelligence, so it can directly process invoices, tickets, and other vouchers sent by users as images in the chat. Andi would then automatically know which workflow to execute in the backend, triggered directly by the user via WhatsApp.

The team acknowledges that adding this kind of functionality involves working with more and more sensitive employee data—but also notes that Copilot Studio is up to the task. “The governance and security features that come with Copilot Studio have given both our HR and security teams at Coca-Cola Andina the confidence to continue to expand our agent Andi’s capabilities,” says Valderrama.

This governance model is being refined to enable business users to create their own AI-driven agents in Copilot Studio. In this way, Coca-Cola Andina will accelerate the benefits of AI even further across more parts of the business. “We see Copilot Studio as both an easy and secure way to really leverage the power of AI across Coca-Cola Andina,” says Colla.

Learn more about Coca Cola Andina on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.