How Hertz Cuts Roadside Resolution Time 15% with Microsoft Copilot Studio

The Hertz Corporation is one of the world’s largest car rental and mobility providers, operating the Hertz, Dollar, Thrifty, and Firefly brands across more than 11,000 locations in 160 countries. Its fleet exceeds 560,000 vehicles and its workforce spans more than 26,000 employees. At that scale, operational consistency is a constant challenge: thousands of daily customer interactions, shift management across dispersed locations, and the practical problem of frontline employees needing accurate, real-time answers about hundreds of different vehicle models.

Before Copilot Studio, Hertz’s field employees handled two categories of inefficiency at once. First, shift management relied on manual Excel-based huddle sheets that required constant updating and were difficult to keep current with real-time rental activity. Second, roadside customer issues — questions about vehicle operations, Wi-Fi hotspot setups, tire inflation procedures, and similar requests — required agents to manually search fragmented sources: manufacturer websites, government vehicle databases, and instructional video platforms. Neither process could scale with the volume or speed Hertz needed.

Hertz deployed Microsoft Power Platform across two primary use cases. The “Start My Day” application integrated Microsoft Shifts data with real-time huddle sheets showing local rental activity, automated shift update synchronization to the ADP payroll system, and put schedule management directly in employees’ hands. The second deployment was “Manny” — a roadside assistance AI agent built in Microsoft Copilot Studio that processes natural language queries about vehicle operations and returns immediate, specific answers drawn from multiple live data sources. Manny was built by a single platform developer with no prior agent development experience, using Copilot Studio’s low-code environment to define topics and prompts.

Manny’s pilot results were immediate. Customer issue resolution time dropped by more than 15% in the early testing phase. Employees filed direct feedback: “Manny is great! I entered a complicated question about setting up a car’s Wi-Fi hotspot… Manny answered the question and provided detailed, step-by-step instructions.” The Excel-based huddle sheet process was eliminated. Payroll synchronization was automated. Director of Strategic Technology Initiative Zac Cadi summarized the broader mandate: “We have literally hundreds of processes that could benefit from automation and AI, and we see Power Platform as a fast, efficient way to develop solutions.”

Hertz’s deployment of Copilot Studio represents the opening phase of a broader automation agenda. With hundreds of identified processes that could benefit from automation and AI, and a low-code development environment that allows non-specialist developers to build production agents, the company has a repeatable pattern for scaling AI-powered workflows across its global operations.