How Localiza reorganized work around generative AI

A new kind of computing, not a new tool

When generative AI arrived, Localiza took a view that defined everything that followed: this was more than another piece of software in the toolkit; it was a change in the way the company operates.

Rather than pursuing isolated use cases, the company organized its collaboration with OpenAI around three strategic pillars: transforming the business through experimentation at scale, creating new customer interfaces, and building AI-native products. What connects all three is the decision to redesign processes around intelligence, context, and speed.

“We see this as a powerful tool that helps our teams do what they already do well. They live our culture, understand our customers’ needs, and know how to deliver great service.”

—André Petenussi, CTO, Localiza

Pillar 1: scale enables learning

The principle guiding internal adoption is straightforward: scale enables learning, and learning creates better products.

In practice, that meant distributing ChatGPT licenses as a resource for experimentation and productivity, rather than simply as an individual benefit. Teams across Localiza, from finance to day-to-day operations, maintain active experiments with custom GPTs, agents, and Codex.

Codex first arrived in the technology department—software engineers, product managers, designers, and data scientists. But adoption did not stop there: analysts, managers, PMOs, lawyers, and other business specialists began building their own prototypes and automations to test hypotheses within their areas of expertise.

This was an effect the company had not anticipated—a redefinition of the stages before development, with multidisciplinary teams prototyping solutions before they enter a development queue.

The bottleneck, he says, is human rather than technical.

“The big challenge is helping a large team learn new ways of working and build new skills, while ensuring that all 19 of our tribes and 130 squads work efficiently and consistently.”