Mercado Pago Launches AI Banking Assistant in Brazil as iFood Debuts WhatsApp Ordering Agent

Overview

• Mercado Pago rolled out an AI financial assistant in Brazil, the first Latin American market to receive it, with a gradual release to its customer base.
• The assistant offers roughly 60 capabilities via voice or text, executing tasks such as payments and scheduled deposits through natural-language requests.
• iFood introduced Ailo, an assistant that lets users start food orders outside the app through WhatsApp and receive tailored suggestions based on preferences.
• iFood says Ailo uses a hybrid architecture with models from Anthropic, OpenAI and AWS, incorporates long‑term memory trained on billions of real interactions, and was developed with Prosus.
• Cited studies report up to 150% higher influenced conversions and average reply times falling to 53 seconds, with additional findings of 18% faster problem resolution, 23% higher conversion, and 42% of Brazilian shoppers having used AI online.