5 minutes with Europe's Top CEO Fabricio Bloisi

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Demetrios Brinkmann [00:00:00]: I was recently at the Raise summit and I got to talk with the process CEO all about his humble origins from two people in a garage starting Ifood one of the most beloved food delivery services in Brazil all the way till now where he is the CEO of ProSys and they operate and invest in multiple companies mainly focused on E commerce. He's going to talk about the obsessive use of AI in their companies and how to set up a culture of experimentation. His. His enthusiasm was infectious. Let's get into the conversation.

Fabricio Bloisi [00:00:45]: Perfect. So I'm Fabricio, I'm the founder of Ifood and Mauville in Brazil and now the CEO of Prosus. And it's nice to tell you a little about our story. I'm a tech founder, started the company with two people. And this company today transacts $20 billion in Brazil, has 7,000 people, 500,000 restaurants as partners, 70 million customers and it started with two people in a room. But what is the very nice thing to tell you? In my opinion we got there because of technology. We got there because we are very innovative, we innovate very fast, we take risks on innovation and AI and machine learning was core to our growth. Today Ifood has more than 200 models running everything from the first page when you enter, what discount you have, what's the personalization for the page, how do you talk to the customer? Support is 80% AI or the billing or the fraud or the positioning of the drivers.

Fabricio Bloisi [00:01:38]: We have 200 models running a company that do 5 million transactions per day. And we can only do all these transactions so fast and so well because we abuse in using AI running the whole company. So that's what I did in my past life of five Food. But then I moved here to Prosus in Europe and the opportunity is amazing. In Pros we have 800 models running most of our companies around the world. And I think we are just getting started. But what we are doing now is what we call large commerce model that is fine tuning open source AI model to insert all our knowledge. In that one model we create reasoning receipts where we teach the model how each one of our 2 billion customers, they take decision, how they think, what they purchase.

Fabricio Bloisi [00:02:23]: And then the model understands more about the customers than any specific model we ever had. And now we have a centralized model that can, how can I say inference even different things because it has so much knowledge about our customers. The future of E commerce to me is for companies that can lead on AI. Actually the future of the whole world is for a company that lead on AI and process, we're going to deliver that.

Demetrios Brinkmann [00:02:47]: Nice. The success of Ifood would not have been possible without this muscle that you built for the machine learning and AI systems.

Fabricio Bloisi [00:02:56]: Definitely, definitely. As I told you, ifood today has very high market share in Brazil, more than 80%. And I think it's one of the best operations in the world. And to me, technology is behind all of that. I think two things. First one is a mindset of being lean. Do not be top down, but have a culture of entrepreneurship where we innovate and move fast. And you test 100 hypothesis.

Fabricio Bloisi [00:03:19]: I think the right decision is not the CEO decision is a decision that is done using data of fast experiments. So ifood has a culture of like do a prototype test and see what works. Usually the CEO idea is wrong, but then one day some idea gets right, then we invest 100 times more on that. And the second thing is to be cutting edge. And cutting edge in the last four years was AI. So first we did models, machine learned models for each vertical, like fraud or customer support or each specific vertical. But now we can have a large model that can capture all the knowledge. You see, there is very few companies in the world doing that and very few companies that has the amount of data we have doing that in the machine learning world makes the difference.

Fabricio Bloisi [00:04:05]: So we are very excited. I think the success of FIFO is because of that, but I think the future success of Prosus is going to be because of that. And, and that's what I'm very excited about actually.

Demetrios Brinkmann [00:04:14]: That's a great point. You have many different food delivery services under the process umbrella. How do you think about bringing that culture of ifood into those other companies?

Fabricio Bloisi [00:04:24]: I think it's the culture of process. Now we call it the process way. The culture of process is move fast, be entrepreneur, be obsessed about results, innovate a lot. That's what we are building there. We put our companies to work together. I think the strength of Prosus is being an ecosystem. So ifood is very good in a few things, but Swiggy is, is very good in other things or take a lot in South Africa in other things, or OLX in Europe in other things. So we are a big tech because we have 10,000 people in technology, some of them in Brazil, some of them in Romania, some of them in Portugal, some of them in India.

Fabricio Bloisi [00:04:57]: And we can, and that's what we do. Well, we put those people together because when you put lots of people together, you have the scale to be the best in the world. In a segment in an area and that's a thing. What process is building?

Demetrios Brinkmann [00:05:07]: Incredible. Is there anything else you want to touch on?

Fabricio Bloisi [00:05:10]: We are just getting started. Wait for the next year.

Demetrios Brinkmann [00:05:14]: I love it.