[Ricardo Amorim] We currently have an unprecedented immediacy in personal relationships and in consumer relationships with companies, right? In other words, this has been growing a lot over the last 20, maybe 30 years. Welcome to another episode of Metamorfoses, which discusses the mega transformations happening in our lives and in the way we work. Today’s program is beyond special. If you haven’t subscribed to the channel yet, do it now—click on the bell to receive notifications. All the episodes are really good, and today’s is even better. Our amazing guest today is Itaú’s CIO, Ricardo Guerra. Ricardo, thank you so much for being here with us.

[Ricardo Guerra] I’m the one who should thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

[Ricardo Amorim] So, I want to talk about your “war,” which is the war to bring about a complete digital transformation in a huge institution. From what I know, this usually doesn’t happen. You all managed to make it happen. Tell me how.

[Ricardo Guerra] I think this story undoubtedly begins with the cultural foundation of the Itaú Unibanco institution, which is always to question itself, always look outward, always try to see if there’s something that needs to be done differently. I’ve worked there for many years and always learned this as part of the culture.

[Ricardo Amorim] You’ve been there 32 years, if I’m not mistaken?

[Ricardo Guerra] Yes, it’ll be 32 in February now, and I’ve always learned that since I joined, that we need to look and say, “OK, we did something good, but could it be better?” or “What wasn’t so good?” or “What’s going to change going forward that requires us to change our path?” If you get too attached to your results, you end up not looking at the changes the world is going through. I think that culture is the foundation of everything. If we’ve had any success in this transformation, I think that culture is at its core.

Motivated by that culture, we started to observe strong changes happening worldwide, starting with people. And I think that was the key element. I’m going to say things that are obvious to people on a day-to-day basis, but that you don’t naturally notice inside companies. You end up not having these conversations inside companies; you end up just operating as is, in the daily grind. So what did we start to notice? Huge changes in people’s behavior. People stopped using landlines and started using cell phones, started using text messages, started using WhatsApp, right? And this may seem trivial, but it made people much more immediate in their demands, right? Probably many of us here in the studio today let someone know, “Hey, for the next hour I won’t be able to answer messages.” Me included. That’s not normal nowadays. Today people are usually plugged in, they’re online. That didn’t exist back then, right? People used to call you on a landline, and it was normal if you weren’t at your desk or at home.

This applies to many industries: the music industry, the entertainment industry, movies, right? The major change we had from video rental stores to streaming and other innovations as well.

[Ricardo Amorim] Exactly. In summary, we all became anxious for semi-automatic responses.

[Ricardo Guerra] I think that’s the word, Ricardo: we all became anxious. We have an immediacy today in our personal relationships and in our consumer relationships with companies that’s unprecedented. It’s been growing for the last 20, maybe 30 years, and it’s growing more and more. And this growth is increasing at an even faster rate. Then, around 2010 or a bit before, we started to notice this shift in people’s behavior precisely because of the experience they were having in other industries. And in the financial industry, it became pretty clear that this change needed to happen. It was no longer acceptable for people to call a bank, call a call center, and get a response a week later, right, and think that was normal. It’s not normal for people anymore, and if it’s not normal for them, we need to adapt.

So one thing is diagnosis, one thing is concluding that this was happening. Another thing is: how do you adapt, right? What needs to change in a 100-year-old institution? We turned 100 last September. It has extremely robust processes, very well-established working methods, and especially when you’re successful—our bank delivers a lot of results, has always been at or near the top over the last decades—it’s not straightforward to reinvent yourself. It’s not straightforward to say, “Stop doing what you’re doing,” which is easy to say when you’re doing poorly, right? Not when you’re doing well.

[Ricardo Amorim] Exactly, exactly.

[Ricardo Guerra] So we started trying to look outside. In short, we’d say, “Look, these changes are coming from the tech industry. If we stop and look, everything is happening through technology. It’s occurring worldwide, but especially concentrated in Silicon Valley, in California.” And we tried going there to learn what was going on, but the truth is that if three people go there, spend a week, two, then come back to 100,000 people here, it doesn’t accomplish much. And so we challenged ourselves: “How do I bring California to Brazil? How do I influence the organization—‘California’ in a figurative sense—how do I bring that technological innovation mindset to influence Itaú at scale?”

After a lot of research, we made a few attempts, and we concluded that we needed to build an innovation ecosystem. That’s when we created Cubo, which in the beginning was a coworking space. Cubo is a location where we rent space to startups.

[Ricardo Amorim] Right.

[Ricardo Guerra] It started out small, with 50 startups. Today, there are 250 physical ones. In São Paulo-speak, folks say they went from the “little cube” to the “big cube.”

[Ricardo Amorim] That’s—

[Ricardo Guerra] Exactly, that’s it. You know it, right? That’s exactly it. So when we started with the “little cube” back in 2013 or 2014, the idea was to bring entrepreneurs, schools, investors, large corporations, and make this ecosystem move. So that entrepreneurs would learn from other entrepreneurs, learn from major corporations, and that large companies could bring their issues to this environment, discuss the issues they had, and then benefit from solutions that certain entrepreneurs could create for them, and really get that wheel turning, as I said.

By watching that wheel turn and by being part of that ecosystem, we realized our model needed to be much faster, with much greater speed, where we would develop hypotheses about problems to be solved and, from there, test these hypotheses to see if they met people’s needs or not. In an organization like ours, with thousands of products, hundreds of different business lines—from retail to wholesale, credit cards, insurance, and many different businesses—these hypotheses need to be tested in all these niches, right? Naturally, we picked some to start testing. And we saw that to do this at scale, to achieve that speed and closeness to the customer, we needed to change some fundamental elements.

Those fundamental elements were: the technology platform—our legacy was very slow, and that’s normal—

[Ricardo Amorim] Oops, I was going to say, “What’s that characteristic of a legacy system?”

[Ricardo Guerra] Big companies usually have very old platforms that become complex over time, and I would say with a caveat that not always but typically is true in the case of large companies—and it’s definitely very true for you guys—that you are a union of two companies which are, in turn, a union of I don’t know how many. Maybe you know that number: how many companies combined—

[Ricardo Amorim] Right, so the platform is formed by many pieces in a puzzle at the end of the day.

[Ricardo Guerra] Exactly, exactly. We’ve had—I don’t know the total number—between Unibanco, Itaú, plus the acquisitions that were made, but you’re correct. They were technical platforms built over time and consolidated over time, right? And I think that was even a correct decision in the earlier tech strategy, where the bank always prioritized the biggest platform and migrated clients over to that platform. Trying to unite platforms is very complex, and you end up having various platforms, as you said.

But anyway, the technology platform is a key element for speed. Data is a fundamental element for understanding customer journeys, understanding customer behavior, and making business decisions. So you need data at scale that is easily accessible. The working method—ways of working—is essential. And maybe that’s not obvious for people who don’t work at big corporations, but these corporations organized themselves over time into big silos, in big areas of specialization, right? And as these areas grew, they started to take on a life of their own. I joined the technology area at the bank, and the goal of the technology area was to maximize the technology team’s results for the bank—which seemed obvious: the more results I deliver, the better it is for the organization. But alongside us was a business area trying to solve client problems, which depended on the technology team. However, the relationship between them wasn’t an interlocking gear that functioned together. Essentially, in technology, we looked at the projects with the highest returns and chose those, because that maximizes bank returns.

[Ricardo Amorim] Right. Which isn’t necessarily best for the client, nor necessarily best for all of the bank’s business units. Deep down, the reality, from what you’re telling me—and unfortunately still the reality of many organizations—is that technology isn’t seen as something that cuts across the entire business; it’s seen as just another department. And then you have a major problem…

[Ricardo Guerra] Exactly, exactly, a huge one.

[Ricardo Amorim] Right.

[Ricardo Guerra] And I think that was the big change in the technological vision within Unibanco. It used to be seen—like in most large companies in the ‘90s and 2000s—as a cost center. As such, the goal was to minimize that cost. Many companies outsourced their tech areas, including to reduce costs. The United States did it heavily, sending development to India to cut costs. That’s how the world saw technology. The truth is, all this technological revolution started using technology as a competitive advantage, embedded into the business, as a fundamental element to create value for the customer. Because it’s through technology that you generate this value.

[Ricardo Amorim] And so, enjoying our conversation so far? If so, leave me a comment saying which department at your company you work in, where you are, if you’re finding what you’re hearing useful. I am, and I hope you are too. One thing I find interesting is that it surprises me that this vision—especially in the Brazilian financial system—wasn’t previously clear. Maybe this catches my attention because of my personal experience. I worked in the financial sector in Brazil, I worked in the U.S., but I especially lived here and there. And there’s an experience I’ll never forget: I moved to the U.S. in 2001, and at the time you already did all your transfers in Brazil electronically, via the internet. In the U.S. back then, it was all done with checks. And, on top of that, if you received a check deposit from a different state, the further away it was, the more complicated. I remember living in New York and receiving a check from Alaska, and it took two weeks for the money to hit my account. And I thought, “Hey, this is the U.S., the most advanced place there is!” In Brazil, it took one day. So it’s interesting because due to our hyperinflationary past, we couldn’t live with that. So we had an extremely high level of efficiency in transactions, but that efficiency was connected to the transaction, not yet to the business logic. That happened later, right?

[Ricardo Guerra] And you’re right. Actually, it was somewhat connected to business logic in the sense that if I didn’t allow clients to access their funds the same day or the next day, the money would be eaten up by inflation. So in that sense, there was indeed a business need. But there is a subtle difference between those two times. When I say that today technology is viewed as a competitive advantage, that means I need to have a few elements: speed, quality, and efficiency in producing solutions for customers. When pursuing speed, quality, and efficiency, some technical aspects of data architecture—I don’t want to get too technical—must become preeminent. Your technology architecture strategy—i.e., how will my platform operate, will it run in the cloud, what kind of architecture it’ll have (we call them microservices, basically Lego blocks for those who don’t work with technology)—this strategy must be followed rigorously, because it can degrade very quickly over time.

So, without getting too technical, I think there’s a strategic detail here that’s key for those watching and wanting to understand: these decisions, once taken, everything that happens later—for example, about data, everything connected to improving decision-making—has to be based on data. And second, we’re going through an artificial intelligence revolution: if your data lake isn’t well-organized, forget it, nothing else will happen. All the rest is like building a skyscraper. To build a skyscraper, you first have to dig down deep, or else it won’t stand. It’s the same idea. So these architecture decisions you’re talking about are absolutely crucial, without needing to detail every tech aspect, but they’re fundamental.

[Ricardo Amorim] Yes. And that’s the big difference. In the past, Brazil did a lot of good things, and you’re correct about that, and it’s an excellent foundation for us in the financial industry. But it was done with a project mindset: “Create an online system where the customer can access their funds in real time. Done.”

Because if you say, “Oh, in the past we did a lot of good things,” it might also seem we generally fell behind, but I believe there are still some areas we’re quite advanced in. For example, when we talk about transfers—like I mentioned earlier—Pix is something that’s an international reference, a global benchmark. So I think there are still a few things, and even some led by the regulator, in this case the Central Bank, that Brazil deserves praise for, and we should highlight it.

[Ricardo Guerra] Certainly, no doubt, you’re absolutely right. This push for speed that we realized was key to delivering value to the client runs through technology, data, and ways of working, which is what we were discussing. So breaking these silos, creating multidisciplinary teams around customer journeys—you know how to divide these journeys within the organization (in the bank, there are thousands of different journeys), but group those journeys. I’ll give an example to make it clearer: the “grow your wealth” journey, in which the customer invests their money wherever they choose, is a self-contained journey. Being able to bring business professionals, product professionals, design, tech, technology, operations, all dedicated to that journey, but at the same time following the general strategies and rules of the organization, is what’s really accelerated us, because decisions are made in a more “micro” environment but not in a completely isolated, autonomous way.

[Ricardo Amorim] But that demands two changes in people. First, in the technology department, the tech professional now has to understand business, and second, the business professional needs to minimally understand technology. Correct?

[Ricardo Guerra] You’re correct. But here is the beauty of the model: living together and learning cause people to develop along these lines. The goal is exactly as you said: we want business people to understand more of the technology platform. They don’t have to sit there coding, but they need to realize that in the end the product they sell is a technology product. And, as such, the “house” needs to be in order. The architecture strategy has to be central, because the speed you have now—if you don’t strictly follow that strategy—ends up producing isolated projects, and the platform turns slow because you add unnecessary ties. You need to adhere to a real plan.

[Ricardo Amorim] When you say “the house needs to be in order,” you mentioned to me earlier that in the process of getting that house in order, as it usually happens whenever we put any house in order, it generally takes more time than we expect, costs more than we expect, and after that the results show up. And from what you told me, the story was similar, right?

[Ricardo Guerra] Yes, it was. Our technological evolution process wasn’t trivial. Obviously, you don’t just leave behind a mega-complex legacy like the bank’s. Itaú’s platform was inaugurated in 1973, so it’s 51 years old, going on 52. I joke that it’s a young elderly lady. And, of course, that platform came from 1970s technology—mainframe—evolved on mainframe, and we still do solutions on mainframe to this day. We gradually took advantage of new tech waves—client-server, the internet, etc.—but they never replaced the earlier waves; they just got added on top. So we ended up with quite a complicated infrastructure. Cleaning that up so that you can establish, first, “state of the art” technology at the time you start the transformation isn’t a simple step, because how do you migrate to that technology while living with what’s already there? You can’t say, “Let’s shut down business for three years so I can overhaul the bank.” That doesn’t exist. So you have to have a technology methodology where you build new things, new features, on the cutting-edge technology without letting go of all the other ongoing things. That’s one side.

[Ricardo Amorim] Using a metaphor by Reid Hoffman, it’s like building the plane while you’re flying it, right?

[Ricardo Guerra] That’s exactly it. Essentially, that’s what you need to do. And the second part of this scenario, Ricardo, is that the technology you built will also become obsolete. So you need to create a method for constant updating. So it’s not like once you’ve brought it, you’re done—you brought it, and now it has a method for continuous renewal. The mindset behind it is that each…

[Ricardo Amorim] Sorry to interrupt, but it seems to me that the first step is the hardest, because that first step—taking multiple legacies and moving them to what I’d call “state of the art”—is indeed the first. You’re taking Stage 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, all to Stage 20. If you do that and, most importantly, turn that into a learning process and a mindset shift, the following steps should be easier…

[Ricardo Guerra] You’re right, that’s how it is. The biggest hurdle was doing it the first time. And, as we said, we invested a lot of time before starting to see the results. The way we did it was by dividing the problem into chunks. So when I said we formed various multidisciplinary teams, we learned how to do it in a lab, with an excellence team, and that team spread across these multidisciplinary teams. So we had one or two experienced professionals in each multidisciplinary team of maybe 10, 20 people. That group taught everyone else how to do it, and each one took their own approach in a distributed manner, with centralized management. Once a week, in my tech team, I’d sit with my direct reports, my team, and look at who was advancing, who wasn’t, who needed help, who was doing well, who we could learn from, and which insights they were having, so we could share them with the others. So it’s always a bottom-up and top-down process: how do you do it on a distributed scale, bring in the learnings centrally, and push them back out. We were deeply convinced that was the path to greater speed, because we tested it in small form at Cubo, tested it small in some business lines, but scaling that up takes time because the bank is huge. It requires investment and the belief that this is the strategy for the organization to stay competitive.

[Ricardo Amorim] And you did this simultaneously across various departments. For instance, one case of yours that I followed, that I saw, was related to HR management, meaning you changed everything from the platform onward, achieving extremely significant gains—everything I saw had double-digit gains. So tell me a bit about that story.

[Ricardo Guerra] That’s a great example, Ricardo, because in that old model where technology was a silo, we didn’t invest in HR technology. And when we break it down into multidisciplinary teams, HR is one of them. For you to have the best people management, you need technology, you need top-notch technology. “OK, how much do you want to invest in it?” Fine, that’s a relevant discussion, and we revisit it each year. You do need constraints, but also adequate investment to get results in each multidisciplinary group we have.

Then there’s a second question: how do you decide what to do in-house versus bringing in a partner? More and more, we do the highest volume possible in-house, and I’ll explain why. We learned three reasons to outsource. First, maybe it’s cheaper. Sometimes we can do it cheaper in-house.

[Ricardo Amorim] Uh-huh.

[Ricardo Guerra] Second is tech expertise. Sometimes it’s a new technology we haven’t learned yet. Third is demand volatility, as we say. Sometimes with Pix, for example, there’s a massive demand at that moment, and we don’t have enough teams, so we hire a temporary team for a year or two to work on it…

[Ricardo Amorim] Right, you don’t enlarge your department permanently…

[Ricardo Guerra] Exactly, exactly. But the interesting reason not to outsource, which people talk less about, is that in a world where we want tech solutions that differentiate the customer experience, that improve the customer’s life, if the tech professional doesn’t understand the customer and the business, they won’t contribute to innovation. They won’t bring the full potential of technology to help us stand out as a company.

[Ricardo Amorim] I completely agree with you. I only wonder if that necessarily requires development to be done in-house. What I mean is: doesn’t working with a partner that has stronger expertise in that specific domain accelerate this learning curve? Because if you bring an external partner, by definition, they know less about your business than you do, by definition.

[Ricardo Guerra] Yes.

[Ricardo Amorim] Right, it shouldn’t be otherwise—if they know more, then you have a serious problem.

[Ricardo Guerra] Exactly. So, by definition, you know more about your business. The tech professional sitting here needs to know as much about the business as the business folks do day to day—obviously not as deep, but more than an outside vendor—otherwise, you won’t get the speed we’re talking about. If that person doesn’t do the actual coding, they’ll have to write something to teach the third party how to code, which is an extra step we get rid of.

[Ricardo Amorim] Got it.

[Ricardo Guerra] So that person there isn’t saying, “Ricardo, you work in business, tell me what you need.” That was the old world. Now, you don’t send a PowerPoint doc for someone in tech to interpret and build, then have them say, “Hey, is this what you meant?” and you go, “Hmm, not exactly.” This back-and-forth is slow by definition. Right, when you have a tech professional sitting next to you, and we’re debating, “What are we going to do for the customer?” “Ah, I think we should do this, or that,” “Wait a minute, let’s try it out—I’ve built something here, an MVP…” That’s the “minimum viable product,” basically a first version to test if it works, and if it does, you go further, you evolve it.

[Ricardo Amorim] Exactly.

[Ricardo Guerra] So right there, they’re already testing with the customer, they already understand it, they themselves are creating that product, and they’re testing it, and that is already the basis for the final product. It’s a different way of building. If the technology you’re discussing is something that external vendor masters much more, and you still know more about the customer, you combine forces. If you don’t have that first condition, it stops making sense. So we outsource less and less these days. To give you numbers so it’s more concrete: in the past, we outsourced nearly half our projects. Some companies went as high as 90%; we never got that high. Today, we outsource 15%, still going down a bit. That’s because of our belief that having that tech pro onsite provides more speed, truly. We measure it, and we’ve attained much more speed.

[Ricardo Amorim] Let me ask you something: artificial intelligence. What are you seeing, what are you doing, where do you see this heading? It seems to me that it allows for hyper-personalization at an unimaginable degree—especially when we talk about a company as big as Itaú. In the end, it ends up serving “personas,” not people, because that’s the only way. You sort of have a standard approach, “I serve this type of person.” What I see in AI is the potential to change that: you’ll serve Ricardo Amorim, not a 50-something-year-old man living in São Paulo with a wife and two kids. It changes the game.

[Ricardo Guerra] That’s exactly what we believe: this quest for hyper-personalization. Taking a step back, the big AI shift we see is in generative AI. Everyone’s heard of ChatGPT, which is the technology behind ChatGPT. ChatGPT isn’t the only one, there are others. Basically, it exploded worldwide in November 2022, and companies started adopting it more internally for efficiency gains, which is interesting. Then you have a second factor, which is the technology’s maturity. When ChatGPT launched, it wasn’t ready to offer certain services because some responses were wrong. “Wrong” is a polite word, right? It’s what they call “hallucinations.”

[Ricardo Amorim] Exactly, because it really fabricates an answer, right?

[Ricardo Guerra] The underlying technology leads to that. In early ‘23, when we began using it at scale in the bank—thanks to the modernization and the migration to cloud—we were able to scale quickly. If we hadn’t made all those technology investments, it might have taken longer. When we got it running, we used it for internal use cases, solutions with human support reviewing what the technology produced. Now, after two years, we believe the technology is advanced enough, so we started testing with customers, aiming for hyper-personalization. Two weeks ago, we announced what we call “Inteligência Itaú,” which I think is a good example for our conversation. It’s a DNAi platform to interface with customers for hyper-personalization. We started testing Pix, WhatsApp, and we use DNAi and LLM technology behind it. Thus, we’re searching exactly for that hyper-personalization. I think it’s a fascinating time to pursue such solutions—nobody’s done it fully at scale yet. There are still performance issues to figure out because the technology demands huge computing power. If you plug in too many customers, it slows down, right? It still needs to evolve, but it evolves quickly. If you’re not practicing now, you run the risk of falling behind fast because it’s complex to use.

[Ricardo Amorim] That’s actually one question: some believe that part of the solution for it being expensive to develop these LLMs—Large Language Models, as the name suggests—could be what they call SLMs. That is, “Short” Language Models, so you wouldn’t need as much data, chasing similar performance. That would reduce cost drastically and spread usage broadly if we can get near the LLM’s accuracy.

[Ricardo Guerra] Yes, that’s happening. Certain solutions, for certain problems, we’re using SLMs, and they obviously don’t have as large a dataset, so they’re not as versatile as an LLM. But for specific use cases…

[Ricardo Amorim] Maybe they don’t need to be, right?

[Ricardo Guerra] Right, because the conversation might just be about one topic: “I want to talk about investments, or loans…” so at a fraction of the cost it becomes viable, and then you can scale.

[Ricardo Amorim] Yes, exactly.

[Ricardo Guerra] Remember that the cost is in building the LLM, not just using the LLM.

[Ricardo Amorim] Then there’s another cost.

[Ricardo Guerra] Right, another cost that’s also high because the providers of the best LLMs charge a lot for the computing power to run them.

[Ricardo Amorim] Fair enough. We’re talking about the cost, but let’s also talk about the gains. One major gain is that all these AIs can function as a filter with increasingly deeper customer knowledge. That’s especially powerful the more products you have to offer a particular customer. So if you consider, let’s say, financial institutions—those more specialized or smaller players that only work with a narrower product line, that’s one thing. Then there’s Itaú: you have investments, credit, insurance… the more you know about the client, the more opportunities there are, which is huge.

[Ricardo Guerra] Exactly.

[Ricardo Amorim] Hence, from my viewpoint, AI doesn’t just benefit the client—it also leverages your ability to gather client data to offer exactly what they need, correct?

[Ricardo Guerra] Exactly. It does demand a hefty investment in data, which we just touched on. If you want to hold a conversation via AI about a product, you need to capture all the knowledge about that product that’s inside the company and house it in a knowledge database. And not all organizations have that documented. I’d say right now that’s the exception, but I’d hope that they see they need to do it.

That’s exactly the investment we’re making: capturing that for each product, building these databases, and layering our intelligence engines—SLMs or LLMs, whichever—on top of them. That includes the knowledge about the product and the knowledge about the client. And yes, capturing knowledge about the client means we also have to store it in the bank from all their call-center interactions, everything they do, their profile, and so on. Then we can build this solution. Today, the goal is to make that AI as capable as talking to a human agent. I think soon, as it gets even better, it’ll do things a human can’t, because it’ll have a wider knowledge base than any single person could possibly have in a single interaction with you. It’s about the ability to tie in more data and never forget, right? That’s the big difference.

[Ricardo Amorim] Has Itaú had issues, or how are you preventing them, with “shadow AI”—meaning employees using ChatGPT, for example, or Claude, or any of the publicly available LLMs, and feeding it sensitive data that might leak from the organization? How are you dealing with that?

[Ricardo Guerra] We have very strict controls regarding that, Ricardo. In the example you mentioned, we built our own internal platform so that if you want to use ChatGPT, you go through our platform to get there.

[Ricardo Amorim] Perfect.

[Ricardo Guerra] So there’s no direct access; it’s basically a firewall. We track what data is going up. No client data is uploaded, no confidential data is uploaded, none of that. We don’t lose out on the technology’s benefits because we mask the data. So we can reach the same conclusions—mask going up, unmask coming down—and use the tech the same way. But having that Itaú platform is crucial, not only for confidentiality but also to ensure you use the right model. Because, like you said, that platform grants access to Claude, ChatGPT, or whatever—LLaMA from Facebook, or any model. And for each case, we test one or the other to see which is the best solution. So having our own platform for employees has worked well because it matures over time and provides easy-to-adopt solutions.

[Ricardo Amorim] And are you looking at digital twins, doing anything with that, tinkering around?

[Ricardo Guerra] We’re tinkering, trying to figure out how to do it right. It’s really interesting. I think it’s going to be revolutionary. There’s enormous potential for everyone to have a digital twin, it’s mind-blowing. Not sure if people are aware, but imagine me saying to my digital twin at midday, “I want to schedule dinner with Ricardo Amorim.” It’ll respond, “All right.” It already knows my food preferences, it’ll reach out to your digital twin, which knows your preferences, your schedule, my schedule, check availability, see if we want to schedule that dinner. Next thing we know, we get a notification: “Hey, tonight you have dinner with Ricardo Amorim at such-and-such restaurant.” Essentially we’re offloading all the complicated parts to the digital realm while we just reap the fun part—having dinner.

[Ricardo Amorim] Exactly, exactly. Speaking of the fun part, I want to know something else: I know you’re a cyclist. How do you manage all of this yet still go out cycling? Because I know cycling isn’t just “Oh, let’s ride for 15 minutes.” How do you manage it?

[Ricardo Guerra] Dude, I’d say this: I do all of this because I cycle. If I didn’t cycle, I’m not sure I could handle it. I do a high-intensity regimen for one hour each weekday, at a faster pace, which makes up for the short time. Then on weekends, I ride longer—I really enjoy it—so that’s when I invest more time.

[Ricardo Amorim] Got it. I fully understand what you said. I’m crazy about sports, and I’m completely convinced it’s the best therapy we can have. Everyone talks about how great it is for the body, but it’s even better for the mind. I think that ties back to everything we’ve been discussing. In the end, technology is there to improve people’s lives.

I think you’ve touched on a really nice point. Look, we could talk for another half hour, or maybe more, but I want to end on that note, picking up on your point: the importance of mindset, people, and processes to make it all happen. Otherwise, technology alone won’t achieve anything. And remember that technology is still not the end goal; it’s a means. It’s a means to improve the lives of those who work for you, to improve the lives of those you serve—your customers. Once you grasp that, everything else falls into place. Just follow what you’ve been saying.

[Ricardo Guerra] Perfect. You need to be obsessed with always doing more for the customer, always striving for better, because technology is there for that, right? Through creativity, effort, and dedication, with real depth, you can do better.

[Ricardo Amorim] You can’t top that. You need to have an obsession with always doing the best for your customer, and technology is there to make that happen. Words of Ricardo Guerra—wise words indeed. By the way, drop a comment telling me what you liked most about this episode. Also, if you haven’t yet, subscribe to the channel, hit the bell to get notifications for future episodes. Thank you so much, and see you next time!

Thank you, Ricardo.

[Ricardo Guerra] I’m the one who’s grateful. Thank you, it was a pleasure.