We are just at the beginning of 2025 and the CEO of the technology company Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has already declared that the “era of agentic AI has arrived”. Google and OpenAI recently announced new agentic models planned for release in 2025, and 40% of large Brazilian companies plan to integrate agentic AI systems into their operations this year.
How is agentic AI different from its predecessors, and what does the technological buzzword of 2025 mean for the Brazilian consumer? Analysts are expecting radical changes, but the final results may be more subtle than expected.
“Agentic AI is an extremely exciting new stage in the development of intelligent systems,” comments Krishna Tammana, CTO of Gupshup. “But, as with all advanced technologies, it’s easy to get caught up in technical jargon. Instead, make a comparison to the size and scale of the change from the phone to the smartphone in the late 2000s. ‘If what we are using now, generative AI, is like a single app, then agentic AI is like using a smartphone,’ says Krishna.
“Generative AI, like older models of cell phones, is essentially a single-use application. You open it, interact with it, and close it until you need it again,” the executive continues. “If we compare it to a smartphone, which can contain many apps at the same time, that’s how Generative AI looks in relation to generative AI. It’s no longer just a single app, but a whole smartphone full of various apps, all interacting with each other at the same time.”
Generative AI is also designed to perform tasks autonomously, make decisions, and adapt to user input and environmental changes. And while generative AI has seen consumer and enterprise use cases, this next evolution is likely to impact professional lives more than personal ones.
Soon, we may have a workday where time-consuming, repetitive tasks are autonomously completed, freeing up more time to focus on high-level strategic, creative, and social functions. In our personal lives, Generative AI could also manifest as a helpful assistant that can place orders and reservations, organize a weekend social schedule, or even manage our finances, for example. However, as no one knows how close we are to large-scale generative AI, experts are looking to pioneering sectors to lead the way.
“The first sectors to implement Generative AI are doing so in the background operations,” Tammana explains. “The financial sector is seeing results in fraud detection, the medical and pharmaceutical industries focusing on data analysis, research, and development, and manufacturing creating smart robots, and even entire factories, that can operate with very little human intervention,” she notes.
Unless they work in these specialized fields, the everyday life of Brazilians may not feel an immediate impact from conversational AI, except in one key area. ‘At Gupshup, conversational AI handles a variety of requests, but one of the most advanced is dealing with customer interactions,’ Krishna continues. ‘So, I wouldn’t be surprised if consumers start noticing a difference this year when speaking with customer support agents.’
These models are trained with company-specific data, with integrated protection barriers and human agents available for transfer at any time. Therefore, Gupshup’s CTO advises consumers to watch for the shift between interactions from chatbots to humans for a smoother service. ‘The fact that you don’t notice who is human and who is AI means we’ve done a great job. But if the agent you’re talking to is experienced, helpful, proactive, and available 24/7, then this could be your first interaction with conversational AI,’ he explains.
In Brazil, a partnership with a major national fashion brand highlights the emerging landscape of conversational AI. Gupshup is among the first conversational AI platforms to launch an AI agent in Brazil for the retailer Reserva. The fashion house’s AI agent provides users with a unique shopping experience, with AI available directly on WhatsApp. Users can search for products by sending text or voice messages, and even describe characteristics of a person they want to give a gift to. This was done on Mother’s Day, where the user had the opportunity to detail what their mother was like and find the best gift to celebrate the occasion.
In this way, AI understands and recommends products that best fit the description provided by the user, who can easily check the available products through a native WhatsApp carousel model, gaining access to more information about the product, or even be redirected to the website to complete the purchase.
