Inside the AI playbook of the Amazon of Latin America

Good afternoon.

This week’s send is a little delayed thanks to me having to pick up more of the slack in the Del Rey household while my wife recovers from a back issue. Appreciate your understanding.

Next week’s may arrive later in the week as well, due to my attendance at the RetailClub AI festival in Huntington Beach, Calif. I’ll make sure to come back bearing good intel though. And if you’ll be there, drop by The Aisle’s tent No. 435 to say hello. (Heckling me onstage is also an appropriate option.)

Couple of quick plugs up top before a packed newsletter below.

🥳 Big thanks to the venture firm M13 for hosting, and to all The Aisle subscribers who came out to our first subscriber party earlier this week in Manhattan. Absolutely loved meeting and reconnecting with you all, and appreciate all the feedback too. I took it to heart. If you want to help me throw another one in your neck of the woods, please reach out. I’m hoping to get at least one more on the books before the holiday season.

🎙️ I also joined my former rival-turned longtime Recode colleague-turned close friend Peter Kafka on his stellar media pod Channels this week. We discussed, what else? The agentic commerce era, what to make of the Muse and Instinct agent boom of the last few weeks, and what might be in store for Amazon and other commerce companies that have billions of retail ad revenue at stake. You can listen here.

Elsewhere, Meta’s new Muse personal AI agent app continues to sit in the Top 3 of free apps in Apple’s App Store. The big question, as Peter and I discussed, was whether this becomes the AI personal assistant that breaks through into the mainstream. Will it be useful enough? Is the internet’s infrastructure ready for it? But also, will people know what to do with it?

🛍️ To that end, Meta exec Armand Ruiz has shared a collection of 500-plus use cases along with the real-world prompts that made them reality. Shopping-related ones ranged from having Muse place an online grocery order simply from a photo of a whiteboard list of groceries, to refreshing stale Facebook Marketplace listings, to convincing Amazon customer service to accept overdue returns. I’m conflicted about whether I should be impressed at the number of use cases in the collection—though there was definitely some overlap between prompts—or wonder whether it’s a bad sign that a new product needs a repository of how-tos in the first place.

☠️ Finally, I honestly don’t have much to add on the whole AI-human extinction debate. There are enough compelling arguments out there on multiple sides of the debate for smart people like you to make up your own minds on how seriously you want to worry about this. But I do hope there is a middle path to pursue that reduces catastrophic risks—however likely or unlikely—while maintaining most of the human upside I do believe is possible thanks to AI models. The How and Who and When of limiting risk are the real questions now.

It’ll be interesting to see how this photo of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei chumming it up with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff as they announced an integration between their two services at the Dreamforce SaaS conference this week—amid this crazy news cycle—will age. My obvious hope is we won’t have reason to come back to it.

Now on to the good stuff…

I’ve long wanted to find a reason to write about the online marketplace MercadoLibre. Maybe a little bit of that comes from my sometime dream of living in Latin America. But more so because of what a massive, under-covered business it is.

The company is the giant of Latin American e-commerce and is on track to account for roughly 30% of the region’s online retail sales in 2026, according to Emarketer. Its business is largely concentrated in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, which together generated more than 95% of company revenue last year.

MercadoPago, its online payments division, has also become a massive business in its own right: in the second quarter, it brought in $4.4 billion in revenue, while payment volume topped $100 billion and monthly active users reached 88 million. And MercadoLibre is still growing at a pace that would be unusual for most companies of its size, with second-quarter revenue up 50% year over year to $10.2 billion and gross sales on its marketplace approaching $22 billion. Its current market cap is about $90 billion.

So I recently accepted an invitation to interview Leandro Cuccioli, Mercado Libre’s SVP of strategy and corp dev. Cuccioli leads the company’s efforts to coordinate all of its AI initiatives, both those focused on internal work as well as projects related to consumer-facing shopping and payment experiences.

Among the topics we discussed: Better LLM-powered search is lifting conversion, with much of the economic upside showing up in higher bids for product ads. We also discussed how the company’s 31,000 AI-equipped employees are getting faster at their own jobs, but the organization itself hasn’t sped up nearly as much.

“I think that individually we're becoming more productive [but] I don't think that as a whole organization we're yet seeing the impact because it's like the factory floor is laid out for a different era,” he told me. “So you may be very productive today, but if the next part of the chain is operating like it was before, the whole system does not operate at a more productive pace.”

And after a year of pushing AI adoption hard, Mercado Libre is using 2026 to route some work to cheaper open-weight Chinese models, while reserving frontier models for higher-stakes tasks.

The convo has been lightly edited. I hope you enjoy…