Every day, employees and customers have conversations on digital channels such as SMS, WhatsApp, Wechat, Telegram, Microsoft teams, and Imessage. What's hidden in those chats are clues about what their customers need, what they're frustrating and what they want.
Technology entrepreneur Otavio Freire (MBA '05) realized that many companies struggle to capture and monitor digital conversations taking place across their organizations. To address this issue, Freire, Jim Ting, and Ruben Jimenez co-founded Caju AI in 2023, leveraging recent advances in artificial intelligence. “Our company started with a simple awareness. AI was moving forward rapidly, but the existing tools for understanding human conversation were inadequate and frustrating,” Freire said. “When Openai's GPT-2.5 was released, it was a game changer. For a moment, our big 'Aha!” “
Otavio Freire, Jim Ting, and Ruben Jimenez co-founded Caju AI in 2023.
Freire, Ting, and Jimenez imagined a future where businesses could truly understand digital conversations, not just message numbers, but also word clouds. At that time, they decided to build something new. This is an AI-driven solution that unveils actionable intelligence and business insights beyond surface-level analysis.
Darden Report recently spoke with Freire, CEO and co-founder of Caju AI. The conversation focused on his ventures, data privacy, building customer trust, and unprecedented business opportunities where AI can unlock. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation:
Tell us about Caju AI, its unique name, and the problems you are solving.
The name was inspired by tropical fruits of Brazil. “Kaju” means self-producing fruit. So, what is the better name for an AI company?
It focuses on digital conversation. Every time there are millions of conversations where employees are having conversations with customers around the world. And these conversations take place in difficult places like text, email, iMessage, WhatsApp, Wechat, Slack, teams, and other digital channels. Customers couldn't hire enough people to handle these conversations, look for risk, or understand how to create business value from the market. Before Caju AI there was no way to create a central repository for all these important conversations. Before AI, it was impossible to extract insights from these multilingual conversations.
Can you give me a specific example?
One of our customers is the top five pharmaceutical companies based in New Jersey. They were challenged to fire new drugs and find all the bottlenecks about how to reach more doctors and more patients. So, Caju AI can grab every digital conversation that takes place between drug representatives, doctors and key opinion leaders and tell them exactly how to serve their doctors better. With the help of AI, we read it all and said, “In this area we should do this. In this meeting, we should do that. This is how to remove the bottleneck.”
How do you access these digital conversations while ensuring data privacy?
What we do has a big privacy component and employees have to be part of it. Platforms like Meta, Tencent and Apple must also be part of it. Therefore, all stakeholders agree to share this information. What I always sell is that we have to do this in the Propaliency way. So how do you collect all your data in a prevailing way? How do you remove the risk? That's what governance comes into play.
As CEO of an AI company that extracts business insights from sensitive conversations, how do you build trust with your customers?
Every day, I ask myself: How can I build a more trustworthy relationship with my customers? Our customers are top financial services companies, several branches of the US government, insurance companies, hospitals and large educational institutions. Trust is the number one currency because it processes a lot of sensitive data. If we trust, we will earn revenue. That's why we invest in our ability to build on that trust. We have learned that the more transparent we are, the better at building trust, but we need to expose all aspects of control to our customers. If you have a dashboard and you have problems with the controls, you can see it and they know before us.
The adoption of AI is on the rise. How do you stay relevant and competitive?
We are all competing for results. Is AI analysing all this data and asking myself whether it is affecting my business and to what extent? Did it really generate more revenue? Did that cut my costs? Having a better AI that understands the challenges you have can make employees better on arrival, make the entire set of stakeholders more efficient and measure the impact. That's the connection of competition. This requires a large amount of capital investment. We always employ the smartest AI. The smartest AI is the AI that solves business problems more efficiently and delivers results.
Competitors' platforms are not based on AI. They were trying to match keywords and produce a lot of false positives. And they don't understand the context and intention of the conversation, and are not multilingual. Today, people speak through emojis. Understanding these conversations is challenging from a technical standpoint. They are using AI to disrupt other companies in the market.
There is a lot of fear around AI, which replaces humans. Is that fear justified?
It is the other humans powered by AI that will replace humans. It's similar to past innovations. Those who knew how to use the internet became more effective employees than those who didn't. One of our customers was able to enable our system and process 2.5 million messages in 20 different languages within three weeks, deriving actionable insights from them.
What's most exciting about AI?
I remember when the internet came. At first, everyone tried to avoid it. And then suddenly, “Wow, I have to hug it.” We are experiencing the same moment as AI. Last year we conducted a large number of pilots. In 2025, people pushed pilots to produce. I think 2026 will be even greater in terms of AI adoption. We are in this “crossing the groove” moment. The middle of the big fat in corporate America is hesitant to AI, but some say, “This is great, let's go fast, we have the advantages of the first mover.”
What excites me is the impact AI has on business and society. AI helps treat more patients faster. It helps people become smarter about their finances. It helps the school maintain more students. risk? The impact of AI is so valuable to society as a whole, it is something we need to tackle.
Given the rapid changes that AI drives, what advice would you offer to MBA students?
AI is moving fast. All tasks you perform are subject to revision, particularly in terms of how they are accomplished with AI. Should I ask myself how AI applies to accounting? How does it apply to operations and marketing? It helps you get AI to do your job and develop the skills to create business insights and get jobs. It will help you in your first year with your new job, and it will set you for the future.
