Technology is one of the main pillars of innovation in iFood. Today there is more than 100 models of artificial intelligence running within the company, developed internally. “The company has 6 thousand people, and half are either engineers or data scientists”, says VP of strategy and finance Diego Barreto. “A large part of iFood is managed on a daily basis by these models. The understanding of time, supply, demand, topography, time, day of the week, a specific point involving the World Cup, a holiday and things like that, this is all managed by an algorithm that uses machine learning.”
It’s a process that has been unfolding since 2019. “That’s when we made the decision: we need to be an artificial intelligence company. iFood's level of complexity will not allow us to do something through strict rules: if this, then that”. In the same year, Sandor Caetano was hired as Chief Data Scientist. The following year, to accelerate the transformation through talent acquisition, Hekima, an AI startup from Minas Gerais, was purchased. “We brought this whole team in, and they became partners at iFood. They are still here today.”
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