Fabricio BloisiCEO, Prosus and Naspers

The toughest problem for me is to build the next Tencent. We have strong internet companies in Latin America, Europe, and India, but the challenge is creating big tech outside the US and China. AI is the biggest risk because it changes everything, but it is also the biggest opportunity ever.

China was a small internet market twenty years ago and became something amazing. I believe there will be other China stories. India has a massive opportunity, Europe has an amazing opportunity, and Latin America too. They do not have global tech champions yet, but they will, and we want to build them.

AI has a similar impact everywhere. In the US you may have more tech talent, but talent is very expensive. In other markets, talent can be constrained. The biggest impact is moving faster: iterate faster, test things faster, and build things that did not exist one year ago. That speed changes competition.

We have two billion customers, and we can train models on their transactional info, customer service info, fraud info, and more. We are building a large commerce model using that data. It did not exist and was not possible one year ago. Now we can create smarter systems than before.

We already have companies with hundreds of models doing personalization, fraud, marketing, and support. Now we put a trillion tokens from trillions of transactions into one model. It does what we did before, but better. It also sees connections we could not see, like cross selling across food, travel, events, and hotels.

Before, a thousand people could take care of 100,000 or 200,000 restaurants. With AI, we can offer the same service to a million restaurants, with better service. That expands what it means to support partners. We are just starting this, and the pace of improvement will be very fast.

We need both kinds of workers, including very skilled people and others who can use new tools well. Over 200 years, automation always changes jobs, but it also improves quality of life. The most important skill is to learn and keep doing new things. Tools help people do more, faster, and better.

Young people are more open to working in a new way. New developers already use AI tools naturally, and even my daughter uses AI for research and search. We will reduce the cost of service and improve health and education, but workers must be able to use these tools. I am optimistic about that shift.

We sold some Tencent over the years and did a large buyback. But our challenge is still to build the next Tencent, by creating big companies in Europe and Latin America and India. We invest through acquiring companies, but also through innovating a lot. We want to operate leaders, not just allocate a portfolio.

Some people think AI is hype, but I think we are underhyping it. The impact on how we live will be huge. It cannot be concentrated only in California or in Beijing. There will be hundred billion dollar or trillion dollar companies in India, Europe, and Latin America, and we want to help build them.

Crypto is not one of our biggest focuses, but I believe very much in stablecoins and distributed infrastructure. We have many transactions across many countries where not every currency is stable. People may want to hold value in a stable way. Stablecoins can connect distributed systems with a more stable financial backend.

Two areas are most important for us. First is e commerce, because AI has not touched it yet and it will become completely different in a few years. Second is agents, where AI becomes virtual coworkers operating parts of the company 24 seven. The impact on the future of work will be very big.

I am from Brazil, from a city known more for music and culture than tech. When I was young, I saw the Bill Gates story and thought I can do it too. I moved to Sao Paulo and built a company from two people into something big. The iFood story shows scale, but it had many ups and downs.

At 14 I built inventory software and tried to sell it to shopping centers. I talked to close to 200 and sold zero at first. It was strange for them to trust a 14 year old. But I did not quit. I learned that entrepreneurship is not about the idea, it is about grit, improvement, and persistence.

The point is not the idea in the beginning. The point is how fast you learn and keep learning. You stay obsessed with the end goal, but every day you try something, learn, and do better tomorrow. We built many products before we found the big one. In emerging markets, it is a lot of iteration.

In my early 20s, we tried to sell a global service to a large telecom player. We ran out of cash because the process took one year instead of six months. The product was there, but timing killed us. It taught me to think big for five or ten years, but still deliver this month, get cash, and deliver results.

We start with thinking very big and putting people first, people who want impact and will work very hard. Then we face brutal facts: what we are not delivering and where we are not good enough. We put it on paper week by week and day by day, check progress daily, and fix problems fast. We do not wait six months.