Ailo: AI Food Agent

Three questions to the project team

What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
Ailo's UX had to do something the iFood app can't: collapse a multi-step journey (open, search, filter, compare, decide) into a single conversation that doesn't just shorten the path but chooses for you, smartly. That meant designing for a behavior that does not yet exist: an experience that thinks and acts on the user's behalf. The voice feels like a Brazilian friend on WhatsApp, paired with the Ailo App experience. And most importantly: earning trust by proving Ailo truly knows the user's taste, history, preferences, address, and mood to skip steps and place the order that actually benefits them.

What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
The low point came first: designing a conversational food journey is harder than it sounds. Balancing what to ask, when, and how, without sounding rigid, felt like an impossible equation. The aha-moment came when we stopped designing one journey and broke behavior into two archetypes: the indecisive, who wants to receive multiple suggestions, and the decisive, who already knows what they want. Suddenly the equation solved itself. For the indecisive, Ailo trades ideas based on taste and context. For the decisive, it shortcuts everything into a near-instant order.

Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
In five years, we see Ailo evolving from an alternative channel into the primary discovery layer of iFood, not competing with the app, but becoming part of how it thinks. An agent that knows your taste deeply enough to predict hunger, not just give open options and let the user choose. Truly multimodal: native voice, a photo of your fridge that turns into a recommendation, audio that reacts to your day. Memory that learns without feeling clingy. At scale, that changes delivery experience: less friction, more discovery, less choice anxiety.