The Argentinian Marcos Galperin, 54, created Mercado Libre (Mercado Livre in Brazil, or Meli) 26 years ago, when the internet was still in its infancy. Now, he is getting ready to pass the baton to his partner, Ariel Szarfsztejn, 44, in an euphoric moment amid advancements in AI.

From 2026, Szarfsztejn will be at the head of a business with 120,000 workers that serves 130 million clients every month. With a market value of over $100 billion, Meli is the most valuable company in Latin America.

Still, it is worth only a small fraction of the biggest tech companies in the world. What is the size of their ambitions? And what are the biggest challenges in the short and long term?

The duo spoke with EXAME beside Fernando Yunes, at the helm of Brazilian operations, in the company’s São Paulo office.

Will the official command change take place only in early 2026? Has anything already changed in your routines?

Marcos: Everything. On Mercado Livre, we announced a period of transition, which in practice lasted a week. Quickly, Ari began leading, and we understood him to be the new CEO. We are still learning our new roles. But yesterday we had a management meetup, and Ari led the whole thing.

Marcos, did you expect to stay in executive presidency for 26 years?

Marcos: I imagined that Mercado Livre would be pretty large. On day zero, I wasn’t thinking about the transition, but as I grew older and started to see many technology companies struggling to transition from the founder to a new CEO, I began to understand, together with the board, that I needed a plan. I’m very perfectionistic, and I want Mercado Livre to be the best company in Latin America. For that, it must be able to function without its founder.

How was the succession plan designed?

Marcos: First, we had to identify people with suitable characteristics to succeed me. After that, we had to develop their skills. Ari has a more junior role, so we made changes to help him become Mercado Livre’s marketplace CEO. After that, we asked him to start meeting with every investor quarterly to give our CFO quarterly tips, so that every major shareholder could meet him in person. Today, they know him better than me.

The fact that your successor is someone from inside the company doesn’t mean a drastic change for the company…

Marcos: For me, if it were someone from the outside, it would’ve been a sign of personal failure. Because I have always found it very important to work with people who I think are better than me, thus, if I have to step aside and no one is there to fill the gap, I would have failed in hiring people who are better than me.

How is your routine, Marcos? Do you already know what its like to be a chairman, instead of executive president?

Marcos: I’ll learn, just as I learned to be a CEO. When I became a CEO for the first time, in 1999, I’d never seen an employee answer directly to me in my entire life. I had been an analyst, a foot soldier. I went from that to the CEO of a four-guy company in a garage. After that, I had to learn how to be the CEO of an increasingly larger, publicly listed company. Now I’m learning to be the executive chairman. And I’m pleased to have more free time. I want to read more, devote myself more to my family, to myself, to my health. The technology market fascinates me. I spend so much time watching AI videos, and I see there is still so much to learn, so I also want to dedicate myself to it.

Ariel, you arrive at a company during a period of intense competition in Brazil and Latin America. What is your take on this?

Ariel: I believe this is a super-competitive context. E-commerce in Brazil is one of the most disputed markets in the world. But over the past 25 years, we have always competed fiercely. At the beginning, it was against other startups trying to set up their e-commerce platforms. After that, it was against local retailers trying to develop their marketplace and compete online. Then, it was competition with the Americans, eventually with the Asians. There was always a lot of competition, especially in Brazil. We are still relatively tiny. If you look at total retail in Brazil, Mercado Livre is still only 5% of it. We have a significant share of online retail, but the online share of total retail is still only 14%, while in China it reaches 35%.

Analysts see this as a moment when the company decided to invest in initiatives such as free shipping to gain ground on the competition. Do you see it that way too?

Ariel: I see it differently. We are not investing because of competition, but because of the opportunities we have. Based on user feedback, we offer more free deliveries each time. We noticed that users want more and better Mercado Livre services. They want free shipping, the best payment methods, the widest selection of items, and the best prices. We see a market opportunity that we were unable to fully capitalize on due to the high demand for inexpensive products. We realized that it made perfect sense to invest with a long-term perspective.

In Brazil, you are not yet a leader among fintechs. How ambitious are you in this market?

Ariel: Like everything at Mercado Livre, we like to win. We want to be the largest digital financial service provider in Latin America. That is our vision. We cannot imagine a separate company. Mercado Pago is better with Mercado Livre by its side, and Mercado Livre is better with Mercado Pago by its side. The synergies they generate for the ecosystem are enormous. The opportunity to create financial inclusion is huge. The opportunity to better serve users already in the economic system is also significant. We are convinced that we have the talent and resources to get there.

There is a broader question of the extent to which Mercado Pago is a Nubank within the Meli platform...

Marcos: What is Nubank? I don't know...

So it's a direct competitor?

Ariel: We are going to be the most relevant financial services providers in Latin America, and we are convinced of that.

In Brazil, we face an urgent situation in which the postal service needs at least R$10 billion in investments. How ambitious is Mercado Livre in terms of logistics in the short term?

Ariel: We have to keep the best logistics network in Brazil and Latin America. We are the fastest, the most reliable, the most efficient, and the most scalable. And that's a lot. We need to sustain this over time. We must continue serving the user in the best way possible: if we say the package will arrive tomorrow, it will come tomorrow, not today or the day after tomorrow. We have built this using a lot of technology to connect thousands of providers and people working in a sophisticated, complex network. We decided to develop this technology internally, rather than buying it from abroad.

Will this growth continue organically?

Ariel: Yes. I believe our path is to follow the route that is often more difficult but leads to the best result: being the owners of our solutions, our software, and our technology. Instead of being distracted by shortcuts that sometimes seem to help us cut corners, but in the end, continue to be more complex.

Still talking about Brazil, Mercado Livre recently bought a pharmacy and expanded its healthcare ambitions. How do you see the range of possibilities for new verticals in the coming years?

Ariel: I believe we are back to square one. Our focus is on serving and meeting the needs of our users. The healthcare market has high demand and a great need for better services in terms of the shopping and delivery experience. We believe we can contribute by giving everyone access to the medicines they need. Our mission is to connect many pharmacies with buyers. Today, legislation imposes some limitations on us. But our focus is on better serving users so that they can meet their everyday needs.

Will Mercado Livre continue to be a Latin American company? Or in one, five, or 20 years, will it operate in other regions?

Ariel: We are a company built by Latin Americans and focused on Latin America. And the opportunity to grow and transform the lives of Latin Americans is so great that it doesn't make sense to look to other regions. We have everything to do in financial services and e-commerce, and we have many people to continue serving in the interior of the countries where we operate. Mercado Livre exists in many countries. But that does not mean that Mercado Envíos and Mercado Pago do the same.

What concrete impacts does artificial intelligence have on the business? Will technology, for instance, lead to reductions in the number of employees?

Ariel: We believe that artificial intelligence is the present. As a company, we embrace AI in all its dimensions. For 15 years, we have been using AI to build fraud prevention algorithms, recommendation systems, and delivery routes. When generative AI took off, we incorporated it into our experience, with AI-enhanced photos and better AI searches. We have now launched our first AI-powered financial services agent in Brazil. All of this is transforming the user experience. All of our developers use AI to generate faster and better code, but we don't want to reduce the number of developers. We want our 20,000 developers to produce more, because they are our scarcest resource.

Do you see AI as comparable to the arrival of the internet?

Ariel: I am a techno-optimist. AI is potentially stronger than the internet because of the speed of change. The internet took time to scale up. Artificial intelligence is advancing much faster.

AI could eliminate the simplest jobs and increase inequality in society, according to some more pessimistic views. What do you think?

Marcos: I find that view very sad. Some people try to find the negative side of everything. Today, anyone with internet access has access to the best education in the world. The internet has democratized education and many other things that were previously accessible only to a few. Now, with AI, anyone can access the best doctor or lawyer in the world. Why look for the opposing side? Of course, there will be negative things. But I see a thousand positive things before one negative one. Societies have never been more egalitarian than they are now. A middle-class person today lives better than a king in Europe 500 years ago. They have access to hot water, knowledge, food, and air conditioning.

Nvidia has reached a market value of $5 trillion. Does Mercado Livre have the ambition to be a global giant? Is it already on that path?

Ariel: At Mercado Livre, we don't talk about how much the shares are worth, how much the company is worth. That's not part of any conversation at the company. But every day we talk about how to help users better understand us, how to give more credit, and how to make Mercado Pago's interest-bearing account yield even more. Those are the conversations. Evolution will come on its own.

When we talk about risks, one of them is the systemic risk of operating in Latin America. How does that factor in?

Marcos: We focus on generating value for people. Today, 130 million people use Mercado Livre every month. This gives us a specific immunity to the ups and downs of Latin America. When we review the results of an operation, we do not accept macroeconomic justification. We are grateful to Latin America. We continue to operate even in Venezuela. Take Chile, for example, which just had elections. We arrived in Chile in 2000 and lost money until 2019. We tried everything. Then Covid-19 came along, and we've grown sevenfold since then. We spent 20 years betting on all kinds of governments, from center-left to left, right, and center-right. We're in it for the long haul.