AITropos Revolutionizes Hospitality with AI Agents on WhatsApp

AITropos: AI Innovation in Hospitality

In an episode of "Just Now Possible," Teresa Torres speaks with Santi Marchiori, CEO, and Juan Haedo, CTO of AITropos, to discuss their ambitious project: creating an artificial intelligence capable of managing food orders via WhatsApp. This company aims to integrate virtual employees into the hospitality industry, making the ordering process as smooth and natural as possible for customers.

Marchiori and Haedo spent two years exploring hundreds of startup ideas before finding the specific niche of AI-powered order taking. To achieve this goal, AITropos went through three phases of product development. Initially, the company designed a hardware device intended for servers, followed by a dedicated application. Ultimately, it culminated in a customer-oriented conversational agent, fully integrated with WhatsApp. The latter is designed to provide menu recommendations, manage order modifications, determine delivery areas, provide payment links, and send status updates, all while being fast and accurate enough that customers do not realize they are interacting with a machine.

A Three-Step Innovation Journey

One of the major technical challenges that AITropos had to overcome is translating non-deterministic human conversations into structured order data compatible with point-of-sale (POS) systems. This complex process is essential to ensure that orders are processed accurately and efficiently.

AITropos opted for a tool-based architecture rather than a parallel computing model (MCP) for its AI agent. This strategic decision aims to ensure optimal speed and reliability. The company has implemented a parallelized pipeline capable of simultaneously searching multiple products and preloading product context, thereby reducing latency before calling a tool.

Rigorous Testing and Accelerated Integration

Before each deployment in a new establishment, AITropos tests its agent with thousands of simulated conversations overnight. This approach ensures the accuracy and efficiency of the system. Thanks to these innovations, the integration of new clients has been reduced from three months to a few weeks, and the company continues to work on further shortening this timeframe.

AITropos also uses smaller, faster sub-agents to build an "immediate system prompt." This system injects relevant data at each turn without requiring additional tool calls, thereby optimizing the ordering process. The accuracy of identifying ordered items has become the most important KPI for the company, highlighting the significance of precision in this field.

A Promising Future for Hospitality

By exploring hundreds of startup ideas, Marchiori and Haedo identified AI-powered order taking as a promising niche in hospitality. Their work on accurately identifying ordered items has become a key performance indicator (KPI) for the company, underscoring the importance of precision in this area.