Juan Pablo

Making Everyday Life Simpler With AI Lifestyle Assistants

Juan Pablo Ferreira’s core message was that Zapia is designed to make consumer AI move beyond answering questions into completing everyday tasks on a user’s behalf. He introduced himself as CEO and co-founder of Zapia AI, a Prosus portfolio company working in Europe and Latin America to make AI available to everybody. He explained that the company began in Latin America on WhatsApp because, in his words, “everything happens on top of WhatsApp” there: buying, selling, family communication, and business communication. Its first WhatsApp AI chatbot reached 1,000,000 users in less than ninety days, but Ferreira said the product was removed from WhatsApp, forcing the team to restart with a broader vision. The problem he framed was that today’s widely available AI can talk but generally does not do the work for users. He contrasted this with “OpenClaw,” which he described as the most advanced AI agent in the world but also unsafe, unpredictable, difficult to set up, and out of reach for regular consumers. Zapia, by contrast, was presented as an AI agentic assistant that requires zero setup, is safe by design, is stable, and brings agentic power directly to the phone. Ferreira emphasized that a user can download the app and quickly build a team of agents working “20 fourseven” for them, with the key differentiator being context from WhatsApp, work tools, and the open web. Ferreira then showed three user stories to demonstrate what he meant by autonomous task completion. In the first, Zapia reads a daily brief, detects an Airbnb host’s request for passport photos, finds the user’s passport in Google Drive, asks Juan and Franco for theirs through WhatsApp, and forwards the documents to the host without further follow-up. In the second, Zapia notices a business dinner with Thiago from Prosus, connects WhatsApp context about Thiago being Brazilian and liking football with Brazil’s World Cup match, suggests steakhouses near the AI house, and books a table via WhatsApp in Dutch. In the third, Zapia joins a WhatsApp group chat, suggests bitterballen after the Prosus Forward talk, finds Market Thirty Three nearby with free delivery through Just Eat, and places a group order for about 200 people. He concluded by saying that no other AI product can currently perform this kind of WhatsApp group collaboration, where a user can tag Zapia in any conversation and ask it to act across chats and services. Ferreira said the product has already been used by over 6,000,000 users, is growing fast again, and has a 4.8 app-store rating. The final announcement was that Zapia is now available for use in Europe and is being brought to 1,000,000,000 Prosus users worldwide, with attendees encouraged to download the app and start building agents immediately.