AI in LATAM: How to Break Into Mexico’s Tech Market

Brian Samson (00:01.644)
Welcome to another episode of the Nearshore Cafe podcast. I’m your host, Brian Samson And this is the show where we talk about the stories and people doing business in Latin America. Today’s a really interesting, it’s a show about a long career seasoned tech entrepreneur. He’s got an AI company and we don’t talk about this a lot, but how to

Sell to the latam region in this particular case. It’s gonna be Mexico. So we’ll get into that Before we start let me thank our sponsor Plugg technologies PLU gg.tech Great way to connect talent from all over Latin America with growing US companies Let me welcome our guest Oleg baron off the founder and CEO of flame tree AI. it’s so great to have you

Oleg Baranov (01:01.59)
Thank you, thank you. It’s pleasure to meet you here.

Brian Samson (01:04.376)
So Oleg, I’m just going to share your bio for a second with our audience, because I think it’s a really impressive bio. So in addition to Flametree, serial tech entrepreneur, venture investor. You’ve worked in the banking and fintech sectors 20 years on the software space. A lot of work with complex business applications with banks.

And you’re a hands-on guy, I can tell. I believe you like to get your hands dirty at the tech. And in addition to that, some really impressive institutions you’ve attended, Stanford and Harvard. So really excited to have you. I would love to just kind of set the scene. Tell us a little more about where you grew up and your career journey.

Oleg Baranov (02:01.397)
Thank you. I’m in business already about 30 years and major part of this journey I’m acting as an entrepreneur. I managed to start several startups and businesses successfully. My first startup was internal startup when I worked

in a company. It was a development of a new generation of core banking system. Our target audience were CIS countries. We started this software platform from, developed it from scratch with very small team, like five persons. I was young and

a bit ambitious and it was a successful internal startup. We managed to create this software, it’s full-scale core banking system. We managed to sell 400 copies for 12 years. It’s okay. And as I had a stock option in my first company, I got paid in the end of this.

Brian Samson (03:15.78)
wow.

Oleg Baranov (03:29.099)
story and his journey and using this money really what I did in 2005 I started my first first my own company with my partners of course but I was a founder and CEO of this company it was another idea we decided we believed in this moment after more than 10 years working for software development company

Brian Samson (03:41.186)
Yeah.

Oleg Baranov (03:58.481)
We believed that professional services, consultancy, it’s a very interesting area, very interesting topic. And we started a company focused on custom software development for banks. Of course, because at the moment we had relations, had expertise. And it was a very difficult moment in my life. It was again from scratch, second time.

Brian Samson (04:26.2)
Yeah.

Oleg Baranov (04:27.275)
But in this case I didn’t have a big company which could help me. So first year was a very difficult period of time. We approached banks, people we worked with before. Unfortunately many of them did not decide to take risks.

And it’s always for such undertaking it was very difficult to find first customers, but we managed to do this. And finally, this company became not very big, but rather big. When I exited, it was 1,500 engineers. So, and we started it without any external funding.

Brian Samson (05:20.812)
Wow, incredible.

Oleg Baranov (05:26.581)
from scratch with a team of just nine individuals.

Brian Samson (05:30.838)
Please, yeah, please go more in the details here because it’s not every day we talk to people that can go, you know, yeah, yeah, I just gonna say it’s not every day we talk to people that have gone from, you know, nine to 1500, you know, myself, I’ve gotten stuck around the hundred mark a couple times in my career, I can’t seem to.

Oleg Baranov (05:36.265)
Yes, finally we had it Sorry.

Brian Samson (05:57.602)
to get past it. I would just like to learn from you. I’m sure our audience will tell us more about just the building of that company. That sounds amazing.

Oleg Baranov (06:08.159)
Thank you, thank you. So, finally I got two different experiences. First is like out of the box software development. And the second is like building of IT professional services company focused on custom software development. But in both cases it’s software development. And in both cases, especially my second business, we had a lot of…

AI-related, machine learning-related project, especially in the area of banking risk management. So we use machine learning models and train machine learning models starting from 2005. And that’s why when I started my next company, was in 2022, just less than four years ago, with headquarters in Cyprus.

We initially decided to more or less repeat, but on a different market, idea of our previous company. And we tried to build one more IT professional services firm. But frankly speaking, it grew, but not very fast, not fast enough. And one year later, in the summer of 2023,

Brian Samson (07:11.757)
Yeah.

Oleg Baranov (07:34.984)
When large language models appeared and became available, we came up with the idea to build an agentic AI platform, which is now called Flame3 AI. We were not the very first guys who decided to do this, but anyway it was more than two and a half years ago.

Brian Samson (07:49.112)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Samson (08:04.824)
Yeah.

Oleg Baranov (08:05.163)
and we invested a lot in this platform during this period of time and hope what we have now and what we continue developing now. It’s an interesting product. At least we have customers, have paying customers, have customers among banks and financial industry and I believe we have good perspectives.

Brian Samson (08:35.798)
Yeah, yeah. I want to dive deeper into Flametree, but I don’t want to overlook your career right before. What are some of the key lessons that you learned from before Flametree about building companies?

Oleg Baranov (08:58.315)
It was many lessons really. We did a lot of mistakes. But of course, what I think now, course the core of any such undertaking is the team. It’s the team, it’s people, not only their knowledge, not only their expertise, but their attitude.

Brian Samson (09:05.901)
Yeah.

Brian Samson (09:16.611)
Yeah.

Oleg Baranov (09:28.649)
your relations inside the team because you can’t do anything new using standard management approach using KPIs or just giving directions. It should be a common shared idea and only in this case you can really achieve anything serious, especially

in difficult times, because for sure, at least in my experience, in any projects, in any company I started, of course we had difficult moments when everything looked like crazy and only support of my team and support of each other could help in such situations. From my perspective, it’s very important. And the second thing I would like to mention, you mentioned that I…

Brian Samson (10:07.831)
Yeah.

Oleg Baranov (10:29.483)
had a couple of educations. Really I try to, maybe I am so called lifetime learner or I graduated like four universities and I try to every year or at least once in a couple of years to participate in any new educational program, for example during last four years.

I took courses in best universities. For example, in Barclays, I took a program regarding venture capital. In IMD, I took a joint program with IMD and MIT regarding disruptive innovations. Of course, bigger programs about finance, general management, corporate governance. So the second idea.

Brian Samson (11:12.289)
Mm-hmm.

Oleg Baranov (11:29.431)
For me it’s education and constant participation in this educational process, not only for me myself, but of course for my team members.

Brian Samson (11:42.956)
Yeah, yeah. How did you learn, agentic AI?

Oleg Baranov (11:51.115)
As I mentioned, in my previous company we were involved in machine ML and AI projects for risk management. Two areas, it’s credit scoring and all related with lending. And second, we developed models for

regulatory reporting according to standards like IFRS, Bazel and so on. So my team had data scientists already and we had experience with the models of previous generations. So that’s why when LLM appeared, it was not very difficult for us to notice this in time and to…

Brian Samson (12:25.548)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Samson (12:42.702)
Mm-hmm.

Oleg Baranov (12:49.629)
start using them widely in our projects, not only in FlameTree but in other projects because we still have professional services like branch of our company which continue to provide professional services for banks.

Brian Samson (13:03.191)
Yeah.

Brian Samson (13:06.626)
Yeah, and before we get into FlameTree, just your past, were there certain countries or places that you had most of your engineers working?

Oleg Baranov (13:20.235)
Sorry, say it louder please.

Brian Samson (13:22.222)
Yeah, where were your engineers? Which countries were your engineers in?

Oleg Baranov (13:27.019)
are our main office in Cyprus, but we have a couple more. We have Dubai, have Johannesburg, South Africa, we have Serbia and Armenia, two countries where we have engineers with CIS background and roots.

Brian Samson (13:50.998)
Yeah, okay. Okay, good, good. And then with FlameTree, are your engineers in all those countries too, or where have you decided to put your technical team for FlameTree?

Oleg Baranov (14:04.395)
Core team for Flame3 is on Cyprus. Myself and chief architect, my product owner of Flame3. So core team on Cyprus, but we have some engineers in our other offices. We don’t have an office in Latam yet, but we’re seriously thinking about this and I believe this is like a next step for us.

Brian Samson (14:07.49)
Cyprus, okay.

Brian Samson (14:12.066)
Got it.

Brian Samson (14:25.399)
Yeah.

Brian Samson (14:32.568)
Good, good, got it. All right, so let’s talk more about FlameTree. Tell us more about your vision for FlameTree and the ideal customer.

Oleg Baranov (14:48.011)
As I mentioned our background in banking automation. So that’s why when we started this project, this platform, the initial idea was to create a platform to automate customer service for banks, retail banks mainly. And we thought about conversational AI agents. So to substitute…

Brian Samson (14:53.027)
Mm-hmm.

Oleg Baranov (15:16.405)
call centers, employees to substitute legacy chatbots which are inconvenient with like you need to choose a lot of options before you understand that you really can’t get the information you need and you can’t be served. So it was initial idea and because Light Language Models can understand natural language

Brian Samson (15:31.95)
Okay.

Okay.

Oleg Baranov (15:47.168)
up to the very simple, obvious idea right now that such agents, AI agents can help banks in two ways. They can make their customers more happy and it’s important. I believe

Brian Samson (16:03.256)
Mm-hmm.

Oleg Baranov (16:07.179)
All of us have bad experience in some retail businesses, not only banks, it could be like a telecom operator airline where you need to solve any urgent issue and you’re waiting in the queue or you’re chatting with a not very clever chatbot or the employee on the other side can’t answer your question because…

simply didn’t know or can’t understand the situation because you understand that in call centers of bigger companies, not only banks, maybe not best people with not enough sometimes knowledge, sometimes not enough motivation to help you. AI agents from that perspective have a lot of advantages.

They can work They never became tired or frustrated or angry. And another important thing, they can’t leave the company with some knowledge and experience and they learn on each iteration. Because the idea of such platforms like Flame3

Brian Samson (17:05.239)
Hmm.

Brian Samson (17:11.608)
Yeah.

Brian Samson (17:27.234)
Yeah.

Oleg Baranov (17:32.779)
For now I believe not all people understand this. It’s impossible from my perspective to buy ready AI agent for a particular business. Or it’s impossible to develop or train it at once. Really it’s a process of constant improvement. It’s like with real human. If you hire junior specialist, you need to explain him what to do. And after that he is learning.

Brian Samson (17:48.92)
Yeah.

Brian Samson (17:58.187)
Right, right.

Oleg Baranov (18:01.419)
He does mistakes and with each iteration, each and every iteration he became better. The same story with AI agents. That’s why one core idea of Flame 3, it’s not just we can give you an agent which can solve your problems. We provide a technology, a platform which allows us to organize continuous improvement of AI agents.

Brian Samson (18:21.294)
Mm-hmm.

Oleg Baranov (18:31.189)
So we have special tools, special modules to analyze all conversations, all outcomes, all results every day and to get data for AI agents improvement. It’s by the way one of the maybe not so obvious thing even now. If you go to the internet or any like…

trade show, you easily find like dozens of AI agents offering companies who offer AI agents, platforms and so on. But I just come yesterday from a summit from Qatar. You know, it’s like a big conference.

Brian Samson (19:21.292)
Mm-hmm. Of course, yeah.

Oleg Baranov (19:24.875)
It was, if I remember correctly, 1500 startups on this event. I’m not sure, but at least several hundreds worked in the area of agentic AI, agentic AI platforms. What I can say?

Not all of them at least, or maybe even it’s a rather rare situation where they speak about this vicious cycle of constant agent improvement. People try to offer like a ready solution. For me, it’s maybe it’s possible for very simple business, for very standard business. If you have two restaurants, maybe you can develop an agent for one restaurant and offer it to a second one. It could be maybe okay. But if this is a bank,

Brian Samson (19:56.387)
Hmm.

Oleg Baranov (20:14.697)
Regarding our functionality, of course, currently we have, I can give you an example, one bank on our customer use five different AI agents developed based on Flame3 platform. For customer service, for debt collection, for customer onboarding, for cross-sell upsell, and so on. And of course, such AI agents can be specially trained, set up.

integrated with different backend systems to be able to perform particular tasks in particular situations. Of course, I believe it’s relevant to mention a couple of technical things. Our platform is LLM-agnostic, so we don’t try our own large language model because it’s very serious and expensive.

Brian Samson (20:46.701)
Hmm.

Brian Samson (20:53.102)
Mm-hmm.

Oleg Baranov (21:14.079)
business and I believe that companies like OpenAI and Meta and other giants can do this very good and we do not compete with them. We can connect any LLM from privately or publicly served to any of our AI agents. Moreover, if tomorrow, I don’t know, one of these big techs

Brian Samson (21:15.32)
Mm-hmm.

Brian Samson (21:34.253)
Yeah.

Oleg Baranov (21:42.795)
release new version of LLM better than previous one we can easily substitute it, change it just in like 10 minutes so our customers can use best of breed LLMs but our platform just help to organize relevant workflows, relevant integrations with channels of course we support different channels starting from all messengers, telephone calls

Brian Samson (21:46.254)
you

Oleg Baranov (22:13.355)
emails, our agents typically integrated into web or mobile application of the bank. By the way, it’s interesting story. Now we have not only banks as customers, we managed to get some interesting customers from different industries because technically our platform industry agnostic, not only LLM agnostic.

As I mentioned, we cover different business cases. We call it inbound and outbound. the typical example of customers inbound AI agents is customer service agent when customer ask questions and we just need to answer questions. And outbound cases, the best example is that collection when we need to outreach client to remind him, for example, that it’s time to…

pay his debt to ask

Brian Samson (23:12.119)
Yeah.

Oleg Baranov (23:14.217)
get agreement to pay and so on.

Brian Samson (23:14.702)
Yeah

Brian Samson (23:19.31)
Yeah, if I could, if I could shift gears for a second, if I could shift gears for a second Oleg and focus more on Latin America for a few minutes. So tell us more about doing business in Latin America. think you said Mexico is where, where you’ve started first in selling, selling your product. What’s that been like? You know, how did you

decide on Mexico, how is selling to Mexico different from selling to other countries and other buyers.

Oleg Baranov (23:57.871)
It’s a funny story really. At first I would like to start that as I mentioned initially our focus was in Europe, Middle East and Africa.

really we got it was opportunity it was not strategy the person who worked with us in his previous company joined Mexican microfinance company like it’s like a bank monoliner bank and invited us and so as I mentioned as I said it wasn’t strategy it was opportunity we of course decided to

to take this project. Hopefully we had a couple of people who speak Spanish, who hablo Espanol. By the way, myself, I’m not very good in Espanol, but I used to live in Spain and more or less understand and can write in Spanish and Espanol. And we had, as I mentioned, some customers in…

Brian Samson (24:56.152)
Mm-hmm.

Oleg Baranov (25:16.103)
Angola in Portuguese-speak countries, we have some people who have Spanish as a native language. So finally we started this project and it was rather successful and in a couple of months, really maybe three or four months just after starting, we were recommended to another Mexican microfinance company.

Brian Samson (25:25.528)
Sure.

Oleg Baranov (25:45.676)
by the people who worked with us in the first one. So we got second Mexican bank. And again, it was an opportunity, it was not strategy. The third step was more or less similar. Chief marketing officer of one of these banks left his organization and joined another company. In this case, was not a bank, it was a…

company which sells cars and motorcycles and in two or three weeks after joining this new company he called me and said, Oleg, we need your agents to improve sales of our products. Can you do this? We are not a bank. And I said, I don’t know because I don’t know your business, but let’s try.

Brian Samson (26:31.278)
Okay.

Oleg Baranov (26:43.403)
You may believe me or not, but in just three or four weeks, the first Air Engine for this company has been launched successfully. And it started to provide 700 conversations daily with potential clients. And I believe it was one of the fastest implementation of Flame 3. And so next step was again

very very not similar but opportunistic so we have a we use partner models in our business so how do we sell FlameTree? of course we have some our own sales forces but we have partners besides that and these partners are typically IT professional services companies or software companies and one of our

One of our partners invited us to some tender for two banks, one in Guyana and the second one in Belize, so it’s countries in Caribbean region. I’ve never been in any of them. And so after that fact, we decided that we need to create strategy for Latin.

Brian Samson (27:58.286)
Okay.

Oleg Baranov (28:10.547)
Latam for Latin America. what we are going to do, most likely we will open an office in Mexico this year and we will create some special strategy for this market.

Brian Samson (28:13.71)
Okay.

Brian Samson (28:24.11)
Okay.

Brian Samson (28:31.478)
Yeah, amazing. I love that. I love that. That’s a very interesting story. you know, I’ve been spending a lot more time in Mexico myself, and it’s a unique place. And I think it’s important as we talk about on this podcast a lot that Latin America is a unique place, but it’s not all one way, you know, even though Spanish is the common language amongst most of the countries.

It’s just a very Mexico is its own special, special country. Well, I want to start wrapping up here, Oleg, you know, as we as we get close to time. This has been really, really interesting to have such a globally successful entrepreneur as you. You were the first person we’ve had on the show that’s in Cyprus. So that’s exciting. And we like the agentic.

AI platform, flametree.ai. think that’s going to be really exciting to watch. We’ll be cheering for you and all your success. So thank you again for coming on the show on the Nearshore Cafe podcast. Again, we’re sponsored by Plugg Technologies, Plugg .tech. And Oleg, if anyone wants to reach you, what’s the best way to do that?

Oleg Baranov (29:55.403)
My LinkedIn, I believe it’s the easiest way, but of course I can share my email, you have it, and I will be happy if you… Yes.

Brian Samson (30:03.224)
Sure, Sure, yeah, we’ll drop everything in the show notes for people to find you. that’s all we have today. Thank you again for listening to the Near Shore Cafe podcast. Thanks again to Oleg and our sponsor. And we will see you again next time.

Oleg Baranov (30:23.305)
Muchas gracias, Brian.