The Control-vs-Magic Spectrum Building Agents
From Agentic Conversations (formally mlops.community) by Demetrios
June 5, 2026 · 43 min
About this episode
Thiago Cardoso discusses the complexities of deploying AI agents in production at scale, focusing on the balance between control and autonomy.
Thiago Cardoso is the Director of Data & AI at iFood and the architect behind iFood Pago's AI agent platform. This fintech system serves millions of restaurants across Brazil through WhatsApp and the iFood app. In this episode, he breaks down what it actually takes to ship agentic AI in production at scale. The Control-vs-Magic Spectrum Building Agents // MLOps Podcast #382 with Thiago Cardoso, Director of Data & AI at iFood 🤖 WHAT WE COVER: 🔹 Control vs. Magic — Thiago's spectrum model for thinking about AI agents, from deterministic pipelines to fully autonomous systems 🔹 iFood Pago Explained — How iFood's embedded fintech arm uses AI agents to provide credit, loans, and financial services to restaurants 🔹 WhatsApp as an AI Interface — Why WhatsApp is the primary channel for merchant interactions in Brazil and how agents are deployed there 🔹 Multi-Agent Architecture — Why single monolithic agents break down and how to split them into sub-graphs with specialized contexts and tool sets 🔹 Context Engineering — Why what you put in the agent's context window is more important than the model itself 🔹 Human-in-the-Loop Design — How to build trust with merchants while…
People in this episode
Host: Demetrios
Guest: Thiago Cardoso
Topics covered
- AI agents
- fintech
- multi-agent architecture
- context engineering
- human-in-the-loop design
- debugging with AI
Keywords
- agentic AI
- production scale
- deterministic pipelines
- financial services
- merchant interactions
- sub-graphs
- context window
- trust building
- data pipeline problems
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: iFood, iFood Pago, WhatsApp
Products: LangGraph
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