Building MCP Before MCP Existed: Inside Despegar's Sofia Agent

About this episode

Nicolas Alejandro Bogliolo discusses the development of Sofia, Despegar's GenAI travel concierge, and the innovative systems behind it.

Nicolas Alejandro Bogliolo is the AI PM at Despegar, the largest online travel agency in Latin America, and the engineer-product-hybrid behind Sofia, the GenAI travel concierge that beat most of the OTA world to a working multi-agent system. Before MCP was a standard and before LangChain was widely adopted, his team had already shipped their own orchestration layer and tool protocol in production. This conversation is a rare look at what it takes to build an agentic system that actually books trips, runs on WhatsApp, and keeps adding capabilities without falling over. Building MCP Before MCP Existed: Inside Despegar's Sofia Agent // MLOps Podcast #375 with Nicolas Alejandro Bogliolo, AI PM at Despegar What we cover: - Chappi, the brain of Sofia: how Despegar built an internal orchestration layer when there was nothing off the shelf- Building "MCP before MCP": the custom tool-calling protocol that predated the Anthropic standard- Multi-agent architecture by vertical: flights, hotels, activities, and cars each own their own flow - Decentralized agent ownership: how any squad in the company can build a flow with central supervision - Sofia on WhatsApp: making messaging the…

People in this episode

Host: Demetrios

Guest: Nicolas Alejandro Bogliolo

Topics covered

• AI in travel
• multi-agent systems
• orchestration layers
• WhatsApp integration
• travel planning
• customer experience

Keywords

• Despegar
• Sofia
• multi-agent architecture
• WhatsApp
• travel concierge
• AI PM
• orchestration layer
• MCP
• LangChain
• travel planning

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Despegar

Products: Sofia, MCP, LangChain

Places: Latin America

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