As artificial intelligence moves from experimentation into the operational core of digital commerce, the competitive advantage is shifting towards companies that can standardise and deploy AI at scale across complex, multi-market ecosystems. A new agreement between Prosus and Amazon Web Services reflects that change, signalling how AI is becoming infrastructure rather than a differentiating feature bolted onto products.
Under a three-year global partnership agreement, Prosus has selected AWS to support the expansion of AI-driven applications across its ecommerce portfolio in Latin America, Europe and India. The agreement will allow Prosus companies, including iFood, OLX, PayU, Despegar, eMag and Just Eat Takeaway.com, to co-create AI solutions using AWS cloud and machine learning services.
Rather than focusing on individual pilots, the partnership is designed to standardise how AI is developed, deployed and governed across a diverse technology estate serving billions of customer interactions.
From isolated models to shared AI foundations
At the centre of Prosus’ approach is the idea that AI capabilities should be reusable across markets and brands. The company is building on the experience of iFood, Brazil’s largest food delivery platform, which has developed what it calls a Large Commerce Model. This agentic AI system supports personalised search and recommendation by learning from outcomes over time and inferring consumer intent across interactions.
The scale is significant. iFood processes around 180 million orders each month, giving the model a continuous stream of behavioural data. According to Prosus, the system improves with each interaction by maintaining long-term memory and adapting recommendations based on real-world outcomes rather than static rules.
Prosus now intends to apply similar principles across its wider portfolio. By working with AWS engineering teams, the group aims to shorten the time between proving an AI capability in one business and deploying it across others operating in different regulatory and market contexts.
Igor Cardoso, head of Prosus ecosystem, said earlier collaboration with AWS had already allowed portfolio companies to scale proven AI innovations. The new agreement, he said, goes beyond commercial terms, with AWS committing engineering resources to co-develop products and provide portfolio-wide access to deployment support.
Operational discipline becomes the differentiator
The agreement is structured around five pillars that reflect the operational realities of running AI at scale. These include the use of generative AI for product development, standardised reliability practices to reduce service disruption, enterprise-grade security frameworks, tighter financial controls on cloud spending through FinOps, and unified technology templates that can be deployed rapidly across companies.
Taken together, these priorities suggest a shift away from AI as a creative experiment towards AI as an operational discipline. As ecommerce platforms become increasingly dependent on real-time personalisation and automated decision-making, failures in reliability, security or cost control quickly translate into lost revenue or regulatory exposure.
AWS sees the partnership as an illustration of how commerce companies are evolving. Greg Pearson, vice president of global sales at AWS, said Prosus demonstrated how AI and machine learning could be combined with operational expertise to change how customers discover and experience products.
An AI-first commerce strategy
Prosus is positioning the partnership as part of a broader AI-first strategy. Across its wholly owned businesses, the group serves more than 500 million customers and processes hundreds of millions of daily interactions. It also claims to manage more than 10 trillion tokens of data, providing the raw material for large-scale AI systems.
Through its in-house agent development platform, Toqan, Prosus has built an internal workforce of more than 30,000 AI agents that automate workflows across operations. Alongside this, the company has invested in more than 30 AI-native ecommerce start-ups, reinforcing its focus on applying AI directly to commercial outcomes rather than abstract capability.
The agreement with AWS underlines a broader trend in ecommerce and AI. As the technology matures, advantage is increasingly determined by who can industrialise AI across organisations, markets and products, not just who builds the most advanced model. For Prosus, the bet is that shared infrastructure and disciplined execution will matter more than novelty as AI becomes embedded in everyday commerce.
