Mercado Libre's AI Finance Assistant Turns Complexity into Clarity

Ask, And AI Will Answer: Reimagining Finance at Mercado Libre

Mercado Libre put AI at the center of its finance stack-turning fragmented workflows into fast, on-demand analysis. What began as a discussion with IT and finance leaders became a working AI agent that answers finance questions in plain language and executes tasks in seconds.

As Quartr notes, Mercado Libre is a cornerstone of Latin America's digital economy. The company's next phase: bring the same speed and clarity to financial operations that it brings to commerce and payments.

From Boston to Buenos Aires

The initiative started at an event in Boston where Mercado Libre teams met with technology leaders to explore AI-driven finance agents. Over the following year, cross-functional teams ran workshops, user interviews, and co-creation sessions with one rule: serve the end user first.

The mission was clear-reduce complexity, remove friction, and give finance teams direct access to answers without relying on long development cycles.

The problems finance teams faced

• Disconnected systems: BigQuery, Excel, and other tools-no single source of truth.
• Manual work: filtering reports, preparing audit cases-up to 40 minutes each, times thousands.
• Slow turnaround: new reports or configurations could take weeks.
• Low flexibility: small model changes often meant rebuilding from scratch.
• Heavy data prep: more time cleaning and downloading than analyzing.

The result: duplicated effort, slower closes, and missed insight.

The new financial assistant

The team built an AI agent that consolidates data, automates routine tasks, and delivers real-time answers. Analysts can type questions in natural language and get structured, visualized results without waiting on a specialist.

Examples:

• "Create the trial balance for Q2 2024 for company MCM." The agent generates a clean report with drill-downs and charts-instantly.
• "Analyze transaction 12345 on January 1, 2024." The agent returns detailed entries, accounting impact, and custom attributes aligned to Mercado Libre's processes.

What took hours now takes moments-and the workflow stays inside one interface.

Principles that drove adoption

• Synchronous reporting: real-time data for real-time decisions.
• Self-service: end users control the full workflow, start to finish.
• Consistency: one source of truth across databases and teams.
• Simplicity: clean UX, low friction, fast execution.
• Scalability: built for volume today and growth tomorrow.

What this means for finance leaders

• Close faster with fewer handoffs and fewer spreadsheet cycles.
• Improve control with instant traceability from summary to subledger.
• Scale analysis without scaling headcount.
• Shorten audit prep from hours to minutes with on-demand evidence.
• Cut model maintenance costs by reducing rebuilds and rework.

How to start-practical steps

• List the 10 questions finance asks every week; design prompts and outputs for those first.
• Unify core definitions (CoA, entities, fiscal calendars) before you unify tools.
• Standardize data contracts so reports, reconciliations, and controls reuse the same logic.
• Keep the UI minimal: one input, one answer, one drill path.
• Instrument everything-latency, accuracy, lineage-so improvements are data-driven.

Roadmap

Mercado Libre is rolling out AI-driven business and financial insights, followed by error analysis, recommendations, data validation, and improved data quality later this year. Next year, anomaly detection will monitor critical accounts to strengthen financial control.

The message is simple: make financial analysis fast, clear, and accessible to every analyst and manager.

Why this matters now

Finance doesn't need more dashboards-it needs direct answers connected to governed data. Mercado Libre's approach shows how to move from report requests to conversational analysis without sacrificing control.

Learn more about the company's broader platform at Mercado Libre. If you're exploring similar moves in your organization, see curated AI tools for finance that can accelerate your roadmap.