Q&A: How Caju AI Helps Businesses Hear What Customers Really Say

Every day, employees and customers are having conversations on digital channels like SMS, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, and iMessage. Hidden in those chats are clues about what customers need, what frustrates them, and what they wish worked better.

Technology entrepreneur Otavio Freire (MBA ’05) recognized that many companies struggled to capture and monitor the digital conversations taking place across their organizations. To address this issue, Freire, Jim Ting, and Ruben Jimenez co-founded Caju AI in 2023, leveraging recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence. “Our company began with a simple realization: AI was advancing fast, but the existing tools for understanding human conversations were inadequate and frustrating,” said Freire. “When OpenAI’s GPT-2.5 was released, it was a game-changer — our big ‘aha!’ moment.”

Otavio Freire, Jim Ting, and Ruben Jimenez co-founded Caju AI in 2023.

Freire, Ting and Jimenez imagined a future in which businesses could truly understand digital conversations, not just crunch message numbers or generate word clouds. That’s when they decided to build something new — an AI-powered solution that goes beyond surface-level analytics to uncover actionable intelligence and business insights.

Darden Report recently spoke with Freire, the CEO and co-founder of Caju AI, who also serves as a visiting executive lecturer at Darden. The conversation focused on his venture, data privacy, building customer trust, and the unprecedented business opportunities AI can unlock. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Tell us about Caju AI, its unique name, and the problem you’re solving.

The name was inspired by a Brazilian tropical fruit. “Caju” means a fruit that self-generates. So what better name for an AI company?

We focus on digital conversations. Every moment, there are millions of conversations that employees are having with customers around the globe. And those conversations take place in hard-to-get places such as texts, email, iMessage, WhatsApp, WeChat, Slack, Teams, and other digital channels. Our customers couldn’t possibly hire enough humans to process those conversations, look for risk and understand how to create business value in the marketplace from them. Before Caju AI there was no means to create a central repository for all those critical conversations. Before AI, it was impossible to extract insights from those multi-lingual conversations.

Can you give a specific example?

One of our customers is a top 5 pharma company, based in New Jersey. They launched a new drug and were challenged in finding all the bottlenecks regarding how to reach more physicians and more patients. So Caju AI can grab all those digital conversations that take place between pharmaceutical reps, doctors and key opinion leaders and tell them exactly how to serve their doctors better. With the help of AI, we can read all that and say, “In this region you should be doing this, and at this conference you should be doing that—and this is how you remove the bottlenecks.”

How do you access those digital conversations while ensuring data privacy?

There’s a large privacy component to what we do, and the employees must be part of it. And platforms like Meta, Tencent, and Apple have to be a part of it as well. So all stakeholders agree to share this information. The thing that I’m always selling is, We have to do this in a pro-privacy way. So how do you gather all that data in a pro-privacy way? How do you de-risk it? That’s where the governance comes in.

As the CEO of an AI company that extracts business insights from sensitive conversations, how do you build trust with your customers?

Every day, I ask myself: How can I build a more trustworthy relationship with my customers? Our customers are top financial service firms, several branches of the U.S. government, insurance companies, hospitals and large educational institutions. Because we handle a lot of sensitive data, trust is the number one currency. If we have trust, we’ll have revenue. That’s why we’re investing in our capabilities to build on that trust. We’ve learned that the more transparent we are the better we are at building trust, but we have to expose all aspects of our controls to our customer. We have a dashboard and when there’s an issue with the controls, our customers can see that, and they know before we do.

AI adoption is increasing. How do you stay relevant and competitive?

We all compete on outcomes. Ask yourself, Is your AI analyzing all this data, and having an impact on my business, and to what extent? Did it truly generate more revenue? Did it reduce my costs? Having better and better AI that understands the challenges you have makes the employee better on arrival, makes the whole set of stakeholders more efficient, and you can measure its impact; that’s the nexus of competition. That requires a significant investment of capital. We’re constantly adopting the smartest AI. The smartest AI is the one that solves your business problem more efficiently and delivers results.

Our competitors’ platforms are not based on AI. They were trying to do keyword matches and things that create a lot of false positives, and don’t understand the context and intent of the conversation and are not multilingual. Today, people even talk through emojis. Understanding those conversations is challenging from a technological perspective. We’re using AI to disrupt other firms in the marketplace.

There’s a lot of fear around AI replacing humans. Is that fear justified?

What’s replacing humans is other humans who are powered by AI. It’s similar to past innovations; those who knew how to use the internet became more effective employees than those who did not. One of our customers activated our system, and within three weeks, he processed 2.5 million messages in 20 different languages and was able to derive actionable insights from them.

What excites you the most about AI and what concerns you?

I remember when the internet came about. At first, everyone tried to avoid it. And then, suddenly, “Wow, I’ve got to embrace it, fast.” We’re going through that same moment with AI. Last year, we conducted numerous pilots. In 2025, people rushed pilots into production. I think 2026 will be even bigger in AI adoption. We’re in this “crossing the chasm” moment. The big fat middle of corporate America is hesitant about AI, but some say, “This is great, let’s go fast, we have a first mover’s advantage”

What excites me is the impact AI is having on business and society. AI is helping treat more patients, faster. It’s helping folks be smarter about their finances. It’s helping schools retain more students. The risks? It’s something we need to work through because the impact AI has is so valuable to society as a whole.

Given the rapid changes driven by AI, what advice would you offer MBA students?

AI is moving fast. Every task you perform is subject to revision, particularly in terms of how it’s accomplished with AI. You should be asking yourself, How does AI apply to accounting? How does it apply to operations, to marketing? Arming yourself with the skills to put AI to work and create business insights will help you land a job. It will help you in your first year at your new job, and it will set you up for the future.