From AI Agents to AGI Ethics: CloudWalk’s Luis Silva Headlines WebSummit Rio

Rio de Janeiro, April 2025 — CloudWalk, a global financial technology company, will take the stage at Web Summit Rio — part of one of the world’s largest global tech conferences — where founder and CEO Luis Silva is set to deliver a keynote that challenges the way we think about artificial intelligence and what it means to build it with purpose.

Titled “AGI: How Soon is Now?”, the presentation will take place on April 28 and is expected to draw attention across the global tech and business communities. Silva will offer a deeply personal and provocative view of artificial general intelligence (AGI) — not as a feature upgrade of current models, but as a mirror of human intention.

“We have to build feedback loops with ethics and culture, not just code,” he says. “We need to ensure that economic AGI doesn’t outpace society’s ability to absorb and adapt to it. Most of all, we must leave space for humans to define meaning inside the loop — not just be reduced to metrics of value extraction.”

For Silva, true AGI will require more than just more powerful models. It will demand entirely new foundations: architectures that can rewrite themselves, agents that learn through interaction with the world, and systems that act with goal-directed autonomy — not just pattern recognition. His keynote will urge audiences to move beyond the hype and recognize the deeper philosophical and societal stakes embedded in the technologies we’re building.

AI driving global scale

Founded in Brazil in 2013, CloudWalk has emerged as one of the world’s fastest-scaling fintechs, operating in two of the largest markets on the planet. In Brazil, its flagship product InfinitePay serves more than four million small and micro-entrepreneurs across every municipality in the country. In the United States, CloudWalk launched JIM.com in 2024, an app leveraging AI to deliver instant payments and simplify financial operations, rapidly gaining traction among entrepreneurs across the country.

Behind this expansion is an operating model shaped by AI at its core. More than 40 autonomous agents now work alongside CloudWalk’s team of 650 people, embedding intelligence into nearly every customer-facing and internal process. The company’s JIM Agent — an AI assistant embedded within the InfinitePay app — acts as an “extra employee” for Brazilian entrepreneurs. JIM helps users manage everyday business challenges by creating marketing campaigns, pricing products, managing receivables, and offering strategic support tailored to each user’s profile. It represents one of the first large-scale deployments of a Proto-AGI agent built not just to respond, but to act.

Ethics at the center of AGI

Silva’s message extends beyond software and systems. He positions AGI not as an inevitable result of computing progress, but as a design choice — a cultural and ethical inflection point.

“AGI will reflect not what we know, but what we value,” Silva says. “We can build systems that amplify our need for control — leading to surveillance, commodification, and centralization — or we can use this opportunity to construct technologies that promote coherence, understanding, and human liberation.”

He cites several early signs that AGI is already materializing, not through dramatic public launches, but in the quiet emergence of intelligent infrastructure. OpenAI’s Assistants API, multi-agent AI teams acting as strategic collaborators, tools like AutoGPT, AgentOps, and LangGraph — all represent the skeletal framework of a more powerful, autonomous digital ecosystem. Even financial markets, Silva argues, are functioning as proto-AGIs: distributed, adaptive, and guided by abstract goals.

Building meaning into the loop

CloudWalk’s internal projection outlines a staged evolution. In 2025, we remain in what Silva calls the “narrow generalism” phase — where agents operate across grouped tasks but lack full cognitive flexibility. Between 2026 and 2027, he anticipates a shift toward persistent, learning-capable agents that collaborate with humans and each other. And beyond 2028, he envisions a fusion of embodiment, learning, and intention — the foundational ingredients for true AGI.

For Silva, this is not simply a technological challenge. It is a myth-making moment — a chance to define the next chapter of human-machine society.

With its presence now expanding internationally and its AI infrastructure evolving rapidly, CloudWalk appears poised not only to shape the conversation around AGI — but to help build it from the ground up.