From Mercado Libre to AI Founder: Michelle Shocron on Reinventing Marketing with AI

The short answer: Before founding Continuum, Michelle Shocron spent a decade learning how data and AI move real business metrics — scaling Mercado Libre’s credit unit from nothing to 250 million credit lines across the region, then leaving the corporate track to build AI tools for marketing. In a feature interview with Argentina’s Ámbito, she explained the throughline: AI’s real value isn’t novelty, it’s relevance and speed — compressing work that takes a human analyst six hours into ten minutes, and making marketing genuinely personalized at scale.

The corporate decade that taught her the playbook

Shocron studied economics at Universidad de San Andrés, where she found her way into data and big data. An early marketing role at Coca-Cola — including the launch of its “Sin Azúcares” (Sugar-Free) campaign — led into business intelligence, and then to Mercado Libre’s Mercado Crédito unit in early 2019.

“We took the business unit and grew it from nothing to 250 million credit lines in the region, and we became the highest-performing, highest-margin unit,” she told Ámbito.

The engine behind that growth was data. She built the marketing strategy and the microsegments for Mercado Libre’s data, using AI to make the implementation precise — which, she explains, is what drove such a high credit-activation rate and steep growth in roughly a year and a half. She then took the same approach to Pedidos Ya.

The leap: from corporate to founder

The pivot came when she started consulting independently — managing her own clients, controlling her own agenda, and seeing the bottlenecks different startups hit at each stage. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, she saw the opening.

She teamed up with a former Mercado Libre colleague as her technical counterpart and built a product to let non-technical people inside companies use AI effectively. Backed by funding from the U.S. accelerator Techstars, the result was an AI business copilot.

“I put all the knowledge I’d gathered in marketing over ten years into a copilot based 100% on artificial intelligence,” she told Ámbito. “It lets us write, in just ten minutes, reports that a human analyst could take up to six hours to produce — the charts, the analysis, and the whole PDF.”

In the startup world she became known as “la chica de la IA” — the AI girl — a label she carries with pride.

Why marketing, and why now

Shocron’s thesis is that AI’s payoff in marketing is concrete: micro-segmentation, real-time analysis, and automation of the slow, repetitive work that keeps teams from being relevant to each customer.

“Our proposal is about much more than just optimizing e-commerce,” she said. “It’s about redefining the future of business with Artificial Intelligence.”

That conviction is what Continuum is built on: a structured creative layer that turns a brand’s assets and data into thousands of on-brand, personalized creatives — so the right message reaches the right audience at the right moment, at a speed manual production can’t match.

Asked how many hours a day it takes to succeed at a startup, her answer was less about hours than commitment:

“I really don’t know how many hours I work a day… but I can say I live for my company. Every chance I get, I put in another chip.”

This article draws on Michelle Shocron’s interview with Ámbito, “The entrepreneur who said goodbye to Mercado Libre to create a startup that revolutionized marketing with Artificial Intelligence” (January 30, 2025).