“I Use It, But I Verify”: What 80 In-Depth Interviews Reveal About How Brazilians Actually Live With AI

Direct answer: we conducted in-depth interviews with 80 people in São Paulo (40 university students and 40 small business owners) about how they actually use artificial intelligence day to day. The central finding: AI adoption in Brazil does not wait for trust. The same people who barely trust the tools are the ones using them the most, every single day. The full report, with all 8 core themes, original quotes, and detailed methodology, is available to download below.

The Phrase That Repeated, Almost Word for Word, in Nearly Every Interview

“I use it, but I verify.” This wasn’t a one-off answer. It was the dominant stance across all 80 participants, whether they were students or small business owners, occasional users or daily power users. That single phrase captures a tension that runs through the entire study: conditional trust coexisting with intense, daily use.

What We Found (And Didn’t Expect)

Three findings, among the eight core themes in the report, stand out because they contradict what the market typically assumes about this audience:

• Every single adoption journey followed the exact same path. All 80 participants arrived at AI through the same three-step sequence, in the same order, with no exceptions. Capability-focused advertising was nowhere in that journey.
• Brazilians adapt to the AI, not the other way around. More than half of participants actively change how they speak and write to communicate with the tool, a shift most of them don’t even notice until asked about it directly.
• There’s a bias participants experience as personal exclusion, not a technical glitch. In image-related tasks, more than one participant independently reported the exact same specific problem when uploading their own photo, describing the experience in strikingly similar terms.

Each of these findings has a deeper explanation, with participants’ original quotes, in the full report.

Why This Matters for Anyone Deciding Product, Brand, or AI Policy in Brazil

The study’s eight themes (adoption, tools, image, voice, trust, privacy, language, and work) connect into five practical implications for companies, educators, and regulators, also detailed in the report. None of them are intuitive enough to guess without seeing the full reasoning behind the data.

This qualitative study is part of a broader series on Brazilians’ relationship with artificial intelligence. A companion quantitative study, based on 674 survey respondents, is also available in the same series.

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Bossa Research is a market and UX research consultancy operating across Brazil, specialized in turning real consumer and user behavior into product, brand, and policy decisions through rigorous qualitative and quantitative research.