Inside the machine — Technical direction
Ivan Collazos, Toogo's tech lead, speaks openly about building Toogo 2: AI as an ally, solidity before speed, and terrain rougher than expected.
The journey has a destination, but how does the road unfold?
This year, as Toogo's technical team works on the foundations of Toogo 2, we asked Ivan, the head of the technical team, to tell us openly where this work really stands: what was gained when artificial intelligence entered their working methods, what had to be learned the hard way, and why the team stays confident despite terrain that turned out rougher than expected. His text, written in Spanish, is translated here into English for easier reading.
A parallel between the tourism journey and the company journey: in tourism, you know the starting point and the destination well - the adventure is adapting along the way.
For the tourism community, it's fairly simple to have starting and arrival points on a journey, to build a tour, big or small, that makes clients' dreams come true - discovering and feeling the experience of new cultures, traditions, cuisines, and even ways of getting around. It's something we all know very well, all these aspects of the place we live in, and that's the adventure: knowing whether we can adapt to what awaits us elsewhere.
Toogo set its course towards adventure, and the work is already more impressive than expected.
For the Toogo team, having traced the path towards our new goal was in itself an adventure turned towards the future. Today, we're deep into making this journey happen, and it's even more impressive than what we expected.
What Ivan describes are the foundations of Toogo 2 - and already, in the background, the first milestones of new goals for 2027.
The AI shock: destabilising at first, it becomes an ally you have to learn to master.
After a great shock in the face of our new reality, with Artificial Intelligence everywhere, we've been able to improve our processes a lot, but that improvement also means investing time to get used to the novelty, to take in that AI is neither our enemy nor our competitor - quite the opposite, it's our ally, a partner we must learn from and, above all, must know how to master.
Going fast isn't enough: without solid engineering behind it, what you build fast stays fragile.
Now that we're on the train taking us towards the future, we can see many landscapes along the way. We're discovering that we can change many things quickly, provided they're well founded; we can create many new things, fast and easily, but if we don't master them well, they're nothing more than a house of cards: pretty, but fragile, with no engineering to strengthen the structure.
The big lesson of the year: building solid takes more time than expected, and that's normal.
This last discovery is what taught us the most looking ahead: time estimates have changed a lot. We all want a structure that can withstand earthquakes, and that consumes a lot of resources. At first, we marvelled at a possible skyscraper, very beautiful and modern, but one that could collapse at the slightest gust of wind.
The key image: an Eiffel Tower made « of ice-cream sticks » - beautiful on the surface, but unable to last - versus the real tower, in steel.
We saw that we were about to create a very pretty Eiffel Tower, but made of ice-cream sticks and biscuits, whereas the reality is that we need a solid structure, in resistant and emblematic steel.
The direction for Toogo 2: keep the solidity of the first version, but connect it to today's world (API, MCP, CRM).
We now know that our first version of Toogo is like this: solid and robust. We want to reach a Toogo 2 with the same characteristics, but adapted to the needs of the new interconnected world: API, MCP, CRM, with the ability to streamline commercial operations across multiple communication channels.
An honest admission: the team wanted to go too fast, stumbled, and draws lessons from it rather than hiding it.
It's a fact: with all our new machinery, we wanted to run against the wind, but we stumbled. We now know that yes, we can run, but without taking any step lightly; on the contrary, each step must be sure and move us forward. True, we can fall again, but in every fall there's something to learn - and we do learn it.
The chosen pace: progressing step by step, in service of the best possible result for users.
Indeed, every evolution takes time to reach an ever more satisfying result. The Toogo team takes this into account too, so it can reach a result that's the best possible for our users.
Conclusion
The terrain has become harder, but the team is counting on its ability to adapt to go all the way - and then set off again towards a new adventure.
The road, which was a first-class highway for a Formula 1 car, has become 4x4 terrain. Fortunately, adapting to change is in our team's DNA, so I have no doubt that we'll come through and be able to lead everyone to the goal set as the destination of our journey. And when we get there, rest assured, we'll be ready for a new adventure.
Let's not forget that the best way to succeed is to step back and look at your own methods.