Quick Answer:
AI Summit Colombia 2026 was a two-day event in Bogotá with 42 sessions across three simultaneous stages. According to Pulzo, the central message was that Colombian enterprise AI is moving past pilot experimentation into a stage focused on execution and concrete ROI, with most companies still unable to demonstrate a clear return on their AI investments.
Key Takeaways:
- Scale: AI Summit Colombia 2026 delivered 42 sessions across three simultaneous stages over two days in Bogotá, according to Pulzo.
- Shift in framing: Pulzo reports the summit's core message was that AI is entering a stage more focused on execution and concrete results, not theory.
- ROI gap: Pulzo notes a recurring concern that few enterprises investing in AI achieve a clear return on investment.
- User-experience challenge: Catalina Riveros, Director of Agentic AI at Davivienda, told the summit the priority is making AI a real part of the user experience, not an isolated corporate function.
- Sectors discussed: AI agents, autonomous task execution, automation, customer service, and financial services dominated the agenda.
For the past three years, the AI conversation in Latin America has been dominated by pilots, proofs of concept, and the promise of what artificial intelligence could one day do for a business. AI Summit Colombia 2026, held in Bogotá, signaled that the patience for that framing is running out. The new question on the stage was not "what could AI do" but "what is it actually returning."
According to Pulzo's coverage of the event, the summit ran across two days with 42 sessions on three simultaneous stages — a scale that itself signals how seriously the Colombian enterprise market is now treating AI as a discipline rather than a curiosity.
From Pilots to Execution
The summit's recurring theme, as Pulzo reports, was that "artificial intelligence is entering a stage more focused on execution and concrete results." That framing is a meaningful shift. In 2023 and 2024, simply having an AI pilot was a story worth telling. In 2026, the story has to include numbers — cost saved, revenue lifted, customer satisfaction moved, a process measurably faster.
Pulzo's coverage flags the central pain point bluntly: among the enterprises actively investing in AI, few manage to demonstrate a clear return on investment. That is the gap the rest of 2026 will be spent closing.
The new bar: An AI initiative without a measurable business outcome is no longer a leadership story — it is an unmanaged cost. The summit's framing pushes that bar onto every team running an AI project today.
The Davivienda Perspective: Make AI Part of the Experience
One of the clearest framings came from Catalina Riveros, Director of Agentic AI at Davivienda. As Pulzo reports, Riveros emphasized that the enterprise challenge is making AI tools "a real part of the user experience" rather than leaving them as isolated corporate functions that never touch a customer.
That distinction matters. A chatbot that sits in an internal portal nobody uses produces no ROI. A copilot that quietly improves call handling time for every agent in a contact center — measured in seconds saved per interaction multiplied by millions of interactions — does.
Where the Conversation Concentrated
The agenda, as covered by Pulzo, concentrated on a handful of themes that overlap heavily with what global enterprise AI conversations are also surfacing in 2026:
Themes that dominated AI Summit Colombia 2026:
- AI agents and autonomous task execution
- Automation of repetitive enterprise workflows
- AI in customer service and support
- AI in financial services, with Davivienda as a featured voice
The absence of pure model-research discussion is itself the signal. Two years ago, an event of this scale would have included long debates about which foundation model performed best on which benchmark. In 2026 in Bogotá, that was not the conversation. The conversation was about deploying agents into real workflows that customers and employees actually touch.
What This Means for Your Business
The shift the summit captured is not exclusive to large Colombian banks. The same pattern is playing out for small and mid-sized businesses across Latin America and the United States — including the ones MerchandisePROS audits every week from Houston to Bogotá. Most owners have already experimented with at least one AI tool. Very few have a coherent plan that ties AI use to a specific, measurable business outcome.
That is the gap our free audit closes. We score your current digital presence — including where AI is and is not helping you — and produce a 90-day action plan that maps each recommended AI deployment to a measurable result.
"The companies that win the next two years are not the ones with the most AI pilots. They are the ones whose AI is invisibly improving a metric the CFO already tracks."
- Diego Medina F, Founder of MerchandisePROS
Frequently Asked Questions
What was AI Summit Colombia 2026?
AI Summit Colombia 2026 was a two-day artificial intelligence event held in Bogotá with 42 sessions across three simultaneous stages, according to Pulzo. The summit brought together executives, technologists and policymakers around the message that Colombian enterprise AI is moving past pilot experimentation into focused execution and measurable results.
What was the central theme of AI Summit Colombia 2026?
As Pulzo reports, the central theme was that artificial intelligence is entering a stage more focused on execution and concrete results. The new bar is no longer how many pilots a company has launched, but whether those pilots are driving measurable return on investment.
Who spoke at AI Summit Colombia 2026?
According to Pulzo, speakers included Catalina Riveros, Director of Agentic AI at Davivienda, alongside leaders from global technology companies and Colombian firms. Riveros emphasized the challenge of making AI tools a real part of the user experience rather than isolated corporate functions.
What is the main challenge enterprises face with AI today?
Pulzo's coverage identifies a core concern: few enterprises that have invested in AI manage to demonstrate a clear return on investment. The summit framed the gap between piloting AI and embedding it into real user-facing operations as the most important enterprise problem to solve next.
What does this mean for small and mid-sized businesses?
The same execution-versus-theory gap shows up in smaller businesses too. Most owners have tried at least one AI tool, but few have a coherent plan that ties AI use to measurable outcomes like more qualified leads, faster customer response, or lower cost per order. A structured audit closes that gap.