Latin America could add 4.8 million jobs by accelerating AI adoption, study finds

A new report published in July 2026 by the Centro para la Convergencia de América Latina (CCLATAM), a Miami-based think tank, reveals a central paradox for the region's digital economy: the infrastructure is already in place, but most companies are not yet using it. According to CCLATAM, nearly 50% of Latin America and the Caribbean already has access to high-speed broadband, the technical foundation needed to adopt artificial intelligence at scale. Yet only 1 in 10 companies in the region effectively uses AI in its operations, and just 6% manage to capture significant value from the technology.

The constraint is no longer connectivity, it's adoption

The report, titled Unlocking the Digital Potential of Latin America and the Caribbean: Market Integration, Investment, Smart Regulation and Artificial Intelligence, was authored by Víctor Muñoz and Ángel Melguizo, partners at ARGIA Green, Tech & Economics. According to Muñoz, report co-author, "the binding constraint is no longer connectivity, nor even the absence of laws; it is adoption, capabilities, and scale."

That distinction is key to understanding the region's current moment. For years, the conversation about Latin America's digital gap centered on missing infrastructure: fiber optic cables, mobile coverage, data pricing. CCLATAM's report suggests that problem, while not fully solved, is no longer the primary obstacle. The real bottleneck lies in companies' organizational capabilities to incorporate artificial intelligence into their processes, and in the scale at which they can do so.

This gap between infrastructure availability and actual technology adoption is not unique to Latin America, but CCLATAM's report documents it with unusual clarity for the region: nearly half the territory already has the necessary connection, and yet nine out of ten companies remain outside the transformation that artificial intelligence promises.

The Four I's: the framework CCLATAM proposes

To close this gap, CCLATAM's report proposes a four-pillar framework that Ángel Melguizo, the report's other co-author, summarizes as the "Four I's": Integration, smart regulation, Incentives, and Artificial Intelligence. According to Melguizo, "Latin America's digital dynamic is built on four I's: Integration, smart regulation, Incentives, and Artificial Intelligence. When those four pieces work together, the potential becomes real growth for the region."

According to CCLATAM, when these four pieces advance in a coordinated way, the region could accelerate its economic growth by up to 1.3 percentage points annually through 2030, reaching an average growth rate of 3.8% per year. That growth pace, sustained over several years, would represent a substantial difference compared to the current trajectories of most Latin American economies.

What stands out in this framework is that artificial intelligence is presented as the fourth pillar, not the first. The report's structure implies that AI adoption cannot be treated as a standalone technology initiative disconnected from market integration, regulatory design, and investment policy. A company operating in a fragmented regulatory environment, without access to integrated regional markets or targeted investment incentives, is unlikely to realize the full productivity gains that AI can offer, even if it adopts the technology internally. The framework positions AI less as a tool a business simply buys and more as the multiplier that only pays off once the other three conditions are already in motion.

4.8 million jobs and a persistent productivity gap

The report's most-cited finding is its jobs projection: according to CCLATAM, accelerated artificial intelligence adoption could generate 4.8 million high-skill formal jobs within the region's digital economy. These are jobs that, by definition, require more advanced technical capabilities than those that predominate today across much of the Latin American labor market.

This job potential is framed within a broader structural problem that the report also documents: the region's labor productivity currently stands at approximately one-third of that recorded in high-income economies, according to CCLATAM. It is a gap that infrastructure investment alone has not managed to close, and one the report attributes to a combination of low technology adoption, regulatory fragmentation between countries, and insufficient scale in enterprise implementation of new tools.

Adding to this is a concrete financial limitation: CCLATAM calculates that the region faces a financing gap of USD 99 billion annually through 2030 for its combined green and digital transitions. That figure illustrates the scale of pending investment, and helps explain why broadband availability alone has not translated into enterprise AI adoption at the pace the current global technology moment seems to demand.

Taken together, these figures describe a region at an inflection point rather than one starting from zero. The connectivity groundwork CCLATAM documents, nearly half the region online at high speed, is not a small achievement, and it means the region is not waiting on infrastructure buildout the way it was a decade ago. What the report frames as the open question is whether governments, investors, and individual companies treat the next several years as an adoption sprint or continue to let connectivity sit unused. The 4.8 million jobs and the 3.8% growth rate are not guaranteed outcomes; they are what CCLATAM presents as the upside case if the region moves on adoption at the pace it already moved on broadband.

What this means for your business

While CCLATAM quantifies the AI adoption gap at a macroeconomic level, that same gap shows up every day at the level of an individual business, in a very concrete way: whether your customers find you or not when they use artificial intelligence to search, compare, and decide. The report warns that only 1 in 10 companies in the region uses AI in its operations; that means the vast majority of businesses across Latin America and Hispanic markets in the United States have not yet adapted either their internal operations or their digital presence to how their own customers are already using these tools to make purchasing decisions.

That is exactly the gap MerchandisePROS's AI Search Optimization (AEO) service solves. While CCLATAM's study focuses on AI adoption inside a company's own operations, the inverse question is just as urgent: does your business show up when a potential customer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews about your service category? If the answer is no, you are part of that 90% of companies the report describes as lagging, not because the technology is missing, but because adoption is. Our audit evaluates exactly the signals that determine whether an AI engine names you with confidence, and delivers a concrete plan to close that gap. You can review the full detail of this and other services on our services page.

"CCLATAM's report confirms something we see every day working with businesses across Latin America and the United States: the technology is already available, what's missing is the decision to use it. The businesses that close that adoption gap before their competitors do will be the ones that capture the 3.8% growth the study describes."
- Diego Medina F, Founder of MerchandisePROS

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