Latin America is not the first geography that comes to mind when talking about artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley, Beijing, or Bangalore tend to dominate headlines. Yet something unusual is happening south of the equator. A new wave of AI startups is rewriting the region’s technological narrative, fueled by necessity, cultural creativity, and the determination to solve problems others have ignored.
In 2024, the region’s AI adoption rate hit 40 percent. That number might look modest next to India or Singapore, but for a part of the world long defined by inequality and infrastructure gaps, it marks a turning point. What’s more important is the pace—adoption jumped 18 percent in just one year. Optimism is not just rhetoric; it’s turning into tangible innovation.
Fintech: Banking the Unbanked
One of the most pressing issues in Latin America is financial exclusion. Seven out of ten people remain underbanked, locked out of credit or basic services. Here is where AI steps in, not as a luxury but as a lifeline.
Take Kapital in Mexico. By using AI to assess creditworthiness, it extends financing to small and medium-sized businesses that account for more than half of GDP yet receive only a sliver of institutional loans. In Brazil, fintech startup Magie embedded an AI banking assistant into WhatsApp. It has already processed $16.5 million in transactions, bringing banking into the same space where millions of Latin Americans already communicate daily.
Fintech is becoming Latin America’s spearhead in the AI revolution. Instead of waiting for traditional banks to modernize, startups are leapfrogging into solutions that blend local habits, mobile technology, and algorithmic power.
Agriculture: Fields of Data
Agriculture is another battlefield where AI is redefining possibilities. Brazil’s farms alone represent nearly a third of its economy. Precision farming powered by sensors, drones, and predictive models is now standard in high-tech corners of the countryside.
The Argentine startup Kilimo has built a platform that cuts water use by 20 percent while keeping yields steady. The savings are massive—72 billion liters of water conserved. In Mexico, Aiflow relies on drone imagery and predictive analytics to detect crop diseases or irrigation problems before they spiral into losses.
For a region where droughts, soil degradation, and climate change hit hard, agritech is not just about efficiency; it is about survival. AI in the field is rapidly becoming as crucial as rain.
Healthcare: When Algorithms Meet Patients
Latin America’s healthcare systems are notorious for their long waits and lack of specialists. Here too, AI is chipping away at bottlenecks. In Brazil, health insurer Alice uses an AI triage system that reduces screening time by almost a quarter. Faster screening means earlier interventions and fewer patients lost in endless queues.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s BioGrip is venturing into uncharted territory—neural interface prosthetics for the region’s estimated 800,000 amputees. For these patients, AI is not an abstract technology but a bridge back to autonomy.
The Chilean Wave
If Brazil is Latin America’s AI giant, Chile is quietly becoming its precision innovator. Santiago hosts a handful of startups with global ambitions.
Fracttal develops AI-driven predictive maintenance tools already used by multinationals like FedEx and 3M. By reducing downtime 30 percent, it turns maintenance into strategy. SimpliRoute, on the other hand, uses machine learning to optimize delivery logistics, adapting routes in real time to traffic and safety conditions. In a region infamous for chaotic cities, this translates into punctuality that customers notice.
Then there is Kudan.ai, which analyzes live urban camera feeds locally—without sending data to the cloud. That edge capability not only speeds up responses to traffic jams or emergencies but also avoids the privacy nightmares that cloud-dependent systems often trigger.
Barriers That Cannot Be Ignored
Despite the momentum, Latin America’s AI expansion is not free of obstacles. In 2022, only two-thirds of households had internet access, far below OECD averages. The rural-urban gap remains staggering: six out of ten rural citizens are still excluded from the digital economy.
Infrastructure is another Achilles’ heel. AI requires massive computing capacity, yet cloud services are fragmented and energy grids uneven. Brazil, with its 85 percent clean energy, is an outlier. Elsewhere, energy shortages risk stalling growth.
The legal terrain is equally unstable. Only 17 percent of companies have clear AI governance policies. While more than half the population supports regulation, each country is improvising its own framework, creating a patchwork of rules that confuses developers and investors alike.
Culture as a Competitive Edge
Still, the region has something that Silicon Valley or Shenzhen cannot easily replicate: cultural and linguistic diversity. Latin American startups are building AI systems in Spanish, Portuguese, and even indigenous languages. This cultural alignment makes tools not only accessible but also trusted.
It is no coincidence that Brazil’s public trust in AI is 84 percent—far higher than the global average. When tools are designed in your own language, for your own context, they feel less alien and more like extensions of everyday life.
Global Steps, Local Roots
The global ambitions of Latin American AI startups are no longer hypothetical. Chile’s NotCo, a food-tech unicorn, is already selling AI-designed plant-based burgers and milk in U.S. Walmarts. InvGate from Argentina, with its IT management solutions, has been recognized by Gartner and competes in enterprise software markets well beyond the region.
Mexico’s Morada.ai has grown 400 percent annually with its real estate assistant, aiming at markets far outside Latin America. These stories suggest that local roots and global aspirations are not contradictory—they are complementary.
The Road to 2030
By 2030, estimates suggest generative AI could contribute $1.8 billion annually to Latin America’s economy. Achieving that figure will depend on three factors: investment, education, and accessibility.
Investment remains tiny compared to global standards—$8.2 billion in 2024 versus $190 billion worldwide. Education must move beyond training engineers to equipping entire societies with digital literacy. And accessibility requires governments and companies to ensure rural and marginalized communities are not left behind.
The choice is stark: inclusive AI or deepened inequality.
A Region Claiming Its Seat
For decades, Latin America’s role in technology revolutions has been peripheral—consumer, not producer. The AI wave offers a rare chance to break that cycle. Startups are showing that the region can generate not only users but also global innovators.
The challenge is to scale without losing what makes them different: building AI that speaks the language, culture, and needs of their people. In a world where algorithms are too often exported from distant labs, Latin America’s contribution may be precisely its local voice.
And that voice is beginning to resonate globally.
