Latin America Procurement AI: 8 Markets, One Report

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Latin American Procurement: Eight Markets, One Opportunity

A gap between what was adopted and what was actually built.

Latin America is consuming AI faster than almost anyone predicted, and faster than it is building the foundations to govern it. The tools are adopted. The pilots are live. But the infrastructure underneath, the governance, the data quality, the decision boundaries, is still being assembled. The region sits at the moment where that gap becomes visible, across multiple economies at once.

Drawing on ECLAC/CENIA’s Latin American AI Index 2025, Deloitte, The Hackett Group, ProcureCon, McKinsey, and PwC, this Zycus point of view maps where enterprise procurement actually stands on agentic AI readiness across Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, and the broader region, and the decisions that separate leaders from followers in 2026.

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Latin America accounts for 14% of global AI tool visits but only 1.12% of global AI investment. The region is consuming AI faster than it is building the infrastructure to govern it. That gap is both the challenge and the opportunity.

What’s inside the whitepaper

✓Why “one Latin America” is the most expensive mistake in regional strategy, and how eight markets each demand a different approach

✓The talent constraint reshaping procurement: 13 of 19 countries generate no early AI skills domestically

✓A five-decision framework that determines whether agentic AI scales or stalls

✓The six moves the evidence supports most strongly, sequenced from now to Q3 2026 and beyond

✓How the region’s findings contrast against global procurement benchmarks

The numbers behind the point of view

14%

of global AI tool visits originate from Latin America, despite 11% of internet users

1.12%

of global AI investment reaches the region, versus 6.6% of global GDP. A 6x gap.

15%

average logistics cost-to-serve ratio, well above global best-practice targets

The organisations that move now will define the benchmark everyone else chases.

Zycus delivers procurement outcomes, not just transactions. By moving beyond Source-to-Pay to Intake-to-Outcomes, the Merlin Agentic Platform guides every request through Merlin Intake, unlocks hidden savings through the Autonomous Negotiation Agent, and continuously executes toward outcomes, not workflows.

Download the full Zycus Point of View →