Argentina placed last among 28 economies in a new Goldman Sachs study of artificial intelligence adoption, with a utilization rate below 10%, trailing every other country the bank measured, including regional peers Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Colombia.
The report, published September 20 by Goldman Sachs economists Sarah Dong and Joseph Briggs, drew on 11 international surveys of AI use and leaned on OECD data as its primary benchmark. France, the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany and Norway led the ranking, each with adoption rates at or above 20%, roughly double Argentina's figure.
Within Latin America, Argentina's result stood out for trailing Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Colombia, the only other countries in the region Goldman Sachs included, each of which posted somewhat higher adoption levels, according to the bank's estimates.
Where the Job Losses Are Showing Up
On the labor-market side, the report found AI's effect on staffing contained so far: a 10-percentage-point increase in an occupation's exposure to the technology corresponds to just a 0.1% reduction in workforce levels, a pattern the bank's economists described as gradual rather than disruptive. Sectors including call centers, software publishing and advertising showed the clearest job declines in the more AI-exposed economies the report tracked.
The clearest effects showed up in customer-facing roles: call-center employment has fallen 39% below its pre-AI trend in the United States, 33% in Canada and 27% in Germany, the report found, while customer-service jobs overall are down roughly 10% and administrative-assistant positions down roughly 15% since January 2023 in the economies most exposed to the technology.
Goldman Sachs also pointed to a counterweight on the jobs side of the ledger: the buildout of AI infrastructure, including data centers and the electrical and cooling systems that support them, has added roughly 320,000 jobs above trend since 2023, in construction, manufacturing and related support roles. Jan Hatzius, the bank's chief economist, has said his best estimate is that unemployment a decade from now will not look very different from the current 4.1% rate in the United States, arguing that infrastructure-linked hiring is offsetting losses elsewhere.
Hatzius has separately estimated that AI investment has added only about 0.1% to US GDP growth to date, arguing that a larger productivity payoff depends on companies translating the technology into actual use rather than just capital spending on infrastructure.
The finding points to a gap between Argentina's push to attract AI-related infrastructure investment, including data-center projects proposed for Patagonia, and the pace at which the country's own businesses and workers are putting the technology to use -- a gap that will shape how much of any eventual productivity dividend reaches the domestic economy.