Introducing LatAm Prompt

A window into artificial intelligence in Latin America and the Caribbean

Welcome to LatAm Prompt—your window into how Latin America is deploying, innovating, and regulating artificial intelligence.

I’m a communications advisor and speechwriter at the Inter-American Development Bank. Previously, I spent 17 years as a Reuters correspondent—almost all of them in Venezuela—and I’m still a journalist at heart.

This project began with my curiosity about how Latin America is responding to artificial intelligence on every front: from the impact on labor markets and educational standards to the innovations coming from local AI startups and the regulatory debates underway in the region’s parliaments.

It’s also about figuring out when and how artificial intelligence is useful. AI’s wildly inconsistent performance is what researchers call the “Jagged Frontier”—the uneven edge where machines sometimes outperform the wildest expectations, and other times miss the simplest marks. In my experience, AI is only as smart as the guidance it’s given.

LatAm Prompt is an experiment in using AI as a research assistant: it helps me surface and sort news - but the analysis, summaries, and judgment are all human. Each edition delivers curated local headlines, short English summaries, and the context you need to make sense of AI’s real impact across Latin America and the Caribbean.

I also dedicate part of each newsletter to “big picture” AI questions that reach beyond LatAm. AI news is often written for coders and venture capitalists with little content for people who are just trying to make the machines make sense. I don’t know or care about the technical battles between Grok and ChatGPT, any more than I care about the differences in fuel injection between two car brands. What matters is how well the machine drives when you need it to.

Are you involved in AI projects in Latin America? I’m eager to learn more—get in touch!