Argentina is Latin America's most exposed economy to the labour-market effects of generative AI, scoring 0.292 on a 0-to-1 exposure scale built by the Economic and Social Council of Buenos Aires City, ahead of Chile at 0.279, Brazil at 0.276 and Mexico at 0.261. The council's "Occupational Exposure Index to GenAI," which it describes as the first analysis of its kind done at city level, draws on International Labour Organization data and puts Argentina's exposure closer to Canada's 0.322 and the United States' 0.332 than to its regional peers.
The city of Buenos Aires itself scores even higher: 0.353, a level the council says is comparable to Singapore's 0.366 and potentially higher than global hubs like New York or London. Two structural features explain the gap between the capital and the country as a whole. Argentina is 97% urbanised, concentrating employment in cities where AI-exposed white-collar work dominates, and services account for 78% of national jobs, rising to 88% of employment inside Buenos Aires — spanning retail, healthcare, education, finance, administration and professional fields, the categories generative AI tools are proving most capable of touching.
The city's own workforce composition compounds the exposure rather than offsetting it. Buenos Aires' relatively well-educated labour pool is concentrated in exactly the kind of work generative AI has gotten good at in the past two years: as the council's research puts it, tasks that "for years required a college education, such as writing, synthesizing, analyzing, or programming." CESBA president Manuel Socias is now moving to a second phase built around direct dialogue with business groups and unions, aiming to shape policy responses before the disruption the index measures fully arrives rather than after.
