Uruguay's president joined seven other Latin American and Caribbean heads of state — from Chile, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Panama, Paraguay and Suriname — alongside senior officials from Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Guatemala, at an Inter-American Development Bank event in New York held alongside the UN General Assembly on September 21. Technology executives from Google, Anthropic, Microsoft and Nvidia also took part, underscoring how central private AI labs have become to a summit convened by a regional development bank.
The IDB used the gathering to release new projections on what AI could mean for the region's economy, and the numbers cut both ways. Broad AI adoption could raise Latin America and the Caribbean's GDP by 5.1% over a decade, the bank's analysis found — but the wage effects depend heavily on labour policy. With strong worker mobility between sectors, wages could rise 2.3% to 5.3%; without it, the same AI adoption could instead cause wages to fall by 13.5% to 20.9%, a gap the IDB described as one of the starkest policy forks facing the region.
Leaders at the New York meeting called for a regional AI coordination mechanism, complete with joint investment guidelines spanning regulation, workforce development, digital infrastructure and risk management, rather than each country building policy in isolation. For Uruguay, a small economy that has positioned itself as an early adopter of digital government services, the summit offered a chance to weigh in on a regional framework before it hardens — with the IDB framing the choices leaders make in the next few years as the deciding factor in whether Latin America captures AI's productivity gains or absorbs its wage disruption instead.
