Isabel Velarde

Someone in your organization approved a system that decides who gets credit, who gets hired, and who gets access to public services in this region. Almost certainly, no one asked where that system was trained, on whose data, and for which market. Almost certainly, no one knows what it cannot see. That is not a technology problem. It is a governance failure, and it is happening at scale, today, inside institutions that would never accept equivalent opacity in a financial audit. The algorithm...

The governance debate around artificial intelligence in Latin America proceeds, in most official forums, as though the central problem were institutional: which regulatory body should oversee AI systems, how risk categories should be defined, whether to follow the EU AI Act or develop something regional from first principles. These are legitimate questions. They are not the most urgent ones. The most urgent question is what is actually happening right now, in offices and agencies and...

Every digital talent strategy in Latin America contains a decision its authors prefer not to make explicit: who will remain invisible to the automated systems that will later evaluate them. The populations a strategy fails to train do not simply miss an opportunity. They become, with considerable reliability, the populations that algorithmic systems misread, exclude, and cannot evaluate. The two problems are not parallel. One produces the other. Peru’s National Digital Talent Strategy,...