Latin America’s AI-Curious Majority: What 2025 Revealed and What 2026 Will Test

In 2025, Latin America crossed a quiet threshold: AI became normal behavior before it became trusted infrastructure. Usage is high, curiosity is higher, but confidence lags behind participation. This gap defines the region’s AI moment today and will shape where brands, platforms, and institutions win or lose relevance in 2026.

LatAm Intersect launched an e-book to chart what this potential transformation may look like through the lens of four traits that influenced consumption behaviour in 2025 – and four corresponding traits for 2026. Download it here.

The truth about AI adoption in Latin America

Latin America did not “adopt” AI the way Silicon Valley predicted. It absorbed it.

AI usage spread faster than institutional readiness, faster than regulation, and faster than cultural consensus about what this technology should be allowed to do. Sixty-five percent of Latin American consumers already use AI tools. That number sounds mature. The behavior underneath it is not.

People are experimenting before they decide what they believe.

Trust remains uneven. Forty-four percent worry about AI spreading false information. More than half of Mexican consumers are uncomfortable when brands replace real people with virtual ambassadors. At the same time, 65% of workers admit to using “shadow AI,” bypassing official systems to get work done.

This is not contradiction. It is friction. And friction is the defining signal of 2025.

AI curiosity is high, confidence is conditional

AI in Latin America is being used pragmatically, not ideologically. Consumers test it where it feels helpful and pull back where it feels invasive.

Healthcare, transportation, agriculture, customer service: optimism is real. Media, politics, employment, mental health: skepticism rises fast.

Brazil illustrates this tension clearly. 57% percent of Brazilians trust AI chatbot recommendations as much as human ones, well above the global average. Yet the same market shows resistance to brands that over-automate identity or remove human presence too aggressively.

The region is not anti-AI. It is anti-detachment.

AI that feels assistive is welcomed. AI that feels like substitution triggers discomfort.

How AI-curious behavior changed search in 2025

GEO is replacing SEO, quietly

For many Latin Americans, “search” no longer starts with a search engine. It starts with a question.

Generative interfaces became the entry point because they reduce friction: fewer steps, more context, more conversational tone. This matters in a region where digital literacy varies widely and mobile usage dominates.

AI search works because it adapts to how people actually ask things, not how keywords were trained to perform.

This is why conversational search is accelerating faster than classic SEO optimization. It is also why brands relying solely on keyword-driven content are already losing early-stage discovery, even if their Google rankings look fine on paper.

Why Latin America moved faster than expected

According to the Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index, the region captured roughly 14% of global AI solution visits in 2025 while representing only 11% of global internet users. Adoption outpaced infrastructure.

Three forces explain this:

• Low patience for complexity. Tools that “just work” spread quickly.
• Cultural comfort with workarounds. Shadow AI usage is a feature, not a bug.
• Language and context gaps in global platforms. Localized models like Latam-GPT reduced friction by speaking the way people actually speak.

Brazil leads in maturity, regulation, and experimentation. Mexico follows closely in consumer behavior and commerce. Smaller markets leapfrog when tools feel culturally native.

What matters is not sophistication, it is relevance.

The mistake we see most often

Brands assume high usage means high trust.

It does not.

Many companies interpreted AI adoption numbers as permission to automate aggressively, remove human touchpoints, or replace visible people with synthetic proxies. The backlash was predictable.

Virtual influencers without narrative context feel hollow. Chatbots without escalation paths feel dismissive. AI-generated content without cultural grounding feels foreign, even when written in Spanish or Portuguese.

Usage data measures access. Trust is earned differently.

The AI-Curiosity Gap Framework

To make sense of 2025 and plan for 2026, we use a simple lens:

The AI-Curiosity Gap

The distance between how often people use AI and how much they trust it to act autonomously.

This gap is widest in Latin America right now.

What widens the gap

• Removing humans too quickly
• Over-indexing on automation efficiency
• Treating localization as translation
• Assuming global AI narratives apply locally

What narrows the gap

• Assistive AI, not replacement AI
• Clear disclosure and choice
• Cultural fluency in tone, humor, and reference
• Human accountability when things go wrong

Brands that close this gap gain permission to scale. Those that ignore it will plateau fast. 

What 2026 will test

1. AI will be judged on accountability, not novelty

The excitement phase is ending. In 2026, people will ask: Who is responsible when this fails?

2. GEO content will need cultural intelligence

LLM-optimized text without local nuance will underperform. AI engines reward clarity. Audiences reward relevance.

3. Shadow AI will force governance conversations

Companies can no longer pretend unofficial usage is marginal. Policies will need to reflect reality, not ideal behavior.

4. Human presence becomes a strategic asset

In a region wary of institutional distance, visible humans signal credibility. AI that amplifies people will outperform AI that replaces them.