For a long time, professional growth followed a fairly predictable path. People began by executing the work, moved on to coordinate a small team, reached management and continued climbing from there.

Behind almost every promotion was the same question: how many people report to this professional? That question is gradually losing relevance. Impact has become the new measure.

A High Individual Contributor, or HIC, is a professional capable of generating an unusual amount of value even without a team under their responsibility. They solve complex problems, connect points others have not yet noticed and move work forward while the rest of the organisation is still discussing where to begin.

Their influence comes from the quality of their decisions and their ability to turn those decisions into results.

An uncomfortable figure for companies still focused on org charts

In 2025, artificial intelligence companies received US$258.7 billion in venture capital investment. According to the OECD, this represented 61% of all global VC invested during the year. The figure shows the scale of the market’s bet on technologies capable of expanding the capacity of both professionals and organisations.

One of the largest field studies on generative AI followed 5,172 customer service professionals. Access to an AI assistant increased the number of issues resolved per hour by an average of 15%. The gains were even greater among less experienced professionals.

The findings point to an important shift: someone with knowledge, autonomy and the right tools can significantly expand their ability to deliver. Technology makes the difference between an average professional and an exceptional one even more visible.

Why companies need to rethink career progression

The Individual Contributor model gained ground in the technology sector when companies realised that promoting every excellent specialist into management could destroy value on both sides.

The organisation lost an exceptional technical professional and, in some cases, placed someone in management who had never wanted to lead people. Companies such as Google and Microsoft began creating parallel career paths. One focused on management, with roles such as Manager, Director and VP. The other rewarded specialist expertise through levels such as Senior, Staff, Principal and Distinguished.

Leading people and developing deep expertise are different ways of generating value and deserve equivalent recognition.

This discussion has already reached marketing, communications, legal services, finance, consulting and practically every other knowledge-based industry.

Latin America has more than enough talent to lead this shift

The region already has a broad base of professionals working in technology, communications, design, data, finance and other specialist areas. Remote work has also allowed this talent to move beyond dependence on major capitals and local employers.

BairesDev’s figures help illustrate this movement. Between 2020 and 2024, the company recorded a 285% increase in applications from Latin American professionals for remote roles. Approximately 40% of its historical hires have also come from people living outside the region’s main urban centres.

These locations are sometimes described as “Silicon Pueblos”: smaller cities that are beginning to concentrate talent connected to global companies and projects.

The Latin American HIC is already a reality. These professionals are based in São Paulo, Bogotá, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Lima and Santiago, as well as in cities that rarely appear on traditional innovation maps. In many cases, they are already creating value for international companies without leaving their hometowns.

The challenge now is whether companies in the region can recognise, develop and retain these professionals before losing them to the global market.

How this model appears in communications and PR

In our industry, High Individual Contributors can be found across many different areas.

They are the consultants who open a conversation with a journalist in 15 minutes because they spent years building that relationship. They are the strategists who begin organising a crisis narrative while everyone else is still trying to understand what happened. They are the analysts who identify a signal before it develops into an obvious trend. They are also the local specialists who understand that the same story will work differently in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Argentina.

These professionals rarely perform at their best within a structure that has six layers of approval. They need context, trust and autonomy to respond at the speed required by the client and the situation.

At LatAm Intersect, we have worked according to this principle from the beginning. We built autonomous teams made up of local specialists with deep knowledge of each market. This model has allowed us to move quickly, preserve regional judgement and achieve international recognition, including the PR Consultancy of the Year award in Davos.

For us, this is the standard of a leading communications agency in LATAM. Quality is reflected in each specialist’s ability to understand a problem and move it in the right direction, far beyond the number of people sitting in a meeting.

What companies need to change

Three areas need to move forward for companies to adopt the HIC model in practice.

• The first is career progression. Specialists should not feel that they have reached a ceiling simply because they do not want to manage a team. Companies need to create paths that reward experience, influence and the ability to solve increasingly complex problems.
• The second is access to the right tools. AI can expand individual capacity when it is supported by reliable data, effective processes and professional judgement. A new platform on its own is unlikely to change how an organisation creates value.
• The third is performance evaluation. Team size begins to lose its position as the main indicator of relevance, making room for more useful questions. What problem did this person solve? What risk did they help avoid? What revenue did they influence? Which decision did they unblock? What knowledge did they leave within the organisation?

These results may be more difficult to fit into a spreadsheet, but they come much closer to the value a professional actually creates.

The end of the linear career

Mature companies need both profiles.

Managers expand their impact through the people they lead. HICs do so through knowledge, systems, relationships, creativity and specialisation. Problems arise when a company tries to force every talented professional down the same path.

The idea that professional growth depends on accumulating direct reports is gradually being left behind. In a Latin America that is increasingly connected to the global market, with distributed talent and tools capable of expanding individual capacity, impact has taken on a central role in performance evaluation.

It is becoming the measure that separates the people who genuinely move an organisation forward from those who simply occupy a position within its structure.

Is your company ready to attract and retain HICs in Latin America?

Let’s discuss how to position your employer brand and build a corporate narrative that connects with the region’s new generation of talent. Contact us at talk.to.us@latamintersectpr.com.