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Zero Excuses: Turning Latin America’s Connectivity into Productivity

BY Ignacio Perrone

For decades, heavy industry treated information and communication technologies as a cost center — the budget line for email and connectivity.

Today, the digital layer is the infrastructure that supports operations, safety, and profitability in the region’s most important productive sectors.

An underground mine over 4,000 meters up in the Chilean Andes, an oil platform floating 200 kilometers off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, and a tractor planting soybeans in Argentina’s farm belt seem to have little in common. Ten years ago, almost anyone would have said they shared nothing in common. Today, the control rooms of all three look almost identical: wall-to-wall screens, real-time telemetry, geospatial maps, and algorithms analyzing variables every second. None of these industries now depends solely on the power of their machines. All depend, critically, on the data those machines produce.

That shift was the starting point of "Zero Excuses: Connecting Productivity," a recent ALT+ session where Frost & Sullivan analysts Ian Fresco and Ignacio Perrone examined what it will take for Latin America to turn connectivity into real economic output.

The Real Problem Is Productivity

The urgency is economic. ECLAC describes Latin America’s productivity problem as structural and chronic. Average labor productivity per worker in the region is roughly 25% of the United States level and around 30% of the OECD average. In advanced economies, a small or medium-sized enterprise produces about 65% of what a leading large corporation produces. In Latin America, that figure falls to 15% to 25%. Low adoption of digital processes and advanced technology among mid-sized businesses is clearly part of the explanation.

ECLAC points to digitalization and advanced connectivity as one of the few levers with sufficient scale to improve productivity. The region is also starting from a solid foundation: GSMA estimates that mobile technologies generated USD 600 billion in Latin America in 2025, equivalent to 8.6% of regional GDP.

CAF’s Digital Ecosystem Development Index makes the gap concrete. On basic coverage infrastructure, Latin America reaches a ratio of 0.52 — people and cities are, to a large extent, connected. On the Digital Economy index, which measures how much of that connectivity becomes productive processes, the ratio falls to 0.29. The region scores less than one-third of the benchmark level. Latin America has won the first battle: connecting people. Connecting productive assets is a separate battle, and that is where the real gap is evident.

What Changes Inside a Connected Operation

The clearest way to understand this is through a maturity curve. Industrial IoT in the region has moved from basic monitoring — knowing whether a pump is on or off — to predicting failures before they occur, and increasingly to operating heavy machinery remotely and autonomously. That path from monitoring to operation is the foundation for everything else.

What matters most is the chain that links each stage, because if one link breaks, the economic value disappears. A multimillion-dollar asset without sensors leaves you operating blindly. Sensors without robust connectivity trap data inside the equipment or on local memory that no one reads in time. Data that travels but never reaches an analytics platform capable of filtering noise ends up in a data graveyard. And if analysis triggers an alert but the organization cannot act on the site, the investment yields nothing. This is why many digitalization projects stall halfway.

In Latin America, this chain carries extra weight due to geography. In Europe and parts of the United States, logistics hubs, factories, and cities are close together, served by redundant terrestrial networks. In this region, a mine sits on a high plateau at 4,000 meters, a farm lies hundreds of kilometers from the nearest city, and an oil field spans thousands of square kilometers of desert. A strong network allows a company’s top engineering specialist to sit in Buenos Aires, Santiago, São Paulo, or Bogotá and diagnose five remote sites in real time, instead of spending ten hours on gravel roads.

Frost & Sullivan expects three technologies already in production to become dominant by 2030: private cellular networks on closed industrial sites; hybrid multi-orbit networks that connect fleets and mobile staff where terrestrial networks cannot reach; and edge computing, with AI processing on or near the equipment, allowing machinery to make critical safety decisions in milliseconds even if the satellite or cellular link fails temporarily.

Three Problems, Three Measurable Results

The mining industry illustrates the first problem: human risk and operational variability. For decades, open-pit and underground mining has faced two chronic issues — high physical risk for operators at altitude, and costly losses from variability in grinding and haulage. Today, four out of ten large mining sites in Chile operate through remote Integrated Operations Centers. Codelco moved remote control of concentrator plants and autonomous fleets to integrated operations centers in Rancagua and Santiago, hundreds of kilometers from the mine, achieving a 15% to 25% reduction in variability across key tasks and removing hundreds of workers from direct exposure.

The second problem is operational continuity when no terrestrial alternative exists. Petrobras operates floating production vessels hundreds of kilometers offshore in Brazil, where physical infrastructure cannot be deployed. To connect its new vessels, Petrobras used advanced high-throughput satellite connectivity based on MEO constellations — a mission-critical highway for telemetry from subsea valves and structural integrity monitoring, ensuring continuity of production.

The third problem is the efficient use of critical resources: water, fertilizer, and fuel. With tools like John Deere Operations Center, growers in Latin America can transmit telemetry from harvesters and field sensors directly to their smartphones and apply variable seeding and fertilization rates with high precision. In Chile, the Soil & Water project by Entel Digital and Syngenta deployed low-power IoT sensors across 320 hectares of land, achieving a significant reduction in irrigation water use — proving that this value is increasingly accessible to companies beyond the largest enterprises.

Connectivity as the Bridge to Productivity

Latin America’s connectivity base is largely established. Its historic challenge is productivity, and digitalization is the critical infrastructure to address it. Information and communication technologies gain real strategic importance when they serve as the bridge between physical assets, real-time data, and business decisions.

The future of the region’s vertical industries will be determined not only by mines, fields, and factories, but also by the ability to transform those physical environments into intelligent, connected, and sustainable ecosystems. That is the path to producing more at lower cost, reducing human exposure to risk, and protecting the region’s strategic natural resources.