The rise of the knowledge economy: can it turn Argentina into Silicon Valley?

Javier Milei’s government aims to position Argentina as a Global Delivery Center, that is, as a global operations center for multinationals. In this sense, the Federal Council for the Knowledge Economy (CONFEC) projects an increase of up to 14,000 new skilled and well-paid jobs within the sector.

The various trips made by President Milei to Silicon Valley and his meetings with CEOs and leaders of the technological giants seek, precisely, to generate commercial agreements with these companies to provide them with technological development and human capital applied to this branch of production and service. In this sense, the challenge is to succeed in empowering talents and being competitive in the world.

But beyond the projects and the expected foreign investments, the truth is that the country has been standing out for its developments and the quality of its professionals throughout the region. This explains its leading position – together with Brazil and Mexico – within this industry. “We were born in a garage in Rosario and today we serve more than 900 clients in Argentina and in Latin America. We employ 150 people and have developed a competitive business model that offers software solutions in distribution logistics for giants such as Nestlé, Mondelez, AB InBev – Quilmes brewery’s parent company -, Danone, etc. We always bet on the quality and training of our work team. We think of creative solutions when developing new products that add value and solve needs both locally and internationally,” explains Elvio Cescato, founder and CEO of Nextbyn, a Scale Up specialized in mass consumption distribution software, and adds: “We have everything to become a power; our case is an example that it can be shared in the global market. Many of our clients were born in Argentina and due to the success generated, they have applied our solutions to the rest of their subsidiaries in the region.”

For his part, Ramiro Raposo, VP of Growth at Bitwage, a platform for paying fees in cryptocurrencies and digital dollars, witnessed the rise in recent years of freelancers who export professional services in relation to knowledge and technology. “Last year we doubled the number of Argentine user registrations, but the number of companies that hire our services to pay their collaborators also grew. The segment of technology professionals is pushing to change the paradigm and they were the first to dare to offer their services abroad, where this type of talent is highly valued and in demand. In this sense, there is a huge opportunity for Argentina to become a technology development hub.”

According to Bitwage, more than 50% of users are dedicated to the IT world, programming or engineering, who export services mainly to the United States. “The same time zone and the good level of English in Argentina is a big plus,” explains Raposo. In the company’s ranking, Spain comes in second place, followed by England, Uruguay, Chile and Mexico.

The truth is that Argentina is the country in the region with the largest number of innovative technology startups, according to a report by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), concentrating 30% of the companies in Latin America and the Caribbean. This explains the enormous potential for continued growth accompanied by the momentum generated by the companies.

This is the case of the Sense Tech agency, which, with 10 years of experience in IT in augmented and virtual reality and immersive interactive products, is launching sharpAgents, a self-developed AI agent product for chat platforms and adding customized GPTs to the ChatGPT store with Argentine themes, thus positioning the company as a pioneer in the development of AI solutions. “We believe that the development of AI can strongly boost knowledge economies in Argentina and include not only professionals from technological areas, but also from various academic branches,” concludes Yordan Bonne, Project Director of sharpAgents.