Argentine business leaders see macroeconomic order emerging amid AI transformation

Argentina's business establishment gathered this week to confront a paradox: the country is finally achieving macroeconomic order just as the world around it grows more chaotic. The annual congress of ACDE, the Christian Association of Business Leaders, brought together executives, economists, labor leaders, and educators to wrestle with three interlocking crises—economic instability, technological disruption, and demographic collapse—that threaten to undermine whatever stability the nation has managed to build.

Víctor Valle, ACDE's president, opened the conversation by calling for a fundamental shift in how Argentine business thinks about itself. The country's executives, he argued, have been trapped in short-term thinking, locked inside their own comfortable organizations while the world competes around them. What's needed instead is ambition—the willingness to take Argentine talent and resources into global markets. But that outward vision, Valle insisted, cannot come at the cost of the human dimension inside companies. "We need businesses that are productive and deeply human," he said. The technology transforming industries awakens real fear in workers. Business leaders have a responsibility to help people adapt, to invest in their capacity to change, not simply to optimize them away.

Valle's framing of Argentina's moment was cautiously optimistic. The country is finding order, he said, even as disorder spreads globally. That macroeconomic stabilization—the fiscal surpluses, the disciplined monetary policy—didn't happen by accident. It required enormous effort from workers and business owners alike. But Valle was clear that there is no magic formula. Fiscal discipline is a starting point, not a destination. Real development requires something harder: Argentines listening to each other across their deep political and ideological divides, respecting disagreement, building consensus not as a nice-to-have but as a prerequisite for shared prosperity.

The technological transformation looming over these conversations is staggering in scale. Alejandra Ferraro, who chaired the congress, described the current moment as one of extreme fragility, unpredictability, and non-linear change. Artificial intelligence sits at the center of it. The International Monetary Fund projects that by 2030, millions of new jobs will be created—but millions of existing jobs will vanish or be fundamentally transformed. That prospect generates anxiety, Ferraro acknowledged, but it also demands action. The question is what kind of action, and who bears the cost.

Carlos Custer, a labor leader, voiced the fear that animates much of this discussion. Unemployment is already a crisis; what happens when it accelerates? He drew a stark comparison to apartheid-era South Africa: a small privileged minority with access to wealth and opportunity, while the vast majority struggles to survive. Argentina is moving in that direction, he warned—concentrating resources among fewer people while more fall into precarity. The technological transformation, without deliberate policy choices, could accelerate that divide rather than bridge it.

Beneath the economic anxiety runs a deeper demographic crisis that several speakers identified as existential. María Inés Passanante, a professor at the Catholic University of Argentina, presented numbers that should alarm any country thinking about its future. Argentina's fertility rate stands at 1.4 children per woman—well below the 2.1 needed for a population to replace itself. In 2014, the country recorded 777,000 births. By 2024, that number had collapsed to 413,000. This is not a problem unique to Argentina; wealthy developed nations face it too. But it means fewer young people entering the workforce, fewer taxpayers supporting retirees, fewer hands to build the future. Passanante proposed that the solution lies in education—teaching young people to value family and to see parenthood as part of a meaningful life project. Whether that cultural shift is possible in a society experiencing economic stress and rapid technological change remains an open question.

Yet there are reasons for optimism, at least on the resource side. Fabián Calle, a senior fellow at Florida International University, outlined Argentina's emerging competitive advantages. The country is becoming a major producer of oil, gas, lithium, and copper. It has cold regions suitable for data centers and artificial intelligence infrastructure. These assets, combined with energy availability, make Argentina naturally compatible with both the United States and the European Union in ways few other nations are. Calle argued that Argentina has what the world needs and possesses an ambitious economic future—if it can maintain the mental shift that allowed it to execute an economic adjustment more severe than anything attempted before.

The question of how to preserve what makes us human in an age of artificial intelligence threaded through every panel. Claudia Viviana Gómez, president of the Queen Mary Foundation, was direct: we cannot compete with AI in processing data or executing routine tasks. The only viable strategy is to learn to work alongside it. That means identifying what remains irreplaceably human—values formation, team building, critical thinking, creativity. Majd Sakr of Accenture added four more: judgment, context, responsibility, and the ability to create meaning in complex situations. These are not soft skills, he emphasized. They are central capacities for operating in a world augmented by artificial intelligence. Walter Abrigo, a technology executive, captured the essential insight: the mistake is not using AI. The mistake is failing to decide deliberately how to combine its power with human judgment and values. That choice—made consciously or by default—will determine whether Argentina's emerging macroeconomic order becomes a foundation for shared prosperity or merely a platform for further concentration of wealth and opportunity.