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 holds up operations, safety, and profitability in the region’s most important productive sectors.
An underground mine more than 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 share nothing at all. Today, the control rooms of all three look almost the same: wall-to-wall screens, real-time telemetry, geospatial maps, and algorithms reading variables every second. None of these industries depends only on the power of its machines anymore. All of them 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 enough scale to move that number. The region is also starting from a solid base: GSMA estimates that mobile technologies generated USD 600 billion in Latin America in 2025, equal 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 turns into transformed productive processes, the ratio falls to 0.29. The region scores at less than one-third of the benchmark level. Latin America has won the first battle: connecting people. Connecting productive assets is a separate battle entirely, and that is where the real gap shows.
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 happen, and increasingly to operating heavy machinery remotely and autonomously. That path from monitoring to operating 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 blind. Sensors without robust connectivity trap the data inside the equipment or on a local memory that nobody reads in time. Data that travels but never reaches an analytics platform able to filter the noise ends up in a data graveyard. And if the analysis triggers an alert but the organization cannot act on the plant floor, the investment returns nothing. This is why so many digitalization projects stall halfway.
In Latin America, this chain carries extra weight because of geography. In Europe and parts of the United States, logistics hubs, factories, and cities sit close together, served by redundant terrestrial networks. In this region, a mine sits on the high plateau at 4,000 meters, a farm lies hundreds of kilometers from the nearest city, and an oil field spreads across 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 in a pickup truck on gravel roads.
Frost & Sullivan expects three technologies already in production to consolidate toward 2030: private cellular networks on closed industrial sites; hybrid multi-orbit networks that connect fleets and mobile staff where terrestrial networks do not reach; and edge computing, with AI processing on or near the equipment so machinery can make critical safety decisions in milliseconds even if the satellite or cellular link drops for an instant.
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 — the 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 taking hundreds of workers out of direct exposure.
The second problem is operational continuity where there is no terrestrial alternative. Petrobras runs floating production vessels hundreds of kilometers offshore in Brazil, where physical infrastructure simply cannot be deployed. To connect its new vessels, Petrobras adopted advanced high-throughput satellite connectivity based on MEO constellations — a mission-critical highway carrying telemetry from subsea valves and structural integrity monitoring while supporting 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 bring telemetry from harvesters and field sensors straight 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 belonging to mid-sized growers, achieving a substantial reduction in irrigation water use — proof that this value is increasingly within reach for companies well beyond the largest enterprises.
Connectivity as the Bridge to Productivity
Latin America’s connectivity base is largely in place. Its historic challenge is productivity, and digitalization is the critical infrastructure to address it. Information and communication technologies gain real strategic weight when they become the bridge between the physical asset in the field, real-time data, and business decisions.
The future of the region’s vertical industries will be decided not only in mines, fields, and factories, but also by the ability to turn 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.
If you would like the full presentation or the reports behind it, or want to discuss the challenges your organization is facing, connect with Ian Fresco or Ignacio Perrone at Frost & Sullivan.
