45% of Ecuadorian Professionals Already Use AI, but 68% of Companies Can't Find Talent

While the Assembly debated whether to regulate artificial intelligence, Ecuadorian workers were already using it. According to a Multitrabajos study covered by Primicias and analyzed by IT ahora, 45% of the country's professionals use AI tools in their work tasks, six points above the 39% recorded in 2025. The survey covered more than 2,100 workers and HR specialists across Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Panama and Peru.

The figure has two uncomfortable readings. The first is comparative: Ecuador is one of the countries in the region where AI is least used at work. Peru leads with 65%, followed by Chile at 61%, Argentina at 57% and Panama at 44%. The second is internal: according to estimates from Ecuador's Chamber of Innovation and Technology (CITEC) cited in the same coverage, 68% of companies in the country have difficulty finding talent with the skills needed to take advantage of these tools.

The problem isn't resistance, it's governance

A third number stands out: 97% of workers consider AI implementation useful or very useful at work, and only 3% hold a negative view. In other words, this is not a change-resistance problem. The obstacle is on the other side of the desk.

When nearly half a workforce uses AI and the company never set rules, you get what the industry calls shadow AI: tools paid for with personal cards, customer information pasted into public chats, internal documents uploaded to services whose retention policy nobody read. The risk isn't hypothetical: it is exactly the kind of personal-data processing without a legal basis that the LOPDP sanctions, and it happens without bad intent — simply because nobody said what was allowed and what wasn't.

What separates using AI from benefiting from it

The talent gap CITEC reports doesn't close by hiring "an AI expert." In practice, the companies getting real returns do three things that don't require a scarce profile:

They define concrete use cases, not generic capabilities. "Use AI to improve productivity" can't be measured. "Cut response time on a standard quote from 40 minutes to 10" can, and it also tells you which tool you need.

They write a one-page usage policy. Which tools are approved, what information never leaves the company (customer data, ID numbers, financial statements, proprietary code), what requires human review before going out. One page everyone reads beats a thirty-page manual nobody opens.

They train the team that already knows the business. It's faster to teach AI to someone who has been quoting jobs for eight years than to teach the business to a newcomer who knows models. The scarce skill isn't technical: it's knowing which task is worth automating.

What this means for your SME

• You probably already have AI in your company, without knowing it. If 45% of professionals use it, the question isn't whether your team does, but with which tools and which data.
• A usage policy costs one meeting. It's the best cost-benefit control an SME can put in place this week.
• The regional lag is an opportunity. Being 20 points behind Peru means the competitive advantage of adopting AI well is still available in Ecuador.
• Train before buying licenses. A tool without usage criteria creates extra review work; the same budget spent on team training pays off more.

How We Approach It at SimCodec

At SimCodec we don't sell licenses: we implement automations and AI agents on processes the client has already identified as bottlenecks, and we document what each flow does, with which data, and where a person steps in. That includes coaching the internal team so they can operate and adjust what's been built without depending on a vendor for every change.

If you want to identify which of your company's processes are worth automating — and which aren't — write to us at simcod.ec/es/contacto.