Why Latin America’s AI moment demands a different kind of expert: Tony Chatman

Opinions expressed by Digital Journal contributors are their own.

Every organization investing in artificial intelligence right now is asking the same questions about platforms, timelines, budgets and which teams to involve first. What most of them are not asking is the question that will ultimately determine whether any of it sticks: why are our people using it at the most basic level possible and not going further?

Tony Chatman has spent more than two decades studying why people resist change, and right now there is no more urgent place to apply that work than the AI revolution sweeping through organizations across Latin America.

Chatman is a keynote speaker, organizational consultant and leadership advisor whose clients include Fortune 500 companies, federal agencies and major hospital systems. For more than two decades, his work has centered on a single, persistent problem: the human resistance that derails even the most well-resourced initiatives.

“It is not the technology that stops organizations,” he says. “It is the people who are supposed to use it.”

That expertise recently brought him to the IA2Latam executive forum in Panama, an event focused on how artificial intelligence is transforming organizations across the region. The response from that audience led directly to a second invitation: a keynote at the Bench Club HR Summit in Panama City on June 10, a gathering of HR executives and senior leaders exploring the implications of AI for the future of work.

Organizers sought him out not for his knowledge of the technology but for what he understands about the people who are supposed to use it.

The problem hiding inside every AI rollout

Most organizations approaching AI implementation are focused on the right things. What they are less prepared for is the human response waiting on the other side of their plan.

“The narratives on AI are so extreme right now that it is hard to get a workforce to really embrace it,” Chatman says. “You have prominent voices saying AI will replace all white collar jobs within 18 months. If I have a white collar job, why would I embrace AI at work? Because what I am hearing is that I am training my replacement.”

He is not suggesting those fears are irrational. He is suggesting they are predictable, and that predictability is the key to everything.

Chatman points to a striking data point: AI is currently being adopted faster than any technology in human history, surpassing the adoption rates of the internet, the personal computer and the cell phone. And yet, despite that velocity, he says 85% of employees who use AI are using it solely as a search replacement or for basic summaries, not in any way that meaningfully transforms how they work.

“That is resistance,” Chatman says. “It does not look like defiance. It looks like minimal engagement. It looks like people doing the most comfortable version of a new thing.”

The deeper fears driving that minimalism cluster around three themes. The first is the fear of looking incompetent. Workers who have spent years building expertise in their field are suddenly being asked to become beginners again, and in front of their colleagues.

“It is not the fear of the unknown,” Chatman says. “It is the fear of looking incompetent. People train themselves to be experts. That identity is at stake.”

The second fear is data privacy, as employees grow increasingly aware of what happens to the information they feed into these systems. The third is shadow AI, the phenomenon of employees quietly using unauthorized tools because they are simply more familiar with them, inadvertently exposing sensitive company data in the process.

“An organization builds out a secure, internal AI system,” he says. “But an employee is more comfortable with a tool they have been using for months. So they use that instead, and now company information is going somewhere it was never supposed to go. That is a massive problem.”

What Latin America is getting right

Chatman is careful not to let the narrative of AI resistance obscure something he has been watching closely since calling both the United States & Panama home. Latin America may be approaching this moment more thoughtfully than it gets credit for.

“I think people underestimate how technologically advanced Latin America actually is,” he says. “There is a stereotype that it is underdeveloped. And yet in most of the buildings here, you need facial recognition technology just to access the elevator. It is very different from what people expect.”

What he is observing is not a region that is behind but one approaching AI with a measured urgency, aware of what it missed in earlier technology waves and determined not to repeat that pattern.

The Bench Club, the organization behind the June summit, reflects that orientation directly. A global community of HR decision-makers with chapters across Latin America, the group connects its members on a weekly basis, not just for occasional conferences but for the kind of sustained engagement that actually drives behavioral change over time.

“They are asking the right question,” Chatman says. “Not just how do we implement this technology, but how do we get our people to actually use it in a way that creates a strategic and sustainable advantage.”

That question is exactly where his work begins.

Getting traction when an initiative has stalled

At the Bench Club HR Summit, Chatman will not be delivering a broad overview of AI trends. He will be addressing something more specific: what to do when an AI implementation has already started, the momentum has slowed and leadership does not know why.

He calls it the stall, and he argues that getting out of it does not require going back to the beginning.

“When you are in a stall, you do not need more information,” he says. “You need traction. If you do three or four specific things quickly, you are going to generate the momentum you need. The goal is not to fix everything at once. The goal is to get moving again.”

One of those strategies centers on a concept he has found consistently underused: the opinion leader. Most change initiatives rely on change champions, employees selected by leadership to carry the message of a new initiative. Chatman argues these are consistently the wrong people for the job.

“Change champions are the people you select to champion your change,” he says. “Opinion leaders are the people that the people have already chosen to follow. Each one influences between 8 and 20 others, and they have that influence because it was earned, not assigned.”

Winning over those individuals is not a communications exercise, he says. It is a trust exercise, and the earlier it happens, the more it shapes everything that follows.

A personal investment in the region

Chatman has been working out of Panama since late 2024 with his wife Camille, who serves as head of consulting and operations at Chatman Enterprises. His path to becoming one of the most sought-after voices on organizational resistance is anything but conventional. A former chemical engineer and minister turned leadership advisor, TEDx speaker and bestselling author of “The Force Multiplier,” he has spent his career testing a single thesis across wildly different environments: that success, in any organization and at any level, depends entirely on your relationship with resistance.

“We were hoping that one day we could connect with the business community here and begin to have an impact,” he says. “To actually be embedded in it this quickly is almost surreal.”

Conversations have extended well beyond speaking engagements into board invitations and potential investment in regional technology ventures, something Chatman describes as unlike anything he has experienced in other markets.

“We are not building a client list here,” he says. “We are building a partner list.”

For the HR executives gathering in Panama City on June 10, his message will be direct: the resistance your organization is experiencing around AI is not a sign of failure. It is a sign of something predictable, something diagnosable and something that can be addressed.

“What I want people to leave with is the understanding that what they are going through is not abnormal,” he says. “You are exactly where everyone else is. And it is fixable. Not by doing more of what got you stuck, but by doing something different. There is one thing you can do right now that will give you an ROI. Not someday. Now.”

In a region at an inflection point, that kind of clarity may be exactly what the moment requires.