September 17, 2026
Mexico’s biggest adoption gap is not in large companies
94% of small businesses in Mexico still do not use artificial intelligence. It is not a lack of interest, but a lack of a channel that delivers it in the right package. That is where the country’s largest and least contested category lies.
Only 0.1% of microbusinesses and 6% of small businesses in Mexico use artificial intelligence today, compared with 17% of large companies. The gap is not about interest or need, but access: Mexican SMEs have neither the budget nor the internal team to evaluate, implement, and maintain tools that large companies integrated years ago.
It is, at the same time, the country’s largest and least contested technology adoption gap. While almost the entire AI conversation in Mexico focuses on corporations and the public sector, the segment that represents most of the country’s businesses, and jobs, remains virtually unserved.
The reason is not that the technology is irrelevant to SMEs. Digital marketing automation, customer service, content generation, sales data analysis: these are precisely the tasks on which SMEs lose the most time proportionally, because they lack the headcount to perform them manually at the scale a large company can sustain. The technology already exists and has already been validated. What is missing is someone to deliver it in a package that a Mexican SME can buy, understand, and use without friction.
That is, almost word for word, the definition of the problem a representation model solves: a foreign company with an automation or applied AI solution already proven in its home market does not need to reinvent the product to enter Mexico. It needs a partner who understands how a Mexican SME sells, collects payments, and provides support—a buyer with a decision-making cycle, budget, and level of technical sophistication very different from those of a corporation.
Anyone who has already built that sales channel to SMEs in Mexico, especially in adjacent categories such as digital marketing, has a structural advantage in bringing the next wave of automation and AI tools to the same type of customer. The established sales channel, not the product, is what determines how quickly this category can be captured.
At Grupo Aro, we see this subvertical, technology for SMEs and industrial digitalization, as one of the highest-volume and least competitive within the Technology business line.
If you have an automation or AI solution for SMEs and are looking for this channel, or if this thesis resonates with you as an investor, let’s talk: grupoaro.mx