For many years, the development of artificial intelligence (AI) was constrained by technical capabilities. Building AI-powered products required highly specialized talent, costly infrastructure, and long development cycles. It was a field limited to advanced technical teams and organizations with significant investment capacity. 

Today, thanks to foundational models, natural language interfaces, and more recently, agent-based systems, anyone can access and design complex solutions without writing code, using tools like Codex or Cursor.
 
As a result, the adoption of AI to empower businesses has evolved from a purely technological discussion to a matter of governance. The central strategic issue is no longer just developing these systems, but how to govern them so they generate value for both companies and consumers — a challenge that our initiative fAIr LAC seeks to address.

From Engineering to Institutional Responsibility

In this new phase, AI no longer merely follows instructions; it executes processes, makes decisions, connects with external tools, and even enhances its own capabilities. For the first time, the scope of this technology is not limited by what it can do, but by our ability to define, monitor and contain its use.

Agent-based systems are exhibiting behaviors that until recently were difficult to imagine in everyday business environments. For example, they may request excessive access to complete a task, find unexpected shortcuts to achieve an objective, or interact with systems in ways not anticipated by their developers.

This shift transforms the challenge we face and explains why the conversation about AI is moving beyond the technical realm and fully into the organizational sphere. For years, the challenge was to build; now the challenge is to govern. The question is no longer who knows how to build these systems, but who is accountable for their outcomes. 

Integrating Governance from the Design Phase 

For startups and SMEs in Latin America and the Caribbean, this presents a great opportunity, but also a significant challenge. It has never been easier to build advanced products, experiment quickly, and scale digital solutions, but it has also never been easier to deploy systems without fully understanding their implications.

To begin with, the barriers are no longer technical; they have shifted toward governance. Questions that once seemed distant are now central: Who is responsible for what an autonomous system does? What are its limits? What kind of access does it have? How is its behavior monitored over time?
 
In many cases, these questions are not raised during the product design phase, but rather after the product has been deployed and risks begin to materialize. This can lead to a structural misalignment with increasingly critical systems operating in environments that are not equipped to manage them.

Companies that succeed in integrating governance from the design phase will not only reduce risks but also build better products, and such governance will cease to be an external requirement and become an internal capability that generates differentiated value.

IDB Lab’s Approach to AI Governance: fAIr LAC

IDB Lab works precisely at this inflection point. Through fAIr LAC as an alliance between the public and private sectors, civil society, and academia, we seek to influence both public policy and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in promoting the responsible use of AI.

In a context where systems are becoming increasingly autonomous, governance becomes the invisible infrastructure that underpins the product. Far from slowing innovation, responsible AI is the condition that enables it to be sustainable.
 
With this objective, we have developed a set of open tools and methodologies that not only help understand the risks of AI, but also enable better technological, business, and investment decisions in contexts of high uncertainty.

•    fAIr LAC 3S: Enables startups and SMEs to conduct a systematically assess their AI solutions, identify critical risks (such as bias, privacy, or lack of explainability), and translate these into concrete actions for design, governance, and product improvement. It is a tool to enhance technological quality and avoid costly mistakes from the outset.

•    fAIr Venture: Helps investors incorporate AI risks into decision-making, anticipating reputational, regulatory, and operational issues in their portfolios. In practice, it enables a shift from traditional due diligence to a more technologically advanced and sophisticated approach, aligned with the new regulatory and market context.

•    fAIr Tech Radar: Maps how AI is being used in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, identifying trends, emerging capabilities, and best practices. It functions as a strategic intelligence tool to understand where the market is heading and where the real opportunities for value lie.

Complementing these resources, fAIr LAC in a box offers practical guides for applying responsibility principles at every stage of a project, from ideation to deployment. 
What sets fAIr LAC apart is that these tools go beyond the conceptual: they have been applied in numerous real-world cases across sectors such as fintech, employment, and healthcare, where we have identified high-impact risks — such as discrimination in credit scoring, data governance issues, or a lack of transparency in systems — and translated them into concrete roadmaps to improve products and decisions.

Innovating Better to Lead the Future

The innovations that truly transform economies are those that manage to become institutionalized, developing rules, practices, and capabilities to sustain what is built, in line with what is proposed in OpenAI’s viral document “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age.”

Agent-based AI is propelling us toward that phase, and the key question is no longer what we can build, but rather what we are capable of sustaining, controlling, and scaling without losing our way.

We must separate domains of trust, establish controls proportional to risk, and assume that these systems are constantly evolving, so their governance must evolve as well.
We are approaching an era where the advantage will not belong to those with the greatest technological capacity, but to those who know how to use it without losing control.

You can access our publications and studies, as well as learn more about fAIr LAC and the responsible use of AI here.