AI Job Fears Rise to 40% Among Latin American Workers

Fear of AI-driven job loss among Latin American workers rose from 28% in 2024 to 40% in 2026, according to Mercer's Global Talent Trends 2026 report. The increase coincides with Mexico's transition to a 40-hour workweek and evidence that generative AI exposure concentrates in formal administrative and office jobs, affecting an estimated 2.9 million Mexican workers. HR leaders, corporate employers, and policymakers face growing pressure to invest in reskilling as talent shortages and employee resistance slow AI adoption across finance, administrative, and customer service functions.  

Concern over losing a job to AI among workers in Mexico and the rest of Latin America climbed from 28% in 2024 to 40% in 2026, according to Mercer's Global Talent Trends 2026 report, presented during the Latin American Forum 2026, held in Mexico City on June 8. The 12-percentage-point increase coincided with a sharp decline in overall job satisfaction, from 66% to 44% over the same period, as companies across the region accelerate AI adoption without fully redesigning how work gets done.

The forum, which gathered more than 200 executives and human resources, investment, and benefits leaders from across the region, found that 98% of global executives expect significant changes to organizational design over the next two years, and 60% estimate that between 11% and 20% of their workforce will need to be reskilled or reassigned because of AI.

The findings arrive as Mexican companies face mounting pressure to raise productivity without increasing operating costs. Mexico is gradually shifting from a 48-hour to a 40-hour workweek between 2027 and 2030, a change expected to affect more than 13 million workers, and businesses are increasingly turning to automation to offset the reduction in hours. At the same time, the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030, a figure that, while still high, is down from 44% in 2023, reflecting a growing corporate emphasis on continuous training.

The anxiety documented by Mercer coincides with evidence that AI exposure in Mexico concentrates in the formal, salaried workforce rather than spreading evenly across the labor market. Nearly 2.9 million Mexican workers, equivalent to 4.9% of the national labor force, hold administrative and office jobs with medium or high exposure to generative AI, according to a study by México, ¿Cómo Vamos? . Roles such as data entry clerks, office machine operators, accountants, and telephone salespeople rank among the most exposed occupations, while jobs requiring physical presence or complex judgment, including physicians, nurses, and primary school teachers, show far lower exposure. The study also found that informality remains higher among the least-exposed occupations, at 66%, than among the most-exposed ones, underscoring that AI is reaching precisely the segment of the labor market where formal jobs, and their associated social security benefits, are most concentrated.

Employers, meanwhile, are struggling to manage the human side of that transition. Nearly half of organizations in Mexico report internal resistance to AI-driven change, driven by fear of job loss and fatigue from constant transformation, according to Marsh's People Risk 2026 report, also presented at the Latin American Forum 2026. The same report found that only 14% of organizations are actively addressing burnout, even though workload, working hours, and lack of control over tasks remain the three main risk factors behind it.

Mercer's report points to a widening skills gap as the structural challenge behind the rise in AI-related anxiety. More than half of senior executives across the region identify a shortage of qualified personnel as their top obstacle, and 59% of human resources leaders say attracting workers with digital skills is now their hardest recruiting task. Despite that pressure, only 37% of employees have discussed their career with a supervisor in the past year, and just 38% receive regular feedback on how their skills affect their professional opportunities, according to the same survey.

For Mexican companies, the reports suggest that translating AI investment into productivity gains will depend less on the technology itself and more on the pace at which organizations retrain their workforce and redesign roles around it. Mercer's forum concluded with a roadmap for the region: align leadership and human resources departments, invest in training, mental health, and financial wellness, redesign processes so AI amplifies human judgment rather than replacing it, and adapt compensation and benefits policies to a workforce that is older, more demanding, and more diverse than in previous years.