Every year, Colombia's National Competitiveness Report tries to answer a deceptively simple question: what is actually holding the country back? The 2025-2026 edition gives an answer worth taking seriously, and it is not a technology gap. The report points to an accumulation of overlapping regulation, low social and institutional trust, and political polarization as the forces limiting the country's capacity to design and actually implement effective policy. Its own language is blunt: Colombia needs "uncomfortable agreements," acuerdos incómodos, to move forward.
That finding lines up exactly with the argument I made in a recent analysis for La República: in the AI era, national competitiveness depends far less on which country reaches a given technology first than on which country can convert that technology into growth, institutions capable of executing a plan, and public trust that the plan will hold across a decade of politics.
Technology Is Not the Scarce Input Anymore
AI tooling, cloud infrastructure, and technical talent are more broadly available today than at any point in the last several decades. A serious AI strategy is achievable for almost any government willing to fund one. What is not equally available is the institutional discipline to make that strategy survive contact with a change in administration, a coalition collapse, or an election cycle built on short-term promises. That discipline is exactly what Colombia's competitiveness report is describing when it flags low institutional trust and policy fragmentation as binding constraints.
Why "Uncomfortable Agreements" Is the Right Framing
The report's call for acuerdos incómodos, agreements that require real political cost from multiple sides rather than a comfortable consensus that changes nothing, is the correct diagnosis. Trust is not built by avoiding hard tradeoffs. It is built by demonstrating, repeatedly and visibly, that competing political actors can commit to a shared long-term plan and actually keep that commitment when it becomes inconvenient. A cadastral reform, a public investment framework, or an industrial strategy that gets renegotiated every time power changes hands is worse than no plan at all, because it teaches investors and citizens alike that nothing here is durable.
What This Means in Practice
Three things follow from treating trust as the actual constraint rather than technology access.
First, sequencing matters. Institutional capacity, transparent administrative processes, and a functioning regulatory framework need to be in place before a country bets heavily on a specific technology wave, not after. Countries that try to import advanced technology onto a weak institutional base tend to see the investment stall regardless of the technology's merits.
Second, political cohesion across the executive, the legislature, and local government has to treat a small number of strategic priorities as above ordinary electoral contestation. Not everything, a functioning democracy still needs real political competition, but the handful of genuine growth engines a country is committing capital and years to need cross-party durability, or capital will not commit to them either.
Third, the payoff from "uncomfortable agreements" is not immediate, which is exactly why they are hard to reach. The political actors who make them rarely get to claim credit within a single term. That is a feature of real institution-building, not a flaw, and it is worth being honest about with the public rather than promising fast results a serious reform cannot deliver.
The Real Competitive Advantage
Colombia has real structural strengths: a young population, geographic access to both the Pacific and Atlantic, and sectors, from BPO services to renewable energy, well positioned for the next decade. None of that changes the report's core conclusion. Whether those strengths convert into durable competitiveness depends on whether the country can build the trust, across administrations, across parties, across the public and private sectors, to make a long-term plan credible. That is a harder thing to build than any technology stack, and it is the actual competition every country is now in.
