Epidata is an active part of the industrial fabric of the countries where it operates, which is why, on Industry Day in Argentina, the leading media outlets quote us.
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Full column by Adrián Anacleto, founder and CEO of Epidata.
On September 2 we celebrate Industry Day in a country that, for various reasons, has lost more than 55,000 companies since its 2013 peak. In this context, the discussion about how to compete and grow is not solved with a little more efficiency: it is solved by putting innovation and software inside the productive chain. And that requires a productive consensus as a State policy.
A new starting line
A modern car has more lines of code than an airplane from twenty years ago. A household vacuum cleaner has integrated software: the robot that cleans a living room today maps the space and decides its route with more computing power than the computer that guided Apollo 11 to the Moon, which worked with two kilobytes of memory. A modern harvester generates large amounts of gigabytes of data per hour: yield per hectare, fuel consumption, grain moisture, synchronization with the soil map, predictive-maintenance alerts. The conclusion from these factual data is that there is practically no industry left in the world that can stand out without software development inside the product and the process. The car is the commodity and the differentiator is the software.
This makes us think that the most expensive mistake we can make on this Industry Day is to believe it is about gaining a little efficiency; when artificial intelligence is not here to make us 5% more performant, but to rethink entire production models, value chains, product design and the relationship with the customer. Whoever reads it as an incremental improvement will compete against someone who read it as a change of scale and paradigm — meaning they will have lost before starting.
That said, companies cannot lose focus on their business and learn the new technologies at the same time in order to adopt them, so they need to add innovation outsourcing to their strategies, which closes that gap between the appearance and the adoption of technologies and methodologies in IT.
Globally, there are already clear demonstrations of articulating the software industry as State policy. Thus, on September 4, 2025, the President of the United States sat down to dinner at the White House with Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, Bill Gates and a dozen more technology executives. What mattered was not the photo: it was that, immediately afterward, the U.S. State put itself at the service of that sector. Its trade representative included digital-commerce clauses in the tariff agreements signed with Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Cambodia and Malaysia, conditioning tariff reductions on the deregulation of the platforms. And in June 2026 it threatened 100% tariffs on any European country that applied a tax on digital services, even at the cost of breaking the trade agreement with the European Union.
Another well-known example is Silicon Valley. The Bay Area generates around 840 billion dollars of gross product: if it were a country, it would be the world’s eighteenth-largest economy, ahead of the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia or Switzerland. It is a machine for creating companies and value that became one of the engines of the U.S. economy. Nobody there argues about whether Tesla is a car company or a technology company, or whether Amazon is retail or technology. They are companies that use software to eat the world. And —this is what matters to us today— to build a more powerful country.
The problem is not new; the approach must be different
Focused on the search for the country’s growth, where the software industry scales into possible solutions, it is important to keep in mind the industry’s hard data.
The «SME world» accounts for 77% of Argentina’s private employment, according to UCEMA. And the deterioration did not start the day before yesterday. Argentina reached its peak of employer companies in 2013 and has since lost more than 55,000 firms; registered salaried employment has not grown since 2011. On top of that long baseline came the recent drop: in April 2026 there were 46,005 industrial employer companies and registered industrial employment fell to 1,135,942 jobs, the lowest level in two decades, according to the UIA’s Center for Studies based on data from the Superintendency of Labor Risks. And the overall picture is even more telling: between 2015 and 2025, registered private salaried employment fell by 32,800 jobs and ended up just above 6.2 million, while the population and the labor force kept growing. None of this is the responsibility of a single administration: it is the accumulated result of several decades of decisions that were never strategic. Without State policies that have industry as their axis and that consider software companies an integral part of the sector.
On inflation, it has been held at around 30–35%. It is an achievement no one wants to give up; but it is also true that we remain among the ten countries with the highest inflation in the world, and among the top in Latin America.
On the other hand, there is consensus that: we no longer break the thermometer to hide the illness, as was done with INDEC not so long ago; we no longer close the economy by reflex, we no longer sustain an exchange rate intervened to the point of absurdity, nor an eternal currency control.
Let us also agree that the world changed and that some activities no longer make sense in the Argentina that is coming. That cannot challenge or cast doubt on the fact that the country must generate value through industry in order to grow. But it forces us to think and decide which ones and how, where the added value of the software industry is more than necessary.
Historically, the Argentine middle class and social mobility have been driven by SMEs and by national industry, and large companies need that ecosystem to sustain high production levels. Without a strengthened national industry there is no middle class or growth of society. For this reason, the software industry must be part of the agenda in a national strategy, since it is a sector that over the last two decades had the greatest impact on job creation for the middle class, and that —together with the Software Law and the Knowledge Economy Law— managed to transform and formalize an industry that is vital to the productive fabric.
Innovation Outsourcing for development
There is a phrase often attributed to Bernard Shaw: if you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange them, each of us still has one apple; but if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange them, each of us has two ideas. That is exactly the logic our productive fabric lacks.
Putting software and innovation at the service of industry, with the State prioritizing which value chains to promote, would turn us into a powerhouse. Vaca Muerta needs software: that is the most obvious one. But Arcor, Aluar, Bioceres, and hundreds of metalworking SMEs also have an innovation capacity that today is underused. The March 2026 diagnosis by the UIA and Accenture shows it: only 27% of Argentine industrial companies use artificial intelligence to improve processes or make decisions, when AI could transform 34% of local manufacturing work hours and add 1.2 percentage points of productivity per year, against a 1.8% annual drop in industrial productivity over the last decade.
That is where Innovation Outsourcing comes in, which is not about outsourcing tasks to pay less by using AI. It is not outsourcing the work. It is outsourcing the risk of being late. It is about incorporating capabilities that an industrial company does not have in-house and that it is not worthwhile —or simply not possible— to build from scratch: data engineering, applied AI, automation, cybersecurity, integration of production systems. It allows you to innovate without inflating the structure, to shorten a product’s time to market and to lower the risk of making an expensive mistake. For an Argentine industrial SME, with high financial costs and tight margins, it is often the only realistic way to access specialized talent.
And there is something more. When software crosses paths with an industry we do not just add ideas: a disruption is born. Software crossed paths with the music industry and Spotify was born. It crossed paths with passenger transport and Uber was born. It crossed paths with hospitality and Airbnb was born. It crossed paths with agriculture and precision farming was born, where an Argentine company can sell a yield model to a producer in Iowa. In each of those crossings someone took the entire business of the Western world.
And we have what it takes. Argentine software exports reached a record of 2.85 billion dollars a year, according to CESSI’s observatory for the first quarter of 2026, with more than 65,000 jobs created in the last decade. Knowledge-based services exceed 8 billion dollars a year and account for 41.6% of all private R&D investment in the country. It is a structurally surplus industry: it generates net foreign currency without taking anything out of the ground.
But be careful: in 2011 Argentina ranked 25th in the world ranking of software and IT-services exporters. Today it is 38th. Not because we export less —we export eight times more than in 2006— but because the world grew at 10.9% a year and we grew at 5%. Those thirteen places are the exact measure of what we left on the table. The good news is that we can recover them: Innovation Outsourcing is the bridge that would power industry with knowledge-based growth.
We must keep what is good and build what is missing, whoever governs. Decide which industries yes and which no. Stop devouring them with overlapping national, provincial and municipal taxes. Promote complete value chains instead of isolated champions. And always sustain investment in education, which is the only industrial policy that pays off in the long term.
The question left for this next stage is not whether Argentine industry is going to incorporate software and innovation —that is no longer debated anywhere in the world—. The question is whether we are going to do it with a State strategy, with a productive consensus, or whether we are going to keep improvising chain by chain, company by company, while the rest of the world grows at twice our speed.
My wish for this Industry Day is that the truly national entrepreneurs —the ones who pay salaries with their own money, who arrive early at the factory, who reinvest, who support an entire town— do well. That they get what they deserve. And that in the next generation there are more kids who want to be Messi, a teacher, and an Argentine industrial entrepreneur.
