Companies across the US are increasing spending more on AI, but continue to struggle finding the engineers with the experience to make it work. Roughly 2,000 engineers in the US have the industry knowledge and hands-on AI background to actively turn that spending into returns, according to one study shared exclusively with TechCrunch.
At the same time, more companies are trying to recruit them. At the start of 2026, only 5% to 10% of companies planned to bring on forward-deployed engineers, the specialists who work inside a client’s business to get AI into production. By the end of June, that number had jumped to 70%.
The contrast between supply and demand is opening the door for engineering firms with Latin American talent. In 2026 alone, companies with teams from Argentina to Costa Rica have been certifying their engineers on Anthropic’s Claude and earning a place in its partner program, which vets the firms it trusts to put its AI into production for enterprise customers.
It’s a small group, but 2026 has shown momentum for LatAm certified talent. People at 46,000 firms hold Claude certifications, but only 88 firms appear in Anthropic’s public directory of vetted service partners.
As AI gets easier for anyone to build and harder to run well inside a business, nearshore firms are making the case that the answer to the US shortage of senior AI engineers is already working in the same time zone. Anthropic’s partner list is starting to reflect that talent isn’t concentrated in the US.
US hiring in Latin America is growing, and getting more senior
At the start of October, the company accounaced a $100 million commitment to train 10,000 engineers who can deploy Claude inside businesses by the end of 2027, calling talent one of the most pressing problems in AI adoption. The first groups going through the program come from Accenture, Bain, Deloitte, McKinsey and other global firms.
But many US companies are building teams across borders. Hire With Near, a staffing firm that places Latin American workers with US employers, said its placements grew 31% in the first half of 2026 compared with the previous six months, and 67% compared with a year earlier. Most of those hires were based in Brazil (22%), Colombia (18%), Argentina (14%) and Mexico (12%).
The people being hired also tend to be more experienced. In its annual report released in January, Near said 84% of the more than 2,000 placements it analyzed were mid-level or senior across different sectors. US companies are turning to the region for experience, and its engineering firms are now working to certify their level of expertise through Anthropic.
“When companies save 30 to 70 percent per hire in Latin America, they reinvest it into more senior people and bigger teams than they could have built on a U.S.-only budget,” says Hayden Cohen, CEO of Hire With Near.
“The savings get the conversation started, but what keeps companies hiring in the region is access to experienced talent and the ability to grow faster than they could with US-based hiring alone.”
When anyone can build an agent, they also build risk
Part of the reason companies are turning to these firms is that AI has become much easier to start with but much riskier to manage and much harder to extract value.
Building an agent no longer takes a dedicated team, which means more of them are being built without the testing, security reviews and ownership a business needs once they’re running every day.
“Anyone can build an agent. Which makes engineering standards matter more than ever,” Gorilla Logic CEO Drew Naukam said in the company’s announcement in which the Colorado-based firm whose engineers work out of Costa Rica and Colombia, was also named a Select partner.
“A lot of the companies we talk to already pay for Claude. What they want is help getting it into the work their teams do every day, in a way their security and IT teams will sign off on.”
Naukam, says this is why we are seeing a growing number of shadow agents, keeping IT and leadership teams awake at night.
Still, not everyone is convinced the forward-deployed model will last.
Gartner expects about 70% of vendor-led forward-deployed projects to be abandoned by 2028, due to high fees and a lack of delivery depth. Gartner analyst Mukul Saha said many providers now use the forward-deployed label loosely, “some thoughtfully, others because it sounds more strategic.”
Gartner also argued that once the scope of a project is clear, a traditional services partner can often do the work for less, which is the role these nearshore firms are trying to fill and the engineers Anthropic are certifying.
The LatAm firms earning Anthropic’s stamp
Getting into Anthropic’s directory takes more than certificates. Entry-level Select status requires at least 10 certified practitioners, two customers running Claude in production in the past year and one public customer story, according to the program’s published requirements. The next tier up, Preferred, requires 100 certified practitioners, 15 production customers and three public stories.
The Argentina-founded company, Globan, reached Preferred in June and said it was the largest Latin America-founded services firm to do so. The firm is aiming to certify 5,000 architects, and the company said its Claude-powered “AI Pods” are already used by 40% of its top 20 accounts. The company’s CEO Martín Migoya said the pods would help clients “seamlessly integrate agentic AI into their core operations.”
In Brazil, CI&T said in June it is certifying more than 1,000 engineers on Claude. “AI generates options; judgment determines outcomes,” said founder and CEO Cesar Gon. Days later, Zup, the technology arm of Itaú Unibanco, also joined the program, with CEO André Palma describing its role as helping companies that have bought AI actually use it with strategy and consistency. Neither company has said which tier it holds.
More firms moved up around Anthropic’s Oct. 1 review window alongside Gorilla Logic. Including Monterrey-based JTech, who obtained Select status, pitching itself as a Mexican partner that implements Claude in Spanish.
It’s worth noting that Claude certification is only open to people working at partner firms, which means independent engineers can’t earn it on their own. For a region where many developers freelance for US companies, that could keep the opportunity with established firms. But also potentially increase full-time hires for LatAm based engineers into firms eager to become Claude Service partners.
