Reflections from Mexico City
I have been in Mexico City this month, meeting customers, team members and future candidates during a trip across the region. Every time I come here I am reminded that Latin America is one of the most demanding commercial environments in consumer goods anywhere in the world.
Think about what a typical CPG business here has to run at the same time. A national account team selling into sophisticated modern trade chains with joint business plans and rigorous compliance requirements. A field force covering tens of thousands of small independent stores, many of them cash only, most of them ordering weekly. A distributor network that owns the last mile in territories the direct team will never reach. Multiple countries, multiple currencies, multiple languages, and a promotional calendar that never stops moving.
That complexity is exactly why our business in the region is growing so quickly. Here are the five reasons I keep hearing from customers themselves.
1. One connected Vertical AI platform from planning through to execution
Most commercial technology in the region grew up in silos. Trade planning in one system, or more often in spreadsheets. Field execution in another. Distributor data somewhere else entirely, usually arriving weeks late in a format nobody trusts.
The result is a set of stovepiped solutions where the plan and the reality never meet. A promotion is designed in head office, executed differently in every territory, and measured months later using data that cannot be reconciled.
Aforza closes that loop. Planning, trade promotion management, retail execution, distributor management and analytics sit on one platform and one data model. A promotion planned on Monday is visible to the rep in the store on Tuesday, and the evidence of what actually happened in that store flows straight back into the performance view the commercial team uses to decide what to do next. Nothing is rekeyed, reconciled or lost in translation.
2. Aforza fits Modern & Traditional routes to market, not just one
This is the point that consistently separates us in the region. Plenty of platforms handle modern trade well. A smaller number handle traditional trade well. Very few handle both properly in the same system.
In Latin America you do not get to choose. A leading beverage or food business here might generate half its revenue from organised retail and half from hundreds of thousands of tiendas, colmados and bodegas served through a mix of direct sales, pre-sales, van sales and independent distributors. Each of those routes has different economics, different visit models and different data.
Aforza supports them all, configured to how each market actually operates rather than forcing every country into a single template. That flexibility means a business can standardise its commercial model without flattening the local realities that make it work.
3. A mobile app that field teams genuinely want to use
Field adoption is where most commercial technology projects quietly fail. If the app is slow, if it needs connectivity that does not exist in a rural territory, or if it was clearly designed for someone sitting at a desk, reps will find a way around it and the data will never be trustworthy.
Our mobile app is fully offline. A rep can complete an entire day of calls with no signal at all, capturing orders, surveys, photos, assets and payments, and everything syncs when they are back in coverage. The interface is designed around the visit, not around the database, and it is available in Spanish, Portuguese, English and any other language a customer needs, right down to the field labels.
When I sit with reps here and ask them what they think of it, the answer is usually some version of the same thing: it is faster than what they had before. That is the only review that matters.
4. Large field teams that need Vertical AI Powered Realtime Next Best Action
Field forces in this region are big. It is common to see several thousand reps in a single country operation. At that scale, small improvements in visit quality compound into very large commercial outcomes, and the difference between a good visit and an average one comes down to whether the rep knows what to do in the next four minutes.
This is where Ava, Aforza’s Vertical AI, is landing hard. Ava REX turns a shelf photo into a scored, actionable result in seconds, so share of shelf, planogram compliance, out of stocks, competitor activity and pricing are captured without the rep filling in a single form. Ava then puts the next best action in front of them while they are still standing in the store. Ava TPM and Ava Claims do the same job for the trade planning and deductions teams behind them.
Image recognition is not a new idea in Latin America. What’s new is Realtime Next Best Action that tells a rep what to do in the moment, so they can take action in the store.
5. The A-team with deep expertise & industry domain
The big reason we are growing so fast here is the quality of our people. Across sales, solution engineering, professional services, support and customer success we have people who have lived this industry, run these processes, and delivered these programmes before. They combine industry experience with technical depth and a genuine view on best practice, and they are not afraid to tell a customer when there is a better way to do something.
Our Mexico City hub is central to that. It gives customers across the region a team in their time zone, in their language, who understand how commerce actually works here. It is a deliberate investment, and we are continuing to grow it.
We continue to invest in the region
Latin America is a strategic priority for Aforza. It is one of our fastest growing regions, and we are backing it with people, product investment and local presence. Many of our customers are already running Aforza across markets here, and the pipeline of consumer goods businesses looking to replace fragmented, ageing commercial systems keeps growing.
That investment extends to the expertise around our team as well as inside it. I am pleased to share we have just appointed Raquel D’Anello as an Industry Advisor, based in Brazil. Raquel brings deep consumer goods experience in the region and will work closely with our team and our customers as we grow here. You can read more on her appointment, and on how she sees the market developing, in this press release here: Aforza Appoints Raquel D’Anello As Industry Advisor
If you have read this and thought that sounds like the kind of team you want to be part of, we are hiring across sales, solution engineering, professional services and customer success, in Mexico City and beyond. Take a look at our open roles, and if you know someone who would thrive here, send this to them.
¡Nos vemos pronto!
Aforza is Hiring in LATAM
If reason five sounded like the kind of team you want to be part of, we are growing it. Open roles across sales, solution engineering, professional services and customer success are on our careers page.