Néstor Romero answers: which jobs AI changes first in Panama and what universities are missing

Who is answering and why it matters

Néstor Romero is an engineer from the University of Córdoba (Spain) and holds a doctorate from the University of Málaga. He is president of the European Digital Marketing Association and vice president of the European Neuromarketing Association. In Panama he teaches artificial intelligence and digital marketing at Quality Leadership University, and he has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Louisville, the University of Málaga, the University of Chile and UNED. He has more than 20 years of digital projects in more than 30 countries and was a speaker at the LiderIA Summit, held on 23 September in the auditorium of the Torre de las Américas in Panama City.

This interview is a telephone conversation between Deilys Romero, economy and business writer at Radar Panamá, and Néstor Romero, who took the call from Panama City on 26 September, days after his talk at the LiderIA Summit. The sentences in quotation marks are verbatim from that conversation. The interviewee himself asked for a clarification that Radar Panamá records here: his answers on employment and training come from his teaching and professional experience, not from his own measurements, and he offers them as informed judgement, distinct from the data in his research.

What students ask today, and what employers ask

Employers arrive with a different concern and, according to Romero, they arrive late: they want to know which specific process to start with and, above all, what to do with their customers’ data. «The most repeated question in companies is not “what can artificial intelligence do”, but “what can I feed it without getting into trouble”», he sums up. Almost nobody asked that second question two years ago. The contrast matters for a country that, as Radar Panamá argued when asking whether Panama can be a digital hub without digital talent, needs companies and graduates to move forward together.

The three jobs that change first in Panama

The second job, he maintains, is in logistics and foreign-trade documentation, «a huge sector in this country»: document extraction and cross-checking gets automated, and what remains is exception handling, «which is where the value is». The third is marketing content and materials, where «the first draft stops being a job, and the judgement to decide what to publish and what not becomes one». The pattern repeats: the repetitive part disappears and a supervisory function appears. To size the second, Radar Panamá’s guide to what Panama exports and to whom describes the weight of foreign trade in the country’s economy.

Where AI will not reach within five years

Romero adds a less obvious territory: any job whose value consists in taking on responsibility. «Signing a diagnosis, authorising a loan, approving a building project. The machine can prepare the decision, and in fact it prepares it better and better; what it cannot do is answer for it. As long as there is a signature with consequences behind it, there will be someone to sign.» He says it with caution, because five years in this field is a long time and predictions over that horizon tend to age badly. Several of those trades are among the sectors with their own rates in Panama’s minimum wage.

Where a company of thirty employees should start

On whom to train, his answer is both, in that order and with different content. Management, «so that it knows what to ask for, what not to believe and where the legal risk is». Teams, «so that they know how to use it in their specific task». And he warns of what happens when only one side is trained: «If you train only the bosses, you will have enthusiasm without execution. If you train only the teams, you will have people using tools without judgement or permission, which is considerably worse.» For anyone starting from scratch, Radar Panamá’s guide to opening a company in Panama covers the preliminary steps.

1. Choose a boring, measurable process. Something that repeats every week, eats up hours and does not set the company apart from anyone: quotes, frequent replies, internal reports.
2. Train management first. So that it knows what to ask for, what not to believe and where the legal risk is.
3. Train the teams next. So that they use the tool in their specific task, with judgement and with permission.

How to choose an assistant, and why to ask two

That rule is followed by a warning that, he says, comes from his trade: never take a single assistant’s answer as good on anything that matters. Romero says he has measured it: faced with the same question, two systems rely on almost completely different sources. «If you are evaluating something relevant, ask two and compare. The discrepancy between them will tell you more than the answer from either one.» Radar Panamá has seen that divergence in its own Radar AI studies, such as the one analysing which dental clinics AI recommends in Panama.

What universities teach well and what they are missing

What is missing, he acknowledges, is more uncomfortable. «What is missing is teaching how to verify. Students are taught to ask the machine for things and are not taught to check whether what it returns is true, which is the skill that will really set a professional apart.» Romero backs this with a finding from his research, the only measured figure in this conversation. And he points to a second gap: applied legal and ethical training, which data can be used and which cannot. «Today that is taken for granted, and it is not.»

Privacy, Law 81 and services outside the country

From the technical side, the rule he gives his clients is simple: «everything you type into a commercial assistant leaves your company and travels to a server you do not control». For that reason, health data, identity documents, customers’ financial information and anything subject to confidentiality «should not go in there without a contract that expressly covers it». And he leaves a practical question almost nobody asks: «if tomorrow a customer demands that you delete their data, can you guarantee it? If the answer is that you do not know, you already have a problem».

The framework he refers to is Law 81 of 26 March 2019, Panama’s personal data protection law, regulated by Executive Decree 285 of 2021; the authority responsible for enforcing it is the National Authority for Transparency and Access to Information (ANTAI). Romero’s question about deletion connects with the rights that law grants to data subjects, although, as he insists, the scope in each company must be determined by a specialist.

Advice for a forty-year-old worker, and for their boss

The one who should worry, he continues, is not that worker: «it is the twenty-two-year-old who handles the tool wonderfully and cannot tell a good answer from a bad one». To the boss he addresses the complementary message: the forty-year-old who has spent a decade getting to know the customers is, «with two weeks of training, the most profitable asset you have». And he closes with the clearest warning of the whole conversation: «Replacing that person with someone who masters the tool and does not know the business is the mistake that will cost the most in the coming years.»

What a Panamanian business owner takes away

Romero’s answers sketch an order of priorities for a mid-sized company in Panama. The right question is not what artificial intelligence can do, but which data can be handed over without trouble, and that runs through a contract and a legal specialist. Change arrives first in customer service, foreign-trade documentation and marketing content, and in all three what appears is supervisory work and judgement. The sensible starting point is a repetitive, measurable process, with management trained before the teams, and the assistant already included in the Microsoft or Google environment the company uses, cross-checking any relevant answer against a second system. And the veteran worker who knows the customers is worth more, with two weeks of training, than someone who masters the tool without knowing the business.

More Radar Panamá interviews: Néstor Romero answers: why AI recommends one Panamanian business and not another · Kathia Rivera answers: incorporating a company in Panama as a foreigner, without travelling and in a week

Frequently asked questions

Sources consulted

• Telephone interview by Radar Panamá with Néstor Romero, 26 September. Quotations are verbatim from that conversation, translated from Spanish.
• Néstor Romero, the interviewee’s professional website.
• LiderIA Summit, programme of the event held on 23 September at the Torre de las Américas, Panama City.
• Law 81 of 26 March 2019 on personal data protection of the Republic of Panama, and Executive Decree 285 of 2021 regulating it. Enforcement authority: ANTAI.