Jose Maria Rancano on Slalom’s growth ambitions in the Mexican market

Last year, Slalom announced bold growth plans in the Mexican market. Jose Maria Rancano, the company’s General Manager for Mexico, discusses the firm’s ambitions, progress to date, and what lies ahead.

How would you describe Slalom’s position in the Mexican and Latin American technology and business consulting market?

We are a premium consulting partner for business-critical initiatives. Unlike many firms that grow through acquisition or focus on price competition, Slalom is one of the world’s largest privately-held consulting firms with no acquisitions. This reflects our core mission: to deliver high-quality technology solutions right the first time.

In Mexico and Latin America, our strategy is based on client intimacy. By establishing local offices, we embed ourselves within our clients’ business agendas, allowing us to integrate deeply with their strategic priorities and deliver foundational technology solutions that cannot afford to fail.

What is Slalom’s key differentiator within the Mexican technology ecosystem?

Our key differentiator is the way we engage with talent. When we opened our delivery centers in Latin America, our objective was not labor arbitrage, but access to exceptional professionals. Rather than siloing local teams, we fully integrate our talent in Mexico and Colombia into global project teams.

For example, a solution delivered for a Mexican client may include architects in Seattle, developers in Bogota, and analysts in Chicago. This model not only elevates local talent by giving them a global platform but also ensures clients benefit from the best expertise available, regardless of geography. The resulting cost efficiency is a positive outcome, but never the strategic intent.

How has demand for your services evolved in line with the specific needs of the Mexican and regional market?

There has been a marked shift in demand toward services that generate new business value, particularly in data and AI. Our engagements increasingly focus on building AI-enabled platforms that do more than drive efficiencies, they enable market creation. For example, we helped a leading retailer recognize its latent value as a data company, leveraging transaction data to launch new business lines.

We collaborate with hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft, and platforms such as Databricks and Snowflake, to implement these solutions, especially in sectors like retail and financial services, where data can be a transformative asset.

How are you advancing on your goal to hire 500 individuals at your new global technology center by the end of 2025?

We are ahead of our original hiring plan. We had aimed for 500 professionals by the end of 2025 and are already nearing 400.

This growth is driven by the value our regional talent delivers. Our clients consistently highlight the strategic mindset of our Latin American teams, noting their ability to challenge business assumptions and connect technology initiatives to measurable outcomes. These professionals do not simply execute; they co-create. They ensure that every implementation serves a business objective, whether it is customer experience, operational agility, or new revenue generation.

How does Slalom address change management to ensure the successful adoption of new technologies in the companies it works with?

We embed change management throughout the entire lifecycle of a project. We stay embedded during the “enhance and operate” phase, working side by side with clients to ensure knowledge transfer and lasting capability development. This ongoing collaboration creates a natural, frictionless path to adoption. In some cases, our professionals are hired by clients, which we view as a success indicator.

Our philosophy is to be the most valuable chapter in someone’s career, not necessarily the last one.

When it comes to implementing complex systems, how does Slalom ensure that risks are minimized and the scalability of the implemented solutions is assured?

We mitigate risk by engaging early, well before a Request for Proposal (RFP) is issued. Once an RFP is published, key decisions have often already been made, limiting innovation. By engaging during budget planning, we help shape the strategic ‘why’ behind projects.

This allows us to invest ahead of time in accelerators tailored to client challenges, such as AI-powered tools that interpret legacy COBOL code. These tools reduce implementation time and risk and are delivered as part of the engagement. To support this model, we hire professionals with both deep technical skills and the business acumen to contribute at the strategic planning level.

How will the use of AI and data analytics influence strategic decision-making within Latin American companies by 2026?

AI will significantly augment, not replace, strategic decision making. In our own experiments, AI can simulate sophisticated outputs, but the effort required to validate its reasoning and assumptions is substantial. One is never fully certain of what variables it ignored. For this reason, we see the future as human-plus-machine. Those who can harness AI will gain exponential leverage; those who do not will struggle to stay relevant.

Professionals who embrace AI will move to higher-value work, much like skilled artisans did during the industrial revolution. It is not about displacement; it is about elevation. This shift requires continuous learning, and it is our responsibility to provide that upskilling. Our commitment is not just to deploy AI solutions, but to ensure the people who use them evolve with them.

What are Slalom’s main growth or expansion objectives for the Mexican market in the next 12 to 18 months?

Our growth strategy in Mexico is anchored in deepening our partnerships. We go to market as part of a triad: Slalom, a major technology platform like AWS or Salesforce, and a specialized niche player. Strengthening these alliances will be key throughout 2025 and into 2026. We will continue prioritizing financial services and retail and building advanced capabilities in cloud and data.

Our talent strategy is highly focused: attracting senior technical experts, exposing them to global delivery models, and then applying that expertise to solve Mexico’s most complex challenges.