Cyntia Barrera DíazWizeline’s new CEO, Inés Casares, was never supposed to be a surprise. A 20-year professional ally of her predecessor, she was quietly placed on a succession plan shortly after joining the company, making her appointment less a leadership shake-up and more the second act of a deliberate two-year transformation strategy.
Now at the helm of a global technology services firm navigating the most disruptive moment in its industry’s history, the Argentina native shared with Nearshore Americas where Wizeline is placing its next growth bets: Colombia, outcome-based AI contracts, and a Vietnam research and development hub it expects to double by 2027.
The transition itself tells a story. Founder Bismarck Lepe stepped back from the CEO role in 2024, handing the reins to Andrés Angelani, an experienced operator brought in to execute a rapid and deep transformation of the company’s strategy and business model.
He delivered what he was hired to do, setting the platform, the structure, and the direction and then stepped aside on schedule. Casares, who had worked alongside Angelani at multiple companies over two decades, including Globant and Cognizant, was always part of that plan. “It wasn’t such a big gap or jump,” she said of the transition. “A lot of the strategy, the approach and the leadership style were very familiar to me.”
Over the past two years, Wizeline doubled down on its data science, machine learning, and AI services practice, a strategy that predates the current industry frenzy and that the company claims is paying off. Since hiring a chief AI officer and formalizing its services offering, that practice has grown exponentially by Casares’ own account. The foundation, she says, was already there: Wizeline has worked alongside product engineering in AI since its earliest days, giving it a head start that pure-play staff augmentation firms are now scrambling to replicate.
But perhaps the most significant strategic shift isn’t about what Wizeline builds. It’s about how it charges for it. “Let me tell you: for me, the most future proof, the most aligned way of offering value to our clients is by tying our services to the outcomes that we produce,” Casares said.
The logic is straightforward: if AI allows engineers to deliver more in less time, billing by the hour actively penalizes efficiency. Outcome-based models, by contrast, align the incentives of client and vendor around a shared result. “We will take on the risk of delivering,” she said, describing what this model demands of Wizeline internally.
The catch, which she stated plainly, is that the market isn’t there yet. Not every chief technology officer or chief product officer is ready to contract around outcomes rather than headcount. So Wizeline is pursuing a parallel strategy she calls “consultative doers”: embedding itself inside their clients’ organizations not just to build, but to help them understand their own AI readiness, connect initiatives to business outcomes, and manage the internal change that transformation requires. It is, in effect, selling the transition itself as a service.
International Growth
Geographically, the story of Wizeline’s next phase runs through Colombia, the first place Casares visited after her May CEO appointment. The company has operated there since 2021 and currently employs 290 people. “Colombia is a country where we think we can grow to be kind of equal in size with Mexico,” she said. “It is a very promising market.”
Mexico, where Wizeline was founded more than a decade ago, employs around 900 people and it remains the company core. Nearly 70% of Wizeline’s client base is in the United States, and its Guadalajara office, the one that shaped the Mexican tech talent market when it opened in 2014 by importing a Silicon Valley culture into a market previously dominated by hardware firms, continues to be the primary delivery engine for those clients.
Casares said Mexico’s talent pool is keeping pace with AI demands, describing the speed at which Mexican engineers are being trained and enabled for AI work as comparable to any of Wizeline’s other global locations. Headcount growth in Mexico is likely to ease as the company expects to grow its top line without a proportional increase in people, a direct consequence of AI-driven productivity gains.
Further afield, Wizeline is quietly building what it hopes will become a third pillar. Its Vietnam office, currently home to 25 people, functions primarily as a research and development center. This is the location where company builds the accelerators and proprietary technology it uses to deliver services faster for clients. Casares expects that team to double by 2027, driven partly by the logic that as work becomes increasingly outcome-based, physical location becomes less relevant. For now, Vietnam stays focused on internal technology development. No other Asian markets are under active consideration, she said.
Wizeline also has presence in the U.S., Canada, Argentina, United Kingdom, Spain and Romania.
Regarding its future financing needs, Casares said that an initial public offering is not on the horizon for now as private ownership suits the nature of the business. Wizeline raised a $20 million senior secured credit from MidCap Financial, managed by Apollo Capital Management, in 2024.
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