The epistemic readiness gap: rethinking AI readiness indices through ILIA 2025

Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) readiness indices have become central instruments in global AI governance, ranking states according to their apparent capacity to develop, regulate and benefit from AI. These instruments typically privilege digital infrastructure, research output, innovation and the existence of formal strategies, while giving less systematic attention to whose knowledge is encoded in AI systems, who participates in governing them, and how AI-mediated decisions can be understood and contested. This article examines these tensions through the Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index (ILIA 2025), a significant regional effort that both departs from some global benchmarks and makes Latin American AI capacity legible to policymakers and international organizations. Using ILIA as a strategically revealing case, the study reconstructs its indicator architecture and qualitatively recodes its sub-indicators along five axes of epistemic inclusion: linguistic and epistemic diversity; participatory and relational governance; epistemic accessibility and contestability; community data governance and epistemic sovereignty; and the foundations and quality of trust. The analysis shows that ILIA incorporates important regional and endogenous concerns, but that these concerns remain unevenly represented and only partially operationalized within the comparative architecture of the index. Building on this diagnosis, the article conceptualizes an epistemic readiness gap and proposes five families of complementary sub-indicators and a cross-cutting Epistemic Inclusion Score that would strengthen ILIA’s sensitivity to epistemic justice without abandoning its three-pillar structure. The argument has broader implications for the design of AI readiness benchmarks, suggesting that measuring readiness without sufficiently operationalizing epistemic inclusion remains conceptually incomplete and politically consequential, particularly in post-colonial contexts such as Latin America.