Most C-suite playbooks still treat distance as a virtue. The thinking goes something like this: leaders set strategy, deputies handle execution, and the gap between them is where good management lives. Enzo Carpanetti has spent the last two decades building a career around the opposite premise, and from his Panama office, that argument is starting to look prescient.
Carpanetti is a global infrastructure development executive who came up through electromechanical engineering before adding AI, finance, and strategic management to his toolkit. That combination matters, because in 2026 it’s not common. Most executives operating at his level know how to read a balance sheet and pitch a board. Far fewer can also walk a substation, debug an automated transit system, or explain what a model is actually doing under the hood. Enzo Carpanetti can do both, and Panama has become the proving ground.
His connection to the country runs deep. Carpanetti’s first job was in Panama, he lived in Panama for several years, and one of his offices is still based there. That’s not coincidental. Panama sits at one of the most consequential infrastructure crossroads on the planet, where shipping, energy, digital connectivity, and cross-border capital all converge. For an executive working on what he calls the “Mega Forces” of 2026, namely AI, the low-carbon transition, and private infrastructure in emerging markets, there are few better vantage points.
What makes the Enzo Carpanetti approach different is the refusal to treat technical fluency as something delegated downward. He’s described it as “ground truth,” the idea that leaders making major calls on AI deployment or digital infrastructure need to actually understand the systems they’re approving. It’s not micromanagement. It’s the recognition that strategy without execution is theater, and that the executives moving fastest in emerging markets are the ones who can hold both at once.
This is where Panama plays a specific role. Emerging markets reward agility. They punish leaders who need three layers of analysis before making a call. Carpanetti’s hands-on style, shaped across his work in Panama and other emerging markets, has given him something the conventional executive class often lacks: the ability to act on real information instead of filtered reports.
His view on AI fits the same pattern. Enzo Carpanetti talks about artificial intelligence as a catalyst for human potential rather than a replacement for it. Coming from someone who has built actual infrastructure, that reads less like a talking point and more like a working hypothesis. He’s spent years watching automation reshape transit, energy, and operational systems, and his consistent argument is that progress is strongest when technology, strategy, and human understanding move together.
Carpanetti speaks more than five languages, travels constantly, and has built a career where cross-cultural fluency is treated as core infrastructure in itself. The leadership style that emerges from all of this, operating from Panama and across continents, looks like a preview of where executive work is heading. Less distance. More technical literacy. Faster decisions made on better information.
For shareholders investing in major infrastructure assets across OECD countries and emerging markets, that combination is increasingly the difference between a strategy that lands and one that stalls. Enzo Carpanetti has built his career around it, and Panama remains a central part of where that work happens.
More on his work is available at enzocarpanetti.com, on LinkedIn, and on X.
