team size Legal Department of approximately 70 lawyers

Career Biography

José Antonio Bueno Díaz is Manager of IT and AI Contracts in the Legal Department of Grupo Gentera and Banco Compartamos, where he leads the legal function’s adoption of generative AI. A lawyer trained at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), he works at the intersection of contract law, technology and operational risk.

One thread runs through his career: putting the law to work for people. He began in public service at Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, moved through the corporate world at Grupo Lala and the social sector at Oxfam México, and has been part of the legal function of Gentera, a group built around financial inclusion, since 2020. His contract portfolio centres on technology and AI vendor agreements, outsourcing and specialised services, including REPSE compliance, as well as leasing and sub-leasing, licensing, intercompany agreements and related-party arrangements.

In 2025, he helped assess and evaluate a legal AI platform against competing solutions. Since its formal launch in March 2026, he has led day-to-day implementation as coordinator of the department’s AI champions, overseeing six legal sub-directions and approximately 70 lawyers under a lawyer-in-the-loop model.

He treats adoption as something to measure, not assume. In the first month of use, 61 of 69 licensed lawyers were active (88 per cent), and by May 2026 the department had reached a record 3,888 actions in a single month. He built the department’s weekly reporting system, with differentiated KPIs for each sub-direction. The results are tangible: weekly active users exceeded 90 per cent by mid-2026; contract review time for new business fell from 48 to approximately 10 minutes; labour relations reporting hours were reduced by 85.9 per cent; responses to requests from authorities averaged fewer than eight business days, against a 20-day baseline; and a 600-question regulatory questionnaire for authorities was prepared using AI-assisted document analysis and human review.

He distinguishes structural limitations of the tools from gaps in adoption, reports figures transparently and documents value wherever it emerges. He has also developed the people-focused side of implementation: creating the 3P framework (Purpose, Parameters, Depth) for working with AI and adapting an AI literacy programme to the realities of legal practice. The programme was delivered to the entire team over four weeks. He remains its designer and hands-on lead, while champions keep each sub-direction up to date. The judgement he expects from 70 lawyers rests on knowing that they have been trained to exercise it.

Beyond Gentera, he writes publicly about AI governance in legal practice, covering everything from inventories of AI tools and use-case selection to security, monitoring, human oversight and auditability. His position is that AI proposes and lawyers decide: knowing what to concede, what to stand firm on and when not to delegate to a model remains a matter of professional judgement. He applies the same principle to contract design. Through Legal Design and Visual Contracting, he argues that a contract should be usable by the people who must perform it, not only by the lawyers who draft it.

He holds certifications from Harvard Business School Online (AI for Business), IE Business School (Tech4Law) and the Academy of Mexican Banks (AML), and is fluent in Spanish and English.