The World Bank urged developing countries on Tuesday to adopt artificial intelligence technology tools to improve governance results, warning that if they do not, they risk falling behind.
“AI has thrown developing economies a lifeline, and they should seize it,” the Chief Economist of the World Bank Group, Indermit Gill, said as the organisation launched its annual World Development Report.
“They do not need large models or big data centres to reap their benefits,” he added, advocating for the adaptation of lower-cost AI tools to local conditions to deliver results in the health, education, justice and agricultural sectors.
Advanced AI models, mostly created in the United States and China, provide the ability to quickly analyse data and automate numerous jobs that would normally take trained humans longer to do.
These AI models, however, require big data centres and large quantities of complex processing power, utilising massive amounts of electricity and water, with implications for climate change.
“Developing economies today are in the midst of their weakest average growth performance in three decades. AI could significantly boost that performance before the end of the 2020s while delivering tangible benefits to people,” said a World Bank statement accompanying the report.
The report calls for countries to use AI to “help extend otherwise costly medical, legal, educational and agricultural services to underserved billions — doing in a decade what might otherwise take a century.”
Lower-income countries have suffered through the 2020s, plagued by a series of recurrent shocks that prompted the World Bank earlier this year to declare it a “lost decade” for their economic progress.
The bank has cut its global growth prediction for 2026 to its lowest level since the epidemic, citing the economic effect from the Iran war, which is hitting countries worldwide.
The shock has disproportionately impacted low-income and emerging countries, with Asia being the most severely affected region.
The bank’s latest research recommends that developing countries begin working with localised AI tools and solutions right away, as well as invest in electricity generation and distribution, expand access to computer capacity, and improve the availability of local data.
“The window to get this right is narrow. AI presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to solve problems that have resisted solutions for generations,” said the report’s director, Gaurav Nayyar.
AI technologies will need to be tailored to the needs of the 6.8 billion people who reside in low-income and developing countries, accounting for 83% of the global population.
The research provides instances of AI uses in governance, such as increasing diabetes screening volumes in Bangladesh or lowering costs for Indian farmers using enhanced weather forecasts.
The solutions and the report emphasis will need to meet people where they are.
“For example, AI solutions will need to be delivered through voice calls on basic mobile phones for those who cannot read or afford smartphones,” it says.
“Simply importing an AI model does not mean it will work well locally.”
The report encourages governments to increase public trust as they expand AI use.
“Improved public services and better learning outcomes in schools will reinforce trust — but if AI embeds bias in government decisions or erodes data privacy, that trust will be difficult to recover,” the statement stated.
The paper also warns: “AI could widen gaps between countries, increase inequality within them, concentrate market power, weaken trust in public institutions, and create new risks for safety, rights and social cohesion.”
While the risks to employment in poor nations are now minor, the report warns that in the long run, AI technologies could stifle economic mobility by eliminating many of the middle-class positions that enable it.
According to the disclosure, the paper was prepared using many of the world’s most advanced AI technologies, including those from OpenAI, DeepSeek, Google, and Anthropic.
