World Bank urges developing nations to harness AI for faster growth

The World Bank is now framing AI as a once‑in‑a‑century development opportunity for the global South. Its new report argues that, if adopted quickly and tailored to local realities, existing AI systems could dramatically expand access to health diagnostics, personalized education and agricultural forecasting in places that still struggle with basic infrastructure. Examples like SMS‑based AI tutors in Ghana or diagnostic tools in Bangladesh show that “small AI” deployed on modest hardware can deliver real gains without frontier‑class compute.

This is important for the AGI conversation because it counters a narrative that only rich countries will benefit in the near term. If emerging economies can leapfrog some capacity constraints by building around open and lower‑resource models, they may harvest productivity gains even before they host large data centers. At the same time, the Bank warns that the window is narrow. AI diffuses much faster than past general purpose technologies, so late adopters risk locking in a new kind of digital dependency on a few foreign providers.

For the race to AGI, increased adoption in low and middle income countries will expand the user base, feedback data and political constituency for faster progress. But if these deployments rely heavily on tools built and governed in the US, China or Europe, they could also entrench geopolitical asymmetries. The real question is whether the global South can move from being a customer of AGI to a co‑shaper of how it is built and governed.