The World Bank Group's latest report highlighted that artificial intelligence (AI) offers a historic opportunity for developing countries to accelerate their economic development.
Gaurav Nayyar, director of the World Bank Group's 2026 World Development Report, said AI could play a complementary role in addressing capacity shortages in developing countries.
Developing countries needed to be optimistic about what the technology could bring, he told Anadolu.
The World Bank Group's study, titled World Development Report 2026: Decoding AI for Development, drew attention to a historic opportunity for developing countries.
The report provided the first comprehensive assessment of the technology's impacts on developing countries.
It revealed that developing countries could condense 100 years of development into 10 years by rapidly addressing gaps in energy, internet connectivity, skills, and institutional infrastructure.
The study emphasized that jobs in high-income countries faced more than three times the automation risk from generative AI compared to those in low- and middle-income countries.
It underlined that the potential of the technology to meaningfully increase labor productivity remained quite similar in developed and developing countries.
The report included significant warnings for developing countries alongside the opportunities the technology presents. It noted that developing economies had exhibited their weakest average growth performance over the past three decades.
The study showed that many developing countries still experienced significant shortcomings in energy, internet access, data, skills, and institutional infrastructure.
It warned that AI could widen the development gap between countries and increase domestic inequalities if authorities failed to take the necessary steps.
The technology could also concentrate market power among specific actors, weaken trust in public institutions, and create new risks related to security, rights, and social cohesion.
Nayyar said discussions typically focused on potential job losses, but the reality in developing economies pointed to a very different picture.
He noted that employment in developing countries relied more on manual labor than on cognitive work.
He emphasized that the technology could play a complementary role in closing existing gaps.
"AI really can complement the capabilities of people and provide them with expertise that they may not have ready access to," he said, adding: "So, really, the central message of this report is that developing countries should be optimistic about what AI can bring."
He noted: "But obviously, that needs preparation. That needs investing in the right kinds of foundations and complementary factors.
"And if those are in place relatively quickly, then AI's benefits will start to take off faster in developing countries."
Nayyar said the technology could help developing countries catch up by complementing the capabilities of people and countries to solve complex problems.
He noted that this could ensure the rapid acquisition of expertise that might normally take generations through conventional education and training programs.
Nayyar drew attention to the lack of qualified human resources in developing countries.
"So if we think about developing countries today, there are too few doctors to diagnose disease, there are too few experts to support farmers, and there are too few skilled public sector officials to better deliver services," he explained.
"And building this kind of expertise through conventional education programs, training programs, can take generations," Nayyar added.
He said: "So, what AI can do is to bring these capabilities at a much faster pace and really speed up the pace of transformation that developing countries can see.
"So in principle, AI as a technology can narrow gaps between developing economies and advanced economies by raising these capabilities."
Nayyar underlined that the gains provided by the technology would not emerge automatically.
He noted that developing countries needed to invest in infrastructure, basic skills, institutions, and data systems.
Otherwise, the benefits of the technology could be delayed, and inequalities could increase as the technology gap widened.
Nayyar emphasized that a suitable business environment and digital infrastructure remained critical to realizing the benefits of the technology.
He stated that regulations needed to support the use of technology to make companies more productive, and he identified skills as the most important policy area.
He said: "So, (the aim is) to be able to impart skills in the population, which makes people adaptable to the new opportunities and challenges that AI will bring.
"And therefore, if you think about the space of higher education, it would be to develop a broader skill base around STEM and other skills, but not go towards hyper-specialization."
He added: "Because this technology is changing so quickly and it's reducing the demand for certain kinds of roles, increasing the demand for other kinds of roles. But really having a workforce that is adaptable to the changing demands that the technology brings will be critical."
He said this should be limited not only to higher education systems, but should also include vocational training and learning on the job.
Nayyar said concerns existed about the disappearance of certain jobs due to the automation of some tasks by technology, but this situation did not apply exclusively to AI.
He said past technological transformations also led to the loss of some tasks and occupations while simultaneously creating new employment areas and professions.
"So, ultimately, this question on how many jobs AI will displace is a question for which it's too early to have an answer," Nayyar said.
"The best lens to look at this would be to look at technologies that have come before AI," he noted.
"With AI, just the same as with previous technologies, there will be certain kinds of roles and occupations and jobs that will get automated," he said.
He noted that there would be others where AI would complement the capabilities of people and actually make them more productive.
"And then, most importantly, as we've seen with all technologies that have come before AI, there will be new types of roles, jobs, and occupations that will be created," he emphasized.
"And more often than not, we have always seen with previous technologies that the net impact of jobs has always been a positive one," he highlighted.
Nayyar stressed that technologies pushing the boundaries of AI remained concentrated in a few countries and companies.
He noted that developing countries needed to focus on adopting existing solutions and adapting them to their own needs instead of competing from scratch.
Nayyar said the report presented a three-stage approach to help developing countries use the technology as a development tool.
He defined this framework as "adopt, adapt, and advance."
"For most developing countries, adopting AI is going to be the right starting point," Nayyar said, adding: "But along with adopting AI, countries will also need to adapt AI to their own local context."
"And this would not be different for developing countries because all developing countries will have their own local context, their own local languages, their own local norms and cultures," he explained.
"And therefore, the way countries will be able to benefit from AI as a technology will be to adopt and adapt AI to their local context and leverage it as a tool that can enhance the capabilities of its people to solve complex problems that their countries are facing," Nayyar added.
Nayyar said the technology could increase risks such as disinformation and propaganda in countries lacking strong institutional structures.
He said governments primarily needed to build the institutional capacity to manage these risks.
Nayyar noted that authorities had to implement mechanisms to strengthen public trust in the technology, suggesting governments use voluntary standards in the first stage to create a trustworthy ecosystem.
"And these voluntary standards can help people, governments, countries, the private sector to come to an agreement around what are the main metrics and parameters that need to be used to ensure that AI is used safely and responsibly," Nayyar explained.
He said: "So, this would be the right starting point. But where standards fall short, where these voluntary standards fall short, the report argues that governments should not be in a hurry to create horizontal AI laws because regulatory capacities are limited and the technology is moving quickly," he warned.
"But instead to rely on existing laws, existing regulations that they have," Nayyar suggested.
Nayyar said upper-middle-income countries with a young population, such as Türkiye, held a significant advantage in adopting and locally adapting the technology.
He noted that authorities needed to expand knowledge and strengthen startups' access to finance to realize this potential.
Nayyar emphasized that young startups would play a critical role in developing local solutions because younger populations were more inclined to adopt new technologies.
He noted that supporting startups with financing, equity, and venture capital was of great importance in strengthening the ecosystem.
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