The artificial-intelligence boom is doing something unusual: it is helping keep the world economy moving even as it threatens to reorder the jobs, schools and tax systems that economy depends on.
At the opening of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok on Monday, October 12, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said heavy spending on data centers, chips and other AI infrastructure is helping hold global growth near 3%. At the same time, she warned that AI is a “slow-moving tsunami” for labor markets and public policy, Reuters reported.
The boom is cushioning an energy shock
Georgieva described AI as both a demand shock and an investment shock. The buildout is feeding orders for semiconductors, servers, construction, power equipment and digital infrastructure—activity that is offsetting some of the drag from a global energy-price surge.
The IMF’s July forecast put 2026 world growth at 3%, down from 3.5% in 2025. An Associated Press report on that forecast said the Iran war’s energy shock weighed on the outlook, while economies tied to AI investment were better insulated.
Asia is positioned to capture an especially large share of the upside because seven of the world’s 10 leading countries for AI-related trade are in the Asia-Pacific region. Georgieva said the technology could add roughly half a percentage point to one percentage point to growth in advanced Asian economies, and 0.2 to 0.8 percentage point in emerging Asian economies.
The same investment wave could remake work
The growth numbers do not erase the disruption. IMF research estimates that AI may affect about 40% of jobs worldwide and as many as 60% in advanced economies. “Affected” does not mean every position disappears: some workers will become more productive, while other roles may be downgraded, automated or eliminated.
The IMF’s 2026 annual report says AI-related technology investment added an estimated 0.5 percentage point to U.S. economic growth in 2025. But it also stresses that the gains and the risks are distributed unevenly across workers, industries and countries.
Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam focused on the first rung of the career ladder. Entry-level demand for recent graduates is already weakening in some fields, he said at the meetings, raising the possibility that young workers could lose the experiences that traditionally lead to more skilled and better-paid work.
Taxes and education are part of the warning
If income shifts from labor toward capital, governments may collect less revenue through payroll and wage taxes. That makes the AI transition a fiscal problem as well as a workplace problem. Georgieva urged policymakers to rethink taxation and education before the disruption accelerates.
The World Bank is emphasizing a different path for lower-income countries: smaller, less computing-intensive AI systems that can improve farm productivity, health clinics and classrooms without requiring enormous data centers. Its “Small AI, Big Jobs” annual-meetings program is built around using practical tools to create work rather than simply automate it.
What happens next
The IMF is scheduled to release an updated World Economic Outlook on Tuesday. That report should show how much of the current resilience comes from AI spending—and how much is vulnerable to high energy costs, debt-market stress and uneven access to the technology.
The larger message is already clear. AI is no longer only a technology story. It has become a growth strategy, an employment shock and a test of whether governments can adapt quickly enough to keep the benefits from concentrating in a small number of companies, workers and countries.
