Released August 4, 2026, the World Bank's World Development Report 2026 is the first comprehensive assessment of what AI means for people in low- and middle-income countries. It finds jobs in high-income countries are more than three times as likely to be at risk from generative AI automation, 14.2%, compared with 4.5% in low- and middle-income countries, while productivity gains could reach 16.2% of jobs in developing economies versus 18.7% in high-income ones.
The report argues AI could let developing countries compress a century of progress into a decade, but only if governments move quickly to close gaps in power, connectivity, skills, and institutional quality, proposing an adopt, adapt, and advance framework to help countries capture AI's benefits without deepening dependence on any single supplier.