International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said Monday in Bangkok that artificial intelligence investment is keeping global growth near 3% a year even as an energy shock weighs on most countries—but she cautioned that the technology amounts to a "slow-moving tsunami" that will eventually touch about 40% of jobs worldwide, downgrading or eliminating many of them.

Georgieva spoke on the opening day of the IMF and World Bank annual meetings, which run through October 18 in the Thai capital. The Fund will publish its full World Economic Outlook at 9 a.m. Bangkok time on October 13—10 p.m. Monday in New York—its first revision to the 3% global growth forecast since July. The update will put fresh numbers behind Monday's remarks, showing where the Fund now sees global growth heading as the AI build-out and the energy shock pull in opposite directions.

The biggest winners of the boom, she said, are the Asian economies that build the hardware behind AI. Adoption could add 0.5 to 1 percentage point a year to growth in advanced economies and 0.2 to 0.8 points in emerging ones. A percentage point is the raw gap between two growth rates, so an economy growing 2% that gains a full point grows 3%. Georgieva said the high end of that range would more than offset the drag from aging populations across the region.

The IMF's July outlook update offered early evidence of that lift: the top four net exporters of AI hardware—Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia—beat first-quarter growth forecasts by an average of 4.4% on an annualized basis, with South Korea expanding at a 7.5% pace against the 1.8% the Fund had projected in April.

In a speech in Singapore last week, Georgieva said AI hardware and related tech products now make up more than a tenth of world goods trade, and added that AI investment as a share of global GDP will likely surpass what went into building the railroads or the electricity grid—a comparison that places the current wave among the largest infrastructure build-outs in modern history.

She also warned that the boom is bypassing most countries outside that supply chain. The July update projected 2026 global growth at 3%, down from 3.5% in 2025, as the Middle East war drove energy prices up.

On jobs, Georgieva said the IMF expects AI to eventually touch about 40% of positions worldwide. Exposure runs around 60% in advanced economies and roughly 23% in low-income countries, though she noted that poorer nations score lower mainly because AI has not reached them yet. The headline counts jobs the technology touches—through downgraded or eliminated tasks—rather than positions it removes outright, and it will rise only as fast as AI reaches countries that have not yet felt it.

Young people entering the workforce are first in line, she said, because AI is absorbing the routine tasks on which entry-level jobs are built. Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam, speaking on the same panel, said demand for graduates' first jobs is already falling and warned that AI could widen the gap between rich and developing economies if governments do not act.

AI could also squeeze public finances, Georgieva said, because if it shifts income from workers to the owners of capital, governments lose part of the tax base they lean on most. World Bank President Ajay Banga said the bank is backing "small AI" tools that do not depend on large language models, aimed at farmers, clinics and classrooms in emerging markets.

The IMF chief also flagged risks beyond the labor market. In Singapore, she said the AI build-out itself is adding to inflation, and warned that disappointing earnings could spread through markets because major AI companies have borrowed heavily to fund it. Both sides of the AI—its lift to growth and its pressure on jobs and public finances—are set to run through the discussions in Bangkok, which continue through October 18.

Source: Decrypt