Qatar National Bank (QNB) has confirmed that artificial intelligence provides emerging markets with pivotal and promising opportunities, but at the same time imposes serious risks, indicating that this requires seizing opportunities to avoid remaining on the margins of the future global economy supported by artificial intelligence.
Qatar National Bank said, in its weekly report, that the aforementioned trend will depend on taking decisive measures across three axes, including establishing digital infrastructure, developing data systems, and investing in skills.
The report stated that the economies that take the initiative to strengthen these pillars will be in a position to transform artificial intelligence into a powerful tool for reducing the growth gap, while economies that do not do so will find that the gap between them and the technologically leading economies is widening, with artificial intelligence becoming one of the main determinants of economic disparity in the coming years.
The report indicated that artificial intelligence is rapidly emerging as one of the most transformative economic forces in the current era, as the United Nations Trade and Development Organization (UNCTAD) expects its size in the global market to expand approximately twenty-five-fold, to reach about 4.8 trillion US dollars by 2033. For advanced economies, this technology promises significant gains in productivity, while its repercussions are more complex and double-edged for emerging markets.
Qatar National Bank continued: “Artificial intelligence provides a powerful means to accelerate the pace of development, improve public services, increase industrial knowledge, and overcome challenges associated with obsolete infrastructure. However, it also threatens to undermine the long-established competitive advantage and widen the gap between rich and poor countries, especially in countries with large service sectors that rely on manual, repetitive, low-cost tasks. Therefore, the potential repercussions on developing countries are very large.”
The report discussed the impact of artificial intelligence on emerging markets, that is, opportunities to increase productivity and growth in exchange for potential disruptions in the value propositions of entire sectors that have been formed over decades, indicating that artificial intelligence represents a great opportunity to increase productivity and accelerate the pace of development.
He added that in economies that have long been constrained by a shortage of skilled workers and varying institutional capabilities, tools supported by artificial intelligence can expand the scope of benefiting from rare expertise, explaining that for education, for example, translation models based on artificial intelligence can support regional dialects and languages with limited resources, reducing structural barriers to communication, and virtual teachers can improve access to quality education, with lessons adapted to the skill levels of each individual student.
In the health care sector, Qatar National Bank confirmed, in its weekly report, that diagnostics supported by artificial intelligence in health care can expand the scope of services to include rural areas, while improving the quality of initial diagnosis, which may have tangible effects on infant mortality and life expectancy.
For the financial sector, the report explained that credit scoring supported by artificial intelligence, using unstructured and behavioral data, can help increase the availability of credit in microfinance for small producers and entrepreneurs, while reducing the associated credit risks.
Regarding mobile phone technology, which has allowed many developing countries to bypass fixed-line networks and broadband Internet, the report stressed that artificial intelligence provides the possibility of overcoming historical restrictions that hinder growth, indicating that emerging markets have already become an important participant in the digital economy, with digitally deliverable services worth more than $1 trillion exported in 2024, and that if artificial intelligence is harnessed effectively, this momentum may increase and help create entirely new sectors.
On the other hand, Qatar National Bank, in its weekly report, saw that artificial intelligence will lead to major disruptions in labor markets and in the development model that has served emerging economies for a long time, indicating that it transfers the economic advantage of repetitive tasks performed remotely from labor cost-based arbitrage, which relies on low-cost human labor, to algorithm-based arbitrage, which relies on less expensive artificial intelligence agents.
The International Monetary Fund estimates that about 40 percent of jobs in emerging markets are vulnerable to the effects of artificial intelligence, especially in industries and services characterized by high levels of manual and routine work.
According to the report, generative artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence agents are now able to perform simple cognitive tasks, data processing, and basic billing work at a lower cost than hiring employees abroad, and the impact of this is already beginning to be felt in India’s IT outsourcing sector, which is worth $300 billion.
Junior developer roles and routine business process outsourcing are among the jobs most vulnerable to this effect, which has led to sharp declines in university employment within Indian technology hubs. The Nifty Information Technology Index, which tracks the performance of India’s largest software companies, has declined by about 15 percent this year, compared to a 20 percent rise in the broader MSCI Emerging Markets Index.