DOHA, 13th September, 2026 (WAM) -- Artificial intelligence (AI) offers emerging markets significant opportunities, but also poses serious risks, Qatar National Bank (QNB) said, highlighting the need to seize these opportunities to avoid relegation to the margins of the future global AI-enabled economy.
In its weekly commentary, carried by Qatar News Agency (QNA), the QNB said this will depend on decisive action across three fronts: building digital infrastructure, developing data ecosystems, and investing in skills.
The report noted that economies that move early to strengthen these foundations will be well positioned to convert AI into a powerful engine of catch-up growth, while those that do not may find the gap with the technological frontier widening further, making AI one of the central determinants of economic divergence in the years ahead.
AI is rapidly emerging as one of the most transformative economic forces of the era, with its global market projected by UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to expand roughly twenty-five-fold to around USD 4.8 trillion by 2033. For advanced economies, the technology promises substantial productivity gains, while for emerging markets, its implications are more complex and double-edged.
QNB said AI offers a powerful means to accelerate development, improve public services, increase industrial know-how and leapfrog outdated infrastructure. Yet it also threatens to erode long-standing sources of competitive advantage and widen the gap between richer and poorer nations, particularly in countries with large services sectors that depend on low-cost manual and repetitive tasks. The stakes are therefore especially high for the developing world.
The report discussed the impact of AI on emerging markets, namely the opportunity to raise productivity and growth contrasted by the potential disruption to the value propositions of entire industries built over decades, noting that AI represents a significant opportunity to lift productivity and accelerate development.
It added that in economies long constrained by shortages of skilled labour and uneven institutional capacity, AI-enabled tools can extend the reach of scarce expertise.
On the other hand, QNB said that AI will cause significant disruption to labor markets and to the development model that has long served emerging economies, noting that it is shifting the economic advantage of repetitive remote tasks away from labor arbitrage, which relies on low-cost human workers, towards algorithm arbitrage, which relies on lower-cost AI agents.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that around 40% of jobs in emerging markets are exposed to AI, particularly in industries and services with high levels of manual and routine work. Generative AI and AI agents, the report noted, can now handle simple cognitive tasks, data processing and basic billing at a lower cost than employing overseas staff. This impact is already being felt across India’s USD 300 billion IT outsourcing industry.