AI for Development: a roundtable to seed the 2026 World Development Report.

On November 21, 2024, the Growth Academy and the World Bank convened a brainstorming session at the University of Chicago to help set the agenda for the World Bank's 2026 World Development Report, which examines the promise and pitfalls of AI for economic development.

The session was organized around three questions: how AI is changing the global economy through productivity, innovation, and jobs; how to govern AI amid market concentration, privacy, and regulation; and how developing economies can turn AI into an opportunity, from concrete use cases to leapfrogging with AI-enabled technologies.

Participants spanned economics, computer science, law, and industry: Philippe Aghion (Collège de France and INSEAD), Indermit Gill and Gabriel Demombynes (World Bank), Joel Mokyr and Ben Jones (Northwestern), James Evans, Nick Feamster, Aziz Huq, and Robert Grossman (University of Chicago), Rembrand Koning (Harvard Business School), Niel Thomson (MIT), Altan Cakir (Istanbul Technical University), Jason Hickey (Google Research, Ghana), Katie Watson Jordan (Meta), and Elías Zamora Sillero (Sevilla FC). The session was organized by Ufuk Akcigit, Somik Lall, and Gaurav Nayyar.