AI: Deployment and Disruption

In 2025, technology investments related to AI added an estimated 0.5 percentage point to US GDP growth. In addition, productivity growth in the US has accelerated over the past several years, which may in part reflect early impacts from the adoption of AI. Private-sector-driven investment in AI could top $2 trillion globally in 2026, according to some external estimates, making it among the fastest-growing drivers of growth in recent years. The IMF Executive Board is actively engaged on AI-related developments and their macroeconomic implications.

As global spending shifts to deploying this technology across sectors, AI-driven productivity gains could accelerate across a broad range of industries and occupations. Asia is actively pursuing AI opportunities. With strong digital infrastructure, education, and forward-looking regulation, Singapore is at the top of the IMF’s AI Preparedness Index. East Asia is a hub for chip manufacturing and design, while Southeast Asia is building on its strength in manufacturing to move up the value chain as well.

But risks remain. Policymakers, households, and businesses are increasingly concerned about how AI will transform labor markets—it could increasingly displace jobs and depress wages for certain segments of the workforce. IMF research shows that people with jobs requiring AI-related skills earn more, but cities and regions with more of these jobs are not experiencing overall job growth. Workers with AI skills are benefiting. So are people in low-skill roles—such as restaurant staff—who provide services to higher earners. Left out are middle-skilled workers whose jobs are highly exposed to automation.

From a business perspective, there’s a risk that the payoff from expensive investments in AI, increasingly debt financed, could prove illusory. This could lead to a sharp reversal in equity valuations, wealth destruction, and layoffs. Within the AI stack, including the hyperscalers building data centers and the chipmakers, circular financing arrangements—in which a small group of firms simultaneously act as each other’s customers, investors, and financiers—increase the risks of problems in one firm cascading to others. The IMF Board is regularly monitoring these risks through multilateral surveillance.

The IMF is helping its members navigate this rapidly evolving landscape. Its suite of AI indexes (on national preparedness, skill readiness, and skill imbalance) helps each member understand their strengths and weaknesses in key areas of the AI economy, from workforce training and digital infrastructure to venture capital and regulation.

The indexes are part of the IMF’s analysis of a broad range of macro-critical issues relating to AI, such as its impact on productivity and growth, labor markets and skills, cross-country and within-country inequality, financial markets, and energy and climate, as well as their policy implications.

The IMF acts as a transmission line for beneficial policies, providing lessons learned from leaders in these areas to countries that are working to improve. A nuanced understanding of each country’s conditions enables the IMF to provide the tailored advice on structural policies that members are seeking—how to help workers navigate AI-driven transitions across industries and how to understand the potential implications of this technology for growth and inflation, and thus for monetary and fiscal policymaking.

The IMF is also helping members guard against the economic, financial stability, and fiscal risks that could emanate from an AI bust—especially where debt is already high—while still robustly pursuing its benefits.