UN Trade and Development has warned that artificial intelligence could reshape as much as 40 per cent of jobs worldwide as the global AI market expands rapidly toward a projected value of $4.8 trillion by 2033.
The projection appears in a new UNCTAD report examining how developing countries can capture the benefits of AI without allowing the technology to widen existing economic and social inequalities.
The agency said the projected market size would represent roughly a 25 fold increase over a decade and would be comparable with the size of a major national economy.
UNCTAD warned that automation could weaken the low cost labour advantage on which many developing countries have historically relied for growth, industrialization and poverty reduction.
The organization said the risks were particularly serious because access to the technology remained deeply unequal.
About 65 per cent of people in least developed countries remain offline, limiting their ability to benefit from digital services and AI applications.
UNCTAD also said 118 countries, mostly in the Global South, were absent from major AI governance platforms.
That means rules on safety, transparency and accountability were being shaped without substantial representation from many developing economies.
At the same time, the agency acknowledged that AI was already delivering benefits in health, education, agriculture, climate resilience and public administration.
It cited examples including mobile tools assisting rural health workers, adaptive learning systems for under resourced schools and forecasting models that provide earlier warnings of floods, droughts and crop failures.
UNCTAD said those benefits would not arise automatically.
It identified electricity, broadband, computing infrastructure, locally relevant data and workforce skills as essential foundations.
For most developing countries, the agency said adapting existing or open source models to local conditions would be more realistic than trying to build proprietary systems from scratch.
It also recommended stronger global cooperation.
Proposals include a public disclosure framework for AI similar to environmental, social and governance reporting, as well as shared facilities that could give poorer countries access to computing infrastructure they could not afford alone.
UNCTAD also called for more open data, open source models and South South cooperation.
The report said the central policy challenge was to ensure that AI widened opportunity rather than deepening existing digital and development gaps.
