Doha: 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. According to Qatar News Agency, QNB emphasized that decisive action is required across three fronts: building digital infrastructure, developing data ecosystems, and investing in skills. Economies that strengthen these foundations early will be well-positioned to leverage AI for growth, while those that do not may see a widening gap with the technological frontier, making AI a key determinant of economic divergence in the future. 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, AI promises substantial productivity gains, while for emerging markets, its implications are more complex and double-edged. QNB noted that AI can accelerate development, improve public services, and increase industrial know-how, while also threatening to erode competitive advantages and widen the gap between nations. This is particularly true in countries with large services sectors that rely on low-cost manual tasks, making the stakes especially high for the developing world. The report highlighted AI's potential to raise productivity and growth, contrasting with the disruption it may cause to industries built over decades. AI could lift productivity and accelerate development in economies constrained by skilled labor shortages and uneven institutional capacity. In education, AI translation models can support regional dialects and low-resource languages, reducing communication barriers. Personalized tutors can improve education access and tailor lessons to individual skill levels. In healthcare, AI-assisted diagnostics can extend services to rural areas, improving di agnosis quality and impacting infant mortality and life expectancy. In finance, AI-assisted credit scoring using unstructured and behavioral data can increase credit availability in micro-finance, reducing related risks. Mobile technology, which helped many developing countries bypass traditional networks, could also benefit from AI, offering potential growth beyond historical constraints. Emerging markets have already become significant participants in the digital economy, exporting over USD 1 trillion in digitally deliverable services in 2024. If harnessed effectively, AI could reinforce this momentum and foster new industries. However, QNB cautioned that AI will significantly disrupt labor markets and development models in emerging economies. It is shifting economic advantages from labor arbitrage, which relies on low-cost human workers, to algorithm arbitrage, which relies on AI agents. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that around 40% of jobs in emerging markets are exposed to AI, parti cularly in industries with high levels of manual work. Generative AI and AI agents can now handle tasks such as data processing and billing at a lower cost than overseas staff, impacting India's USD 300 billion IT outsourcing industry. Routine developer and business process outsourcing roles are heavily exposed, leading to recruitment drops in Indian tech hubs. The Nifty IT index, tracking India's top software companies, is down by around 15% this year, compared with a 20% gain in the broader MSCI Emerging Markets Index.