We must act urgently to bridge the growing AI divide

Microsoft announces at the India AI Impact Summit IS on pace to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to help spread AI to countries in the Global South

Artificial intelligence is spreading at an impressive rate, but its global distribution remains extremely uneven. As Microsoft’s latest AI Diffusion Report shows, AI usage in the Global North is about twice as high as in the Global South. And this gap is getting bigger and bigger. This inequality impacts not only national and regional economic growth, but also whether AI can deliver on its broader promise of expanding opportunity and prosperity around the world.

The India AI Impact Summit has rightly placed this challenge at the center of its agenda. For more than a century, unequal access to electricity exacerbated the growing economic divide between the global North and South. Unless we act quickly, a growing AI gap will perpetuate this inequality in the coming century.

Solutions will not be easy to find. The…