Fireside chats at technology summits usually tend toward optimism. Ajay Banga’s did not – not at the start, at least.
While the rest of the ATX Summit 2026 fawned over agentic AI and humanoid robots, the chat with Mr Ajay commenced with a deeper look at some numbers Mr Ajay had earlier hypothesised.
The president of the World Bank Group had said that over the next fifteen years, 1.2 billion young people in the developing world will come of age and look for work. Economists project that roughly 400 million jobs will be created to meet them, which leaves 800 million unemployed.
Even if those projections are wrong by half, Mr Ajay noted, “it’s still a very large number of people who don’t have access to what I think constitutes basic humanity – the opportunity to be a productive part of society, have a job, have a way of earning, have a way of looking after your family.”
He called it a potential ticking time bomb.
Young people without economic dignity do not simply stay home when unemployed. Steep unemployment rates translate to greater social unrest, mass migration, and political instability that no number of managed borders can fully absorb, he noted.
But Mr Ajay was equally insistent on the upside. Get this generation into productive work, he argued, and you unlock the next great engine of global growth. With AI, “I believe that Africa would be, for the world of growth, what Asia was for the last thirty or forty years, if this is harnessed and used the right way,” he said.
The challenge here is that the development community has spent decades fragmenting its attention. Climate, gender, vaccines, schooling – all of which are important but none sufficient on their own, ultimately distracting from the one organising principle that ties them together – jobs.
“This fragmentation of development is taking away from worrying about giving people dignity and hope and optimism,” he said. His pitch to policymakers and philanthropists alike is to reorient around employment as the master metric and treat everything else to be in service of it.
That infrastructure comes in three layers. First – roads, power, water, healthcare, education. Instead of universities, which attract political prestige, invest in primary and secondary schooling of genuine quality, combined with skills training calibrated to actual labour markets.
Second – governance, which comprises the unglamourous architecture that private capital requires before it will move. “There is no private capital investor who will keep putting money into a country where you have high levels of corruption, high levels of unpredictability, no basic infrastructure,” he said.
Only once those two foundations are in place, he argued, does the third layer, private capital, become meaningful.
The World Bank, under Ajay, has repositioned itself as a “de-risker”, offering political risk insurance, providing local-currency financing, and structuring bundles of emerging-market projects into securities that institutional investors can actually buy.
The numbers mirror just that. When he joined three years ago, the World Bank was mobilising US$32 billion in private capital annually. In the first nine months of this fiscal year alone, it mobilised US$72 billion – a 53 per cent increase on the prior year. The target he aims to hit by the end of the year is US$500 billion.
On AI specifically, Mr Ajay’s take cut against the grain of most conversations at the summit. Large language models, he argued, are effectively inaccessible to most of the developing world – they require computing power, reliable electricity, vast data and skilled users that simply do not exist at scale in emerging markets.
What he called “small AI” is locally deployed applications that run on cheap hardware, speak local languages, and solve daily problems.
He cited examples such as a farmer in Uttar Pradesh photographing a diseased leaf on an old phone and receiving a diagnosis and a recommended treatment, and a nurse in Indonesia sharing a photograph of a rash with a network of clinics running a locally hosted diagnostic model.
“These are daily use cases of AI that don’t get enough attention.” Mr Ajay said. “It can be a force for good, a huge opportunity for emerging markets if used that way.”
In his parting message to the private sector on job creation, he said that one cannot convince investors to act against the interests of their capital. The only viable frame is to show them that AI-enabled productivity in emerging markets produces returns.
“You’ve got to find a way to give them the reason to believe that return comes in the right way by doing the right things.” Mr Ajay had come to the ATX Summit from a G7 meeting, and he was candid about what it was like to face 189 countries, each with competing priorities and grievances. “Welcome to my life – they are all in my office,” he said. However, he aims to deal with it by tapping on a narrow seam of commonality that runs through everyone.
“I’m an eternal optimist. Utopia is a bad idea, but common thinking is evidently possible,” he said.
Mr Ajay is 66 with three grandchildren. When the moderator pressed him on whether he believed the job crisis in the developing world could be solved, he said, “My job is to give it my best shot. I don’t want my grandchildren to think I was an armchair critic. I want them to say that their granddad tried.”
