The World Bank has urged developing economies, including Nigeria, to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence, saying the technology could help drive stronger global economic growth.
It, however, cautioned that AI systems trained on foreign data may produce inaccurate results in Nigeria when applied to local conditions.
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The Bank disclosed this in its latest World Development Report, titled ‘The Promise of Artificial Intelligence’.
The lender stated that developing economies today have more to gain and less to fear from AI than richer ones, noting that one out of every six jobs would be enhanced rather than replaced, as is commonly believed.
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The report found that less than 10 per cent of jobs in developing economies are susceptible to AI automation, compared with more than 33 per cent in high-income economies.
Speaking on the cost of large-scale AI adoption in the report, Indermit Gill, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the World Bank Group, said AI technology adoption costs little for developing economies, adding that massive investments in data centres or large language models are not needed to reap the benefits of AI.
“AI can help solve important problems involving narrow tasks even when local computing power is limited, electricity is unreliable, and internet service is dodgy. Small AI models can be constructed to run offline on just about any hardware,” Mr Gill said.
Local data
The Bank further emphasised the necessity of adapting AI to local languages, institutions and ways of working in developing economies.
According to the financial institution, “AI is unusually sensitive to context”; a tool that works in one country may fail in another, underscoring the need to build AI systems based on locally sourced data.
“In Nigeria, a medical AI trained on data from wealthy countries recommended more laboratory tests than local conditions warranted.
“For most developing economies, the greatest opportunity lies in adapting AI to local needs,” the financial institution stated.
The World Bank further encouraged developing economies to seek greater control over the technologies they rely on.
The bank clarified that control over adopted technologies does not translate to “AI sovereignty by building every layer of an AI supply chain themselves”.
It stated that a more practical way to reduce dependence on a single country is to purchase models, cloud services, and other AI tools from multiple countries, ensuring they can work together and be swapped out without requiring the entire system to be rebuilt.
Adoption
The report, which surveyed 777 firms in Nigeria, said AI adoption has increased across developing countries compared with previous years.
For Nigeria, AI adoption has improved in recent years, with the country ranking 38th out of 135 countries and first in Africa in the 2026 Global Index on Responsible AI, in July.
Nigeria scored 45.93 out of 100 for its progress in developing frameworks, institutions and safeguards for the responsible development and deployment of AI.
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The firms surveyed in the World Bank report expressed varying expectations about AI’s potential impact on business productivity under different adoption scenarios.
According to the report, the most rapid adoption scenario could result in a 21 per cent increase in productivity, while a slower adoption scenario could yield a 2 per cent increase.
The lender said other studies it reviewed showed that AI productivity gains at the task level range from about 6 per cent to 88 per cent, with the highest effects in coding.
The lender said other studies it reviewed found that AI could boost productivity at the task level by 6 per cent to 88 per cent, with the largest gains recorded in coding-related tasks.
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