The IMF's AI warning, read from Nairobi

At the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok on 16 October 2026, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said the risks of artificial intelligence may exceed its opportunities if adequate safeguards and an ethical framework are not put in place, Reuters reported. She backed a mix of industry self-regulation and government input, and said AI was already strengthening the global economy but could deliver negative shocks if productivity gains arrive more slowly than hoped.

Earlier in the month, the Associated Press reported that she compared AI to a Formula 1 car without barriers, and warned that its benefits are bypassing most countries, adding to economic inequality, with a lag between heavy investment and the arrival of benefits. On jobs, she said the net impact is positive, while noting that much service-sector work pays poorly.

Two warnings in one

Read from an African capital, the IMF's message has two parts.

The first is about safety: powerful technology deployed without guardrails can cause harm, from fraud and misinformation to financial instability. African countries are drafting their own rules. Kenya has a National AI Strategy for 2025 to 2030, a draft AI and Emerging Technologies Policy and an AI Bill before the Senate. What Kenya's AI Bill proposes.

The second is about who benefits. If AI's gains concentrate in a few countries and companies, the continent risks becoming a consumer of AI made elsewhere, paying for it in data and dollars, while the productivity boom happens somewhere else.

What "bypassing" looks like on the ground

Most of the world's AI compute, research funding and model development sits outside Africa. African languages, faces and contexts are under-represented in training data, which is why AI tools often handle them poorly. Big-tech moves on the continent are uneven: this month, Microsoft told staff of proposed changes at its Africa Development Centre in Nairobi, according to reports. What Microsoft's Nairobi cuts mean.

What would help

Avoiding the IMF's "bypass" scenario depends on more than regulation:

• Skills: developers, data scientists and, just as important, businesses that know how to use AI well
• Local data, shared fairly: so models understand African languages and contexts
• Affordable access: compute, connectivity and devices
• Local products: AI applications built for African markets by African companies

Where small businesses fit

Macro warnings can feel distant from a shop in Eastleigh or a salon in Kisumu. But the productivity question is concrete there too. If a small business can use AI to make its own adverts in an afternoon rather than paying for a shoot it cannot afford, that is a productivity gain captured locally.

That is the bet behind Tari Studio: AI video and image tools tuned for African scenes, people and languages, priced in shillings and paid by M-Pesa, so the gains of AI reach businesses here. It is one small part of a much bigger answer, but it is the kind of answer the IMF's warning calls for: AI whose benefits do not bypass us.