Artificial intelligence is about to rearrange who gets hired, who gets promoted and who gets paid what — and the International Monetary Fund has been measuring how uneven that shake-up will be.
In this Davos 2026 conversation recorded by the World Economic Forum, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva walks through the Fund’s research on AI and work: which country’s workers look best placed for the shift, where paychecks are most exposed, and why she argues policymakers will play a make-or-break role in what plays out. Watch the official video below.
Video credit: World Economic Forum (official YouTube channel).
The Fund’s contribution to the AI argument is arithmetic. Its researchers have mapped which occupations AI can plausibly perform, assist or leave alone, and traced the consequences through wage distributions: exposure is highest, unusually, among the educated workers who historically gained from new technology. That inversion is why the paycheck question lands differently this time — the technology reaches up the pay scale rather than down it.
Georgieva’s policy conclusion, in the Fund’s telling, is preparation over protection: training systems, safety nets that follow workers between jobs, and tax treatment that stops tilting employers toward automation for its own sake. For executives, the speech reframes AI adoption as a workforce strategy with a balance-sheet shadow — the savings are real, and so is the political weather they are accumulating in.
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