Just as Korea once underwent rapid economic development through innovation in the digital field, today's developing countries can seize growth opportunities through artificial intelligence (AI).
At the 2025 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Chief Executive Officers (CEO) Summit held at Hwarang Hall in Gyeongju Arts Center on the 29th, Anna Bjerde, managing director of the World Bank, took the stage as a speaker for the fifth session, "Finance and investment strategies in a changing global environment," and said this.
Bjerde said, "Korea is a country that shows exactly what the World Bank Group seeks to achieve in cooperation with countries around the world," adding, "When it joined the World Bank in 1955, it was one of the poorest countries in the world, but today it has one of the largest and most advanced economies in the world."
Bjerde cited LG Electronics as a representative success case for Korea. Goldstar, the predecessor of LG Electronics, had difficulty raising capital from commercial banks in the 1970s, hindering its business expansion. The World Bank, through the International Finance Corporation (IFC), lent $17 million to Goldstar.
Bjerde said, "Goldstar grew into the first among emerging-market corporations to have global competitiveness, and later changed its name to LG Electronics, establishing itself as a core corporation responsible for Korea's economy," adding, "If 'advanced consumer electronics technology' was the background that enabled LG Electronics to achieve progress, today's developing countries can advance through AI."
Bjerde divided AI into "big AI" and "small AI," and saw that developing countries should focus on small AI. She defined advanced-economy AI models—backed by large-scale computing power, stable and low-cost electricity, vast data, and talent to handle that data—as big AI, and small computing systems based on local data as small AI.
She said, "Currently, 77% of global data center capacity is concentrated in high-income countries, and low-income countries do not even have 0.1%. This means most developing countries will find it difficult to benefit from big AI," adding, "While demanding conditions are required to utilize big AI, small AI does not need massive servers or cutting-edge models."
The World Bank projected this year's global gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate at 2.3%. Bjerde said, "This is the lowest figure in the past 15 years since the financial crisis," and assessed that "foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries is at its lowest level since 2005."
Bjerde expected a global employment crisis to emerge in the long term. She said, "In developing countries alone, 1.2 billion young people are expected to enter the labor market by 2035, but job creation during the same period will amount to only 400 million."