New Economy Forum: AI and the Resilience Gap: Diffusion, Dependency, and the Policy Agenda

Print / Export

New Economy Forum: AI and the Resilience Gap: Diffusion, Dependency, and the Policy Agenda

Wednesday, Apr 15, 2026 | 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM

Location: Meeting Halls A&B HQ1-3-430A&B

OVERVIEW

Artificial intelligence promises to be one of the most powerful tools for economic development in modern history accelerating productivity, expanding the capacity of firms, and improving public service delivery of governments. But the same forces driving that promise are also creating new systemic dependencies: on a handful of frontier models, on concentrated compute infrastructure, and on innovation ecosystems that remain largely out of reach for most of the world's economies. The risk is a growing resilience gap, the widening divide between economies that can harness AI to grow and those that cannot.

This panel examines the structural factors affecting that risk and what it would take to prevent it. The evidence on innovation diffusion suggests that transformative technologies take decades to translate into broad productivity gains and that the distribution of those gains is far from automatic. Meanwhile, firms and industries are adopting AI at vastlyuneven rates, with early movers pulling ahead while others risk being locked into dependency rather than capability. And at the frontier, the decisions being made today about how AI systems are deployed, governed, and accessed will shape the macro risk landscape for years to come. For policymakers, the urgency is real.

The gap between the pace of AI development and the readiness of governments to manage its macroeconomic consequences is widening. Closing that gap through smarter regulation, investment in public AI capacity, and international coordination is not a technology question. It is a policy one. This panel brings together leading voices from innovation economics, global management practice, and frontier AI development to map that gap and chart what policy must do next.

PANELISTS

Bo Li

Deputy Managing Director, IMF

Neil Thompson

Director, MIT FutureTech

Dr. Neil Thompson is the Director of the FutureTech research group, and Principle Research Scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), and at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) within the Sloan School of Management. Guided by Dr. Thompson’s leadership, the FutureTech group researches the cutting edge and most important trends driving progress in computing and AI, how these trends underpin scientific progress and economic prosperity, and produces rigorous insights that broaden humanity’s knowledge, and inform policy and industry decisions.

Anu Madgavkar

MGI Partner, McKinsey Global Institute

Anu is an MGI Partner based in McKinsey’s New Jersey office. She is a leader of the McKinsey Global Institute, the economics and business research arm of McKinsey & Company. Anu’s research spans broad topics of Human Potential, involving demographics, labor markets, technology and the future of work, human capital, skills, and an inclusive workforce.

Peter McCrory

Head of Economics, Anthropic

Peter McCrory is Head of Economics at Anthropic, where he leads the Economic Research team. Prior to Anthropic, Peter was the Head of Labor Research at LinkedIn’s Economic Graph Research Institute after having worked on an applied science and market design team using machine learning and econometric tools to solve practical business problems. Earlier in his career, Peter was a U.S. economist at J.P. Morgan and a research associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from UC Berkeley.

Mihnea Constantinescu

Deputy Governor of the National Bank of Moldova

Mihnea Constantinescu serves as Deputy Governor of the National Bank of Moldova. He previously held research and managerial positions at the National Bank of Ukraine and Central Bank of Lithuania as well as in the private sector. His current research engages with the use of alternative data and applied machine learning in macro and regional economic analysis.

MODERATOR

Karen Tso

Co-Anchor CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box’ in EMEA

Karen Tso Co-Anchors CNBC’s flagship show ‘Squawk Box’ in EMEA. The three-hour programme, which broadcasts worldwide five days a week, bookends the opening of European equity markets and is a must see for financial professionals, C-suite executives and investors. Tso often reports live on location from major international events, while moderating conversations and firesides with world leaders and CEOs at the World Economic Forum in Davos, IMF conferences, Asian Development Bank, Mobile World Congress, Web Summit, Women’s Forum, Cannes Lions and the Frankfurt Motor Show. In 2017 she covered both rounds of the French Presidential Election live from Paris. Tso has anchored across CNBC International, from London, New York, Singapore and Australia. Prior to the European edition of ‘Squawk Box’, Tso was based in Singapore and co-anchored the Asian edition of ‘Squawk Box’. Tso was recognized as ‘Highly Commended’ in the ‘Best News Anchor’ category at 15th Asian Television Awards. Before joining CNBC during the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Tso was a household name in business news in Australia, anchoring for Nine Network, Sky News and ABC. Tso holds a Bachelor of Commerce from Griffith University, Queensland. She also has studied for a Masters in Journalism at the University of Westminster, London and UTS, Sydney.

Meetings Calendar