The AI Era Is Here. But Will It Reach Everyone?
2026年5月18日
2026年5月18日 ・ minutes reading time
AI is reshaping economies, industries, and jobs at breathtaking speed. Google's Chief Economist, DR. Curto Millet, says the defining question of our time isn't whether AI will change the world; it's whether that change will work for everyone.
Watch the keynote speech by Google Chief Economist
What if we're asking the wrong question about AI?
AI is already transforming the world. The question is: for whom?
Most people who focus on how AI will change the world can already see it: medicines are being discovered faster, developers are saving hours every day, and research that once took years is now taking months.
This was the central challenge raised at the launch of the World Intellectual Property Report (WIPR) 2026. Speaking at the event, Dr. Curto Millet delivered a clear message: AI’s potential is enormous, but potential is not the same as impact, and the gap between the two is where the real work begins.
AI is here and it is delivering
The results speak for themselves. Google developers saved 21% of their time. Drug discovery is accelerating. The OECD estimates more than 10% added to GDP within a decade.
Like the steam engine, electricity, and the personal computer before it, AI is redefining what human labor can accomplish. But unlike its predecessors, it doesn't just power work — it thinks alongside it.
What makes AI unlike any technology before it is the pace at which it is moving. As the Figure below shows, ships took 120 years to spread globally. GenAI took just four days. The window between invention and worldwide reach has collapsed from generations to days.
How Fast We Adopt New Technologies?
Average technological adoption lags around the world have fallen
Figure 1.4 Average number of years to adopt selected technologies by year of invention, 1750-2025
Note: The sample includes 139 countries, 17 of which are advanced economies. A small average adoption lag indicates that adoption is rapid across all countries in the sample, regardless of income level.
Source: Fink et al. (2026). How Do New Technologies Diffuse? WIPO Economic Research Working Paper Series No. 91. Geneva: WIPO.
For more details, see Figure 1.4 in World Intellectual Property Report 2026.
The gap is already visible
The benefits are real. But they are not spreading evenly.
In the United States, tech companies have embraced AI at more than double the rate of industries like construction. An economy where only some sectors modernize is an economy leaving prosperity on the table.
The same pattern plays out at the human level. In research conducted in the UK in 2025, Google found that only one in three workers used AI on the job. After simple training, daily use doubled. The barrier wasn't technology or cost. It was what Dr. Curto Millet called “permission to prompt”, the confidence and support to simply experiment.
But this pattern, where technology exists yet fails to deliver broadly is not new. Dr. Curto Millet was emphatic on a crucial point: invention does not translate into productivity on its own. The real journey follows a deliberate chain: technology → impact → productivity, and every link requires active effort.
History offers a sobering lesson.
Think about when electricity was introduced in the 1890s as a replacement for the steam engine. Most owners just swapped the power source from steam engine to electricity. But the real transformation came decades later, when it became apparent that factories could redesign their factory floors to optimize their production line. Machines no longer had to line up along a single overhead shaft, which was necessary when they were powered by steam engines. Instead, work could happen in parallel. Productivity exploded, but only for those who reimagined how they worked, not just what powered their machines.
If this gap between industries that adopt AI and those that do not, or do it later, hardens, the benefits of AI will concentrate rather than spread, argued Dr. Curto Millet. This is problematic not just for fairness, but for growth. Because an economy where only some sectors modernize is an economy leaving prosperity on the table.
AI is facing that same fork in the road right now.
How can governments help
AI will impact the current workforce, but how it does but matters. For example, AI could help overcome the shrinking working-age population, which is a problem for many governments in advanced economies.
But it could also create challenges for the current workforce who must build new skills that include AI tools. Otherwise, AI would be a disruption costly to labor rather than one that works advantageously for it.
Solving this problem of ensuring how AI can be beneficial rather than costly for economies requires coordination between governments, businesses, educators, and international organizations.
World Intellectual Property Report 2026 offers the evidence and policy tools to help make it happen.
The technology is ready. The window is open. The only question is: will we act before it closes?
