Brad Smith

or we will continue and maybe risk even exacerbating the great economic divide that defines our world today.

I think fundamentally it's economic development.

It's prosperity.

Because when you have a general purpose technology, meaning something like electricity that reshapes the entire economy, what history tells us

is that the countries that deploy it, adopt it widely, grow faster than those that do not.

So it's about productivity growth.

It is about job growth.

It's about opportunities for a new and younger population.

It's about opportunities to solve real-world local problems using the best technology available.

Well, we at Microsoft made clear we're on pace to spend $50 billion by 2030 to bring AI to the global south.

If you think about what happened with electricity, private capital did not come to these countries.

They didn't bring power plants to these countries.

This starts, I think, actually with investment and capability.

So when you see a company like Microsoft investing, and we're obviously not alone, that's encouraging, especially since the investment is all about world-leading technology.

But it's just a start.

I think it's going to require a massive amount of funding

It is really going to require getting the private markets moving.

It's going to require governments using AI because they play key roles in generating demand.

And we need to scale the population.

That requires schools, it requires government, it requires tech companies all working together.