The global spread of artificial intelligence (AI) will not only transform individual industries, disrupt the labour market, and undermine the competitiveness of some countries, but it will also significantly alter global trade structures. Whether this development will have strong growth effects on global trade itself will depend largely on how regulations are designed, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) argues in a study, warning of „regulatory fragmentation“.

In the WTO report Trading with Intelligence, the authors demonstrate that the use of AI in initiating and conducting trade transactions and automating bureaucracy can dramatically reduce costs and increase productivity. At the same time, new digital trade products are expected to emerge, and new forms of global cooperation will become apparent.

The WTO has developed several AI implementation scenarios to illustrate the potential impact on global trade. Some scenarios envision more or less technologically open economies where AI is quickly and widely integrated with few disruptions. In other scenarios, higher trade barriers and national restrictions exist, and there is a greater or lesser gap between countries regarding AI adoption.

In an optimistic scenario, referred to by the WTO as „global synergy“, where AI is evenly implemented across all regions and leads to significant productivity gains, cumulative real growth in global trade in goods and services could rise by nearly 14 percentage points by 2040. In this scenario, the global trade in digitally delivered services could even be almost 18 percentage points higher than in the baseline forecast.

Conversely, the impact of AI on trade growth in a more „cautious“ technological scenario – marked by regional disparities in productivity gains and AI adoption – would be halved, with a cumulative increase of only 7 percentage points by 2040.

„In other words, failing to spread AI technology across various economies would mean missing out on many potential gains“, warned Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the WTO, at a recent conference. She also noted that there are many reasons to regulate AI more strictly, as it touches on issues like data protection, intellectual property, and human rights compliance. Since AI is a global technology, global coordination is also necessary.

The WTO's significance lies not only in its rules and its role as a decision-making body, but also in its function as a global forum for discussion, coordination, and cooperation. As a cornerstone of global efforts to facilitate trade in services and goods that enable or are enabled by AI, the study’s authors argue that it is now essential to address various aspects of the WTO's framework, to promote the development of and access to AI.