The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has urged governments to plan for multiple artificial intelligence (AI) adoption scenarios rather than anchoring economic policy to a single forecast, warning that the pace and impact of the technology remain deeply uncertain.
The gap between the speed of AI development and the readiness of governments to manage its macroeconomic consequences is widening, the IMF said, calling for smarter regulation, investment in public AI capacity, and international coordination to close it.
Bo Li, Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, made the remarks while speaking on the topic “AI and the Resilience Gap: Diffusion, Dependency, and the Policy Agenda” at the IMF and World Bank Group Spring Meetings in Washington on April 15. He said authorities must build flexibility into economic planning to avoid policy missteps as the technology evolves.
“We think that’s very important. Not to lock your policy into one view about the speed of diffusion, about the capability of AI,” Li said.
Li outlined two broad scenarios developed in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other partners. The first envisages gradual and uneven AI adoption across economies. The second involves a faster and more widespread rollout that could require significant upfront economic adjustment. He warned that the policy implications across these two paths could be sharply different.
“And under these two scenarios, their implications for policy, for labor market, for monetary policy, fiscal policy, can be very different,” Li said.
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, with firms and industries adopting AI at vastly uneven rates.
Li cautioned policymakers against dismissing either the optimistic or the pessimistic scenarios, saying both the most likely baseline and lower-probability but high-impact outcomes deserved attention. “On the one hand, you don’t want to chase the hype. But on the other hand, you don’t want to miss some of the important risks,” he said. “Even though they may be tail for now, but it could prove materialized down the road.”
He said scenario planning would help authorities design policies with what he described as high option value, keeping economies and institutions resilient to potential technology shocks. The IMF’s broader Spring Meetings agenda identified AI alongside geopolitical uncertainty and fiscal pressures as central challenges for policymakers heading into the second half of 2026.
