AI and economic transformation: Growth, adoption, and who captures the gains

Date
October 6, 2026, 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM EDT
Virtual Event

Martin Chorzempa (PIIE), Anton Korinek (PIIE; Anthropic Institute), Anna Stansbury (PIIE) and Filiz Unsal (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)

Event Summary

Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing rapidly and could reshape productivity, economic growth, jobs, and living standards. But AI gains are unlikely to be distributed evenly across countries. How quickly economies adopt the technology—and whether they have the computing infrastructure, skills, investment, and international access to benefit—will shape AI's impact worldwide.

Join experts Anton Korinek, Filiz Unsal, and Martin Chorzempa for a discussion of the economic transformation underway and what it could mean for countries, workers, and businesses.

Anton Korinek outlines the range of economic scenarios for transformative AI, from modest productivity improvements to the possibility of explosive growth, and discuss why policymakers need to prepare for a wide range of outcomes rather than focus only on a single predicted path.

Filiz Unsal examines why countries' ability to benefit from AI depends on both domestic and international factors. While economies that lag in adoption may benefit from cheaper imports of AI-enabled goods and services, maintaining competitiveness in global markets will ultimately require domestic AI adoption and access to computing capacity and data-center infrastructure.

Martin Chorzempa outlines the state of US-China competition in AI and its implications for economics and geopolitics. China has many AI labs that are fast followers of US labs, with models only a bit behind US capabilities. Adoption of those models has been growing even here in the United States. Chinese AI models put competitive pressure on US labs to compete on price and frontier capabilities in ways that may shift the distribution of gains towards adopters.

A discussion with Anna Stansbury follows.

MODERATOR

Anna Stansbury 
Nonresident Senior Fellow, PIIE

SPEAKERS

Martin Chorzempa 
Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow, PIIE

Anton Korinek 
Nonresident Senior Fellow, PIIE; Head of Transformative AI Economic Studies, Anthropic Institute

Filiz Unsal 
Deputy Director of the Policy and Research Branch, Economics Department, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

Video