What do central bankers and economists say about AI?

Eighteen people who set interest rates, run the international financial institutions or hold the chairs in economics, on what AI does to work. They split cleanly. Kristalina Georgieva calls it 'a tsunami hitting the labor market'. Tiff Macklem says it 'could end up destroying more jobs than it creates'. Joseph Stiglitz expects more jobs lost than made. Against them, Andrew Bailey warns against 'oversimplified conclusions on the employment effects', Erik Brynjolfsson says almost no job is fully automatable, Raghuram Rajan says adoption outside the frontier is slower than its builders see, and Tyler Cowen says the problem is adjustment rather than unemployment. They agree on one thing: Christine Lagarde, Pablo Hernández de Cos, Bailey and Jerome Powell all say the outcome turns on skills. Each quotation is dated and linked to the central bank, the institution or the outlet.

This is one of nine slices of the register of what the world's leaders say about AI, which sets out how every quotation was found and checked twice against its source. 18 central bankers, finance ministers, institution heads and economists, 18 quotations, grouped by region.

UK#

Two points to conclude on productivity and AI. First, education and training in AI skills will be critical. Second, we shouldn't resort to oversimplified conclusions on the employment effects.

Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, United Kingdom. Remarks titled "The world today" at the IMF / Saudi Ministry of Finance conference, 8 February 2026. bankofengland.co.uk. Bailey set out four channels through which AI could affect employment and said the net effect was uncertain.

For good or ill – or merely as an enabler of ever more intense zero-sum competition – artificial intelligence will have a pervasive and perhaps transformative impact on society. But the hope that it will unleash a sustained increase in measured productivity and GDP growth is probably a delusion.

Adair Turner, Chair of the Energy Transitions Commission and former Chair of the UK Financial Services Authority, United Kingdom. Commentary "AI Will Not Supercharge GDP Growth" in Project Syndicate, 27 February 2025. Project Syndicate. Turner argued that AI's social effects will be large but that the expected boost to measured productivity and GDP is overstated.

Europe#

But AI is not merely another digital tool to adopt. It requires an industrial mobilisation on a scale not seen for generations: vast investment in energy, semiconductors, computing infrastructure and capital.

Mario Draghi, Former President of the European Central Bank and former Prime Minister of Italy, author of the EU competitiveness report, Italy. Speech at the Charlemagne Prize ceremony, Aachen, 14 May 2026. aachen.de. Draghi argued that Europe must treat AI as an industrial undertaking rather than a technology to be bought in.

All told, I do see a path for Europe to adopt AI without fracturing its social model. But it will require massive complementary investments in skills to prevent a rise in inequality.

Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, European Union. Welcome address to the ECB conference on AI, Frankfurt, 1 April 2025. ecb.europa.eu. Lagarde weighed AI's automation potential against its augmentation potential and argued that skills investment determines the distributional outcome.

North America#

Almost no job is fully automatable, while almost every job has tasks that AI can change.

Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, United States. Q&A interview published by Stanford Graduate School of Business Insights, 17 September 2026. Stanford Graduate School of Business. Brynjolfsson argued that AI reshapes tasks within jobs rather than eliminating whole occupations.

Our lives have not really been disrupted. But what is coming is that virtually all of us will, in a radical way, have jobs that are very different from the jobs we expected.

Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, United States. Keynote at the Sana AI Summit, New York Public Library, reported by Fortune, 22 May 2026. Fortune. Cowen argued that the main problem of the AI era is psychological adjustment and shifts in status rather than mass unemployment.

I think it makes people who use it more productive. It may make other people have to find other jobs, though.

Jerome Powell, Chair of the US Federal Reserve, United States. FOMC press conference, answering a question from Neil Irwin about a productivity shock, 10 December 2025. federalreserve.gov. Powell was asked whether the US is experiencing a positive productivity shock from AI and distinguished gains for users of the technology from displacement of others.

My argument is that we currently have the wrong direction for AI. We're using it too much for automation and not enough for providing expertise and information to workers.

Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor of Economics at MIT and 2024 Nobel laureate in economics, United States. Interview published by MIT Technology Review, 25 February 2025. MIT Technology Review. Acemoglu argued that the direction of AI development, not its existence, determines whether workers gain from it.

As AI becomes more established in the economy and its impacts more transformative, it could end up destroying more jobs than it creates. And the people who lose their work to automation may struggle to find new opportunities.

Tiff Macklem, Governor of the Bank of Canada, Canada. Keynote "Artificial intelligence, the economy and central banking" at the NBER Economics of Artificial Intelligence Conference, Toronto, 20 September 2024. bankofcanada.ca. Macklem set out the possibility that AI reduces the number of non-automated tasks by more than it creates new ones.

The unique opportunity that AI offers humanity is to push back against the process started by computerization – to extend the relevance, reach and value of human expertise to a larger set of workers.

David Autor, Professor of Economics at MIT, United States. Essay "AI Could Actually Help Rebuild The Middle Class" in Noema Magazine, 12 February 2024. Noema Magazine. Autor argued that AI could extend expert decision-making to more workers rather than concentrating it among elite professionals.

I see it as, at least in many areas, increasing productivity enough that the demand for labor in those areas will go down. There will be jobs created, but my judgment is that there will be more jobs lost.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate economist and professor at Columbia University, United States. Interview with Scientific American, 1 August 2023. Scientific American. Stiglitz set out why he expects AI to reduce net labour demand and widen inequality without government intervention.

Asia#

Unless those safeguards arrive quickly and update continuously, the question of AI going rogue is left for society at large to answer.

Nirmala Sitharaman, Finance Minister of India, India. Address at the Global Fintech Fest 2026, Mumbai, 11 September 2026. Deccan Chronicle. Sitharaman called for AI guardrails proportionate to risk and said accountability for AI-assisted decisions must sit with people and institutions.

The only question now before us is whether you shape the AI journey or you let it shape you by default.

Sanjay Malhotra, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, India. Inaugural address at FIBAC 2026, 11 August 2026. Open Magazine. Malhotra told Indian banks that AI adoption is unavoidable and that the choice is whether institutions direct it deliberately.

The fastest users of technology are the people creating the technology. What they don't see is adoption outside the frontier is much longer.

Raghuram Rajan, Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, India. Interview with Bloomberg Television, reported by Business Today, 27 February 2026. Business Today. Rajan argued that fears of rapid AI-driven job losses overstate how quickly the technology spreads beyond the firms that build it.

Oceania#

Technological change has always reshaped the labour market, and AI is no exception. As AI continues to reshape industries and economies, it is not just the tools and processes that are evolving – it is the very nature of work. While many experts anticipate a net increase in jobs, it is likely to be more nuanced: some roles will be redefined, others might be displaced, and entirely new ones will be created.

Michele Bullock, Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Australia. Shann Memorial Lecture, "Technology and the Future of Central Banking at the RBA", Perth, 3 September 2025. rba.gov.au. Bullock described the expected labour-market effects of AI while setting out how the RBA itself uses the technology.

International#

The lesson I draw here is not that we should resist the technology, but that we should prepare people for it. Reskilling and retraining the workforce to keep pace with AI will be key to ensure that it augments human labour rather than substitutes for it.

Pablo Hernández de Cos, General Manager of the Bank for International Settlements, International. Speech "Artificial intelligence, growth and financial stability: challenges for central banks" at the Global Fintech Fest 2026, Mumbai, 10 September 2026. bis.org. Hernández de Cos warned that informal-sector workers in developing economies have the least protection against AI-driven displacement.

It is like a tsunami hitting the labor market, especially in advanced economies, where we assess 60% of jobs to be impacted.

Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, International. Interview with TIME published in its Davos 2026 collection, January 2026. TIME. Georgieva was asked what had changed since her 2024 assessment of AI's labour-market effects and said economies remain under-prepared.

How can the WTO help ensure that the benefits of AI are broadly shared? How can we address AI's challenges in a globally coordinated way?

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, International. Launch of the WTO World Trade Report 2025 and its companion study on AI and international trade, Geneva, September 2025. Vanguard (Nigeria). Okonjo-Iweala framed the questions the WTO's 2025 report poses about AI's distribution of gains and about regulatory fragmentation.

The split on jobs, and what it turns on#

The split does not follow institution or country. It follows how much weight each speaker gives to the last two centuries, in which every wave of automation created more work than it removed, against the possibility that Jamie Dimon also names on the business slice, that this wave moves faster than people can retrain. Georgieva's 60 per cent is the IMF's own assessment and is given here as her claim. Bailey's caution and Rajan's point about adoption are the two lines that say the forecasts have outrun the measurements, which is the position this site's entry-level jobs page reaches from the data.

Direction, not adoption#

Two economists speak to capability rather than headcount. Daron Acemoglu says 'we currently have the wrong direction for AI', too much automation and too little expertise given to workers. David Autor says the opportunity is 'to extend the relevance, reach and value of human expertise to a larger set of workers'. Between them they describe the choice this site puts to every organisation: whether the machine replaces judgement or extends it. Sanjay Malhotra's line to India's banks, that you shape the AI journey or let it shape you by default, is the same choice in a governor's words.

The decision that stays with you#

Central banks measure the aggregate. An organisation decides the particular: which decisions a machine may make in its name, who can stop each one, what its people must remain able to do without the machine, and how anyone would know if it went wrong. That is the argument of Rules Before Tools, and the measurable risk sits there, in the handover of decisions to machines and what happens to human judgement afterwards.

What these quotations do not show#

These are forecasts, not measurements, and every figure in them is the speaker's own. Most of the speeches quoted are about inflation or financial stability and touch AI in one passage; the passage was chosen, not the speech. No central banker from Africa or Latin America is present, Kazuo Ueda and Lesetja Kganyago could not be verified at source, and Malhotra's line is read from a magazine report rather than the Reserve Bank of India's transcript. Adair Turner's sentences are confirmed against the free part of a paywalled column.