Blueprint for Intelligent Economies

The 'Blueprint for Intelligent Economies' outlines a three-layered approach—building foundations, growing new economies, and putting people at the heart—to ensure equitable AI development. It emphasizes the need for sustainable infrastructure, diverse datasets, and ethical guardrails to prevent a widening digital divide. The report advocates for public-private partnerships and international collaboration to secure compute resources, manage cross-border data flows, and establish global safety standards.

• The blueprint is structured into three interconnected layers: 'building the foundations', 'growing new intelligent economies', and 'putting people at the heart'. Each layer contains strategic objectives and enabling capabilities designed to guide nations regardless of their current AI maturity level.
• Sustainable AI infrastructure requires addressing high energy consumption through green energy sources and optimizing energy use via AI. Examples include Microsoft's agreement to use nuclear power for data centres in the US and a $2 billion World Bank initiative to add 15 GW of renewable energy capacity in Europe and Central Asia, with a $657 million facility specifically for Turkey.
• Bridging the digital divide requires expanding high-speed connectivity and providing affordable AI-ready devices. Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), such as India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) which handled 11.7 billion transactions in 2023, serves as a model for inclusive access.
• Data equity is essential to prevent AI from perpetuating biases. This involves curating diverse datasets and developing national language models, such as the UAE's 'Jais' LLM based on modern standard Arabic and regional dialects, or Cohere's 'Aya' dataset covering 114 languages.
• Establishing ethical guardrails is complicated by a lack of universal standards and a dominance of perspectives from the Global North. The report notes that 'whole parts of the world have been left out of international AI governance conversations', particularly in the Global South.
• Regulatory approaches to AI vary between 'hands-off' models that prioritize rapid innovation and 'hands-on' models, such as the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, which uses risk levels to set requirements for high-risk applications.
• AI has created legal uncertainties regarding intellectual property and copyright, as traditional laws often require human contribution. Different jurisdictions are responding differently, with Japan expanding fair use for AI training and the EU providing exceptions for text and data mining.

APA

World Economic Forum (2025). Blueprint for Intelligent Economies. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_A_Blueprint_for_Intelligent_Economies_2025.pdf

Chicago

World Economic Forum. Blueprint for Intelligent Economies. 2025. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_A_Blueprint_for_Intelligent_Economies_2025.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Economic Forum |title=Blueprint for Intelligent Economies |date=January 2025 |url=https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_A_Blueprint_for_Intelligent_Economies_2025.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldeconomicforum2025blueprint, author = {{World Economic Forum}}, title = {{Blueprint for Intelligent Economies}}, institution = {World Economic Forum}, year = {2025}, month = jan, url = {https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_A_Blueprint_for_Intelligent_Economies_2025.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }