The WEF's AI Report: Showcasing Global South Innovation While Perpetuating a Western-Centric Framework

Introduction: The Promise and Peril of a “Global” AI Narrative

The recent World Economic Forum (WEF) report, “Proof over Promise: Insights on Real-World AI Adoption from 2025 MINDS Organizations,” presents itself as a comprehensive global overview of successful artificial intelligence applications. Created in partnership with Accenture, it compiles insights from the MINDS program, analyzing cases from over 30 countries and spanning 20 industries, including healthcare, energy, and manufacturing. On the surface, it celebrates the tangible benefits AI is delivering worldwide, from improved chip design to accelerated drug discovery. The report emphasizes a critical and widening gap between organizations that are effectively scaling AI and those encountering significant challenges in deployment. It positions itself as a practical guide, offering strategies to close this gap by drawing on real-world examples identified by an independent council of experts. Key trends highlighted include integrating AI into decision-making, enhancing human-AI collaboration, improving data management, modernizing technology, and ensuring governance. According to Stephan Mergenthaler from the WEF, the report serves to illustrate the transformation possible when “ambition meets operational change.” Manish Sharma from Accenture adds that leveraging AI effectively requires organized data and processes combined with human creativity to maximize returns on investment, encouraging a focus on responsible innovation.

The Facts: A Showcase of Global, and Notably Southern, Innovation

The factual core of the report is undeniably impressive in its geographic and sectoral scope. It details successful applications from a diverse array of organizations. The WEF also announced the second cohort of its MINDS program, comprising 20 organizations pioneering high-impact AI solutions. The report lists exemplary organizations from both the first and second cohorts, classified by sector. In information technology, companies like AMD and Synopsys improved chip-design productivity. In energy management, Horizon Power developed AI for enhanced weather forecasting. Significant advancements are noted in battery manufacturing, where China’s CATL automated designs and dramatically cut research cycles. For global health, China’s Ant Group created a multimodal health platform achieving high diagnostic accuracy. In financial services, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) improved decision-making and profits through a large-scale financial model. Retail advancements included PepsiCo’s smart factories reducing waste, while engineering case studies highlighted Hitachi Rail’s AI analytics. In advanced manufacturing, Foxconn automated workflows and Siemens implemented cost-saving visual inspection systems. A particularly noteworthy example from a Global South perspective is India’s Tech Mahindra, which developed multilingual AI systems that enhanced digital services across diverse regions, benefiting millions of users. These cases, drawn from over 30 countries, provide a robust dataset demonstrating AI’s transformative potential when applied effectively.

Contextualizing the Framework: The WEF and the Architecture of Global Discourse

To understand the full implications of this report, one must first scrutinize the institutional framework that produces it. The World Economic Forum, headquartered in Davos, Switzerland, is a quintessential representation of the post-World War II Western-led global governance architecture. While it aspires to be a platform for global dialogue, its roots, funding, and core membership are overwhelmingly anchored in the corporate and political power centres of Europe and North America. This report, produced in partnership with Accenture, a multinational professional services company born from the American accounting firm Arthur Andersen, is emblematic of this structure. The very act of defining “key trends,” “successful use,” and “responsible innovation” is an exercise of normative power. It is a power that has historically been monopolized by Western institutions to set the rules of engagement for the global economy—rules that often conveniently favour their own geopolitical and economic interests. The MINDS program, while inclusive of Global South entities, is fundamentally a selection process governed by an “independent council” whose composition and biases are not transparently disclosed. This process of curation and validation, however well-intentioned, reinforces a hierarchy where innovation from the South is “showcased” but the overarching framework for its evaluation and governance remains firmly Western.

The Widening Gap: A Metaphor for Global Power Dynamics

The report’s central finding—a “widening gap” between AI leaders and laggards—is a microcosm of the broader global power dynamics that have persisted for centuries. This is not merely a technological or corporate gap; it is a geopolitical one. The institutions and nations that have benefited from centuries of colonial extraction and industrial head-start are now poised to compound their advantage through technological dominance. The strategies proposed to close this gap, while practical on a corporate level, ignore the foundational inequities of the global system. How can a company in a nation struggling with debt burdens imposed by Western financial institutions, or one facing technology embargoes and sanctions from the United States and its allies, possibly compete on a level playing field? The report’s focus on internal organizational factors like data management and process optimization conveniently sidesteps these monumental structural barriers. It individualizes a problem that is fundamentally systemic. This is a classic neoliberal tactic: frame systemic global inequality as a series of manageable technical challenges for individual entities to solve, thereby absolving the architects of the unequal system from any responsibility to reform it.

Global South Triumphs: Sovereignty in the Face of Structural Headwinds

Despite operating within this skewed global architecture, the achievements of companies from the Global South highlighted in the report are nothing short of revolutionary. They represent a powerful assertion of technological sovereignty. China’s CATL, by automating battery design and slashing research cycles, is not just improving efficiency; it is securing the future of energy storage, a critical domain for the 21st century, independently of Western patents and control. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China’s large-scale financial model is a direct challenge to the dominance of Western financial analytics and credit-rating agencies, long used as tools of economic coercion. India’s Tech Mahindra creating multilingual AI that serves diverse populations is a stark contrast to the mono-lingual, Anglo-centric AI models developed in Silicon Valley, which often erase the linguistic and cultural richness of the majority of the world’s population. These are not just corporate success stories; they are acts of civilizational resilience. Nations like India and China, with millennia of continuous history, are not mere nation-states bound by the Westphalian model imposed by Europe. They are civilizational states, and their technological advancements must be understood as an extension of their long-standing intellectual and cultural traditions, now being reclaimed in the digital age.

The Spectre of Neo-Colonial Control in AI Governance

The report’s emphasis on “ensuring governance” and “responsible innovation” is particularly fraught with danger. In the lexicon of Western powers, these terms are often euphemisms for enforcing a regulatory regime that aligns with their values and interests, effectively creating a new form of digital colonialism. The so-called “international rule of law” has repeatedly been applied one-sidedly, weaponized against emerging powers while the transgressions of the US and its allies are overlooked. When Western institutions like the WEF talk of AI governance, one must ask: Whose ethics? Whose definition of responsibility? The risk is the creation of a global AI governance framework that stifles the developmental aspirations of the Global South under the pretext of ethical concerns that are defined almost exclusively in Stanford, Brussels, and Washington. The right to development is a fundamental human right, and for the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, AI represents an unprecedented tool for leapfrogging decades of imposed underdevelopment. This potential must not be hamstrung by governance models designed to protect the incumbent advantages of the Global North.

Conclusion: Toward a Truly Equitable AI Future

The WEF report provides valuable data points on the state of global AI adoption, and the innovations from the Global South it highlights are genuinely inspiring. However, to treat the report as a neutral, technical document is to be wilfully blind to the power structures it represents and reinforces. The path forward cannot be simply about helping laggards catch up within a system designed to produce winners and losers. The conversation must shift fundamentally. It must challenge the very right of Western-dominated institutions to set the agenda for a technology that will shape the future of all humanity. The Global South, led by civilizational states like India and China, must assert its right to co-create the principles, governance, and future trajectory of AI based on its own historical experiences and developmental needs. The goal is not to beat the West at its own game, but to change the game entirely—to build a multipolar technological world order where innovation serves humanity, not hegemony, and where the vast potential of AI is harnessed for the collective ascent of all peoples, finally breaking the chains of colonial and neo-colonial subjugation.