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AI and the New Global Trade Shift: Why Services Will Lead the Next Era of Globalisation
AI and the New Global Trade Shift: Why Services Will Lead the Next Era of Globalisation
Over the past twenty years, services trade has quietly become the main growth engine of globalisation. What began as a supporting act to containers full of goods is now a central storyline in its own right, and artificial intelligence is about to accelerate the plot.
In 2003, services still felt like the softer, smaller cousin of goods in trade statistics. Two decades later, they are anything but. UN trade data show that global services exports reached about US$7.9 trillion in 2023, growing roughly 8–9% a year in current dollars, faster than both goods and global GDP.
Within that total, a particular class of services has exploded: those that can be delivered digitally. According to WTO and World Bank estimates, digitally delivered services exports have grown almost fourfold since 2005, reaching around US$3.8–3.9 trillion in 2022 and accounting for more than half of all services exports. They now outrun the growth of both merchandise trade and other, more traditional services.
The geography of this shift is striking. The United States remains the single largest services exporter, with around 13% of the global market. Europe still dominates when taken as a bloc, but the internal composition has changed: the United Kingdom has doubled down on finance and professional services; small hubs such as Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have become outsized exporters thanks to ICT, IP and head-office functions.
On the other side of the world, developing Asia has moved from the periphery to the engine room. Developing economies’ share of global digitally deliverable services rose from 19% to 24% between 2010 and 2022, with Asia driving most of the increase. China has emerged as a heavyweight, while India, Singapore and others have built formidable positions in IT, business-process and financial services.
In short: the last two decades turned services, especially digital ones, from an adjunct to manufacturing into a parallel, and increasingly dominant, channel of global integration.
Looking out to 2045, the story will not simply be “more of the same.” Three structural shifts suggest a deeper transformation.
First, AI automates tasks, not whole jobs.
Most high-value services, legal analysis, product design, investment research, claims handling, are bundles of micro-tasks. Generative and analytical AI will do much of the drafting, summarising, testing and monitoring. That makes remote collaboration cheaper and more reliable, because much of the work can be specified, logged and quality-checked in digital form.
A loan-underwriting process, a clinical trial protocol or an ESG reporting workflow can be embedded into software agents and templates. Once codified and instrumented with data and quality metrics, these workflows can be executed from almost any jurisdiction with the right skills and connectivity.
Machine translation and cross-lingual models already allow professionals to work across languages with surprisingly low friction. WTO and UN reports note that digital services now grow faster in many developing economies than in advanced ones, precisely because connectivity and language barriers are falling together. The next wave, AI systems tuned to cultural norms, tone and emotional resonance, will lower barriers further, enabling small teams to serve clients in dozens of markets with locally appropriate communication.
Put together, AI does not simply increase the volume of existing service exports; it broadens the set of services that are tradable. What could once be done only in person can increasingly be decomposed into a local, relationship-heavy front end and a globally distributed, AI-augmented analytical backbone.
The relative position of nations in this new landscape will hinge less on wage levels and more on three forms of capital: digital, human and institutional.
Economies with pervasive broadband, reliable power, affordable cloud computing and large, well-governed data pools will be able to host sophisticated service factories. The evidence from the past decade is clear: countries that invested heavily in digital infrastructure and online business regulation, such as Singapore, several EU members, and parts of East and South Asia, saw faster growth of digitally deliverable services than those that did not.
IT services exports worldwide have grown at around 12% a year between 2010 and 2022, faster than any other major services category. But raw coding ability is commoditising as AI co-pilots spread. The premium will migrate to combinations: software plus healthcare, data science plus law, finance plus climate science. Countries that can mass-produce such hybrid profiles through universities, vocational systems and corporate training, will have a durable edge.
Services trade ultimately rests on trust: trust in data protection, contract enforcement, recourse when things go wrong. UNCTAD’s recent bulletins emphasise that services trade is expanding fastest where regulatory regimes are predictable and where digital trade rules on data flows, localisation, taxation, are transparent. Nations that drift towards arbitrary digital protectionism may protect some incumbents in the short run but will find themselves excluded from the most dynamic networks in the long run.
At the same time, risks of exclusion are real. Least-developed countries still account for only a thin sliver of digitally deliverable services exports, and the gap in skills, connectivity and institutions remains wide. Unless addressed, AI may amplify, not narrow, these divides.
The benign forecast of ever-expanding services exports assumes a relatively open digital environment. The more realistic outlook includes at least three headwinds.
Divergences on privacy, data localisation, AI safety and digital taxation can impose high fixed costs on small exporters. Firms may find themselves building separate tech stacks and compliance regimes for different blocs, eroding economies of scale.
Strategic rivalry encourages governments to treat data and digital infrastructure as security assets. Restrictions on cross-border data flows, cloud localisation demands and limits on foreign ownership of digital platforms can slow the growth of cross-border services, or divert it into more politically aligned channels.
Misuse of automated decision systems, biased underwriting, brittle medical advice, opaque model failures, could trigger regulatory backlashes. If clients and regulators lose confidence in AI-assisted services, some of the efficiency gains that make remote delivery attractive will evaporate.
None of these forces will halt the long-term rise of tradable services, but they will shape where growth happens and how concentrated it becomes.
For individuals, the question is blunt: what must a professional in 2045 be able to do to thrive in this landscape?Several themes stand out.
By 2045, the ability to design prompts, supervise AI agents, interpret model outputs and understand their failure modes will be as fundamental as spreadsheet skills are today. That fluency is not about worshipping tools; it is about knowing when to trust them, when to override them and how to build robust workflows around them.
As generic content and analysis become cheap, depth becomes the real differentiator. Tax specialists who understand both local law and international digital business models; clinicians who can interpret AI diagnostics and adjust for edge cases; engineers who can combine simulation outputs with real-world constraints, these are the profiles that command global demand and bargaining power.
AI can assist with translation and tone, but authentic human judgment about how messages will land remains vital, particularly in negotiation, leadership, sales and crisis management. Professionals who can read context, navigate norms and build trust across cultures will stand out in an environment where many interactions are mediated by AI.
As services workflows become more automated and distributed, the risk shifts from individual error to systemic failure: flawed incentives, feedback loops that amplify bias, opaque outsourcing chains. Leaders will need the ability to design governance structures, checkpoints, audit trails, escalation paths, that keep complex service factories resilient and accountable.
For firms, success will depend on institutionalising these skills: integrating AI into processes, retraining workers rather than simply replacing them, and building partnerships that combine global scale with local insight.
By 2045, the map of services exports is likely to look denser and more contested. The United States and a handful of European and Asian hubs will almost certainly remain at the top. But the middle of the distribution is where the action will be: mid-sized economies that combine credible institutions, digital infrastructure and aggressive human-capital strategies can carve out disproportionate roles in niches from health analytics to climate services to digital public infrastructure.
The quiet revolution of the past twenty years, services exports rising faster than goods, digitally delivered services growing fourfold, developing countries gradually capturing more of this growth, suggests that the ceiling is still some way off.
What changes in the next twenty years is that AI will not only expand the space of tradable services; it will redefine what it means to be competitive within it. Countries and firms that treat AI, data and governance as strategic assets, and that invest accordingly in skills and institutions, will not merely ride the wave of services trade, they will shape its direction.
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