The Great Reset: A Level Playing Field
Why developing nations have a fair chance to leapfrog in the age of AI. The restart button has been hit.
History is usually a game of compounding advantages. If you had the steam engine first, you won the 19th century. If you had the microchip first, you won the 20th century. The rich got richer because they had the infrastructure to build the next thing.
But AI is different. AI is a Great Equalizer. It has hit the “Restart” button on the global economy.
The Collapse of Legacy Debt
Developed nations are burdened by their own success. They have massive legacy systems:
- Cobol banking mainframes from the 1970s.
- Copper-wire grids.
- Rigid, calcified bureaucratic processes designed in the paper era.
To adopt AI, they have to “retrofit.” They have to drag these ancient systems into the future, fighting unions, regulations, and technical debt every step of the way.
Developing nations? They often have a blank slate.
- You don’t have to upgrade a 50-year-old banking system if you build a new AI-native financial layer from scratch.
- You don’t have to reform a broken, industrial-age education system if you can deploy personalized AI tutors to every smartphone tomorrow.
- You don’t have to digitize paper records if you never had paper records to begin with.
Acceleration Through Strategy
This is a level playing field because the tools are open. The state-of-the-art models (or close enough copies via Llama, Mistral, etc.) are available to everyone. A developer in Lagos has access to the same intelligence as a developer in Silicon Valley.
The differentiator is no longer “access to technology.” It is “clarity of strategy.”
A country that restarts today with the right strategy—focusing on digital sovereignty, reliable orchestration, and talent density—can accelerate past a stagnant incumbent that is busy trying to figure out how to put ChatGPT into Excel.
The Leapfrog Moment
We saw this with mobile phones. Africa and parts of Asia skipped the “landline” phase entirely. They went straight to mobile. They didn’t dig trenches for copper; they built towers for signal.
We are about to see this with cognitive infrastructure. Smart nations will skip the “industrial bureaucracy” phase. They will skip the “forms in triplicate” phase.
They will jump straight to the Agentic Network phase.
The race hasn’t been won. In fact, the starting gun just went off again. And the lane is wide open.
