IMF MD Kristalina Georgieva is worried about AI impact on global economy; says: We are not going to get to a place where shocks are…

International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva says the global economy is no longer drifting back to a calm, predictable state—and artificial intelligence is the next big shock governments need to brace for. Speaking on Bloomberg's Leaders with Francine Lacqua podcast, the IMF Managing Director warned that crisis-mode has become the default setting for the world economy. Her deeper worry is that policymakers will mishandle the AI transition the same way they fumbled globalisation—leaving entire communities behind once the productivity gains start flowing to a few."I am worried that we are not completely internalizing yet that this is how the world is going to be," Georgieva told Bloomberg. "We are not going to get to a place where shocks are gone."Georgieva has run the Washington-based lender since 2019. In that time, the IMF has worked through Covid-19, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the tariff fights of 2024-25, and now the war in the Middle East. The fund has just under $1 trillion in lending capacity across its 191 member countries. Her job, she said on the podcast, is keeping all of them aligned. "The best ammunition we have is objective analysis," she told Bloomberg.The IMF cut its 2026 global growth forecast in April after the Middle East conflict escalated. The next outlook is due in July.The bigger anxiety sits with AI and what it does to labour markets. Georgieva said the fund underestimated how much globalisation hollowed out communities whose jobs vanished, and she is determined not to let that pattern repeat."We collectively, including the fund, did not appreciate the backlash against globalization," she told Bloomberg. "Many communities were hollowed out because their jobs disappeared and there was not enough attention to them. I'll tell you what I'm very keen not to see repeated is the same with artificial intelligence."The warning lines up with her earlier reading of the AI jobs market. At Davos in January, Georgieva called AI a "tsunami" hitting labour markets, with 60% of jobs in advanced economies and 40% globally set to be affected. In February, speaking to NDTV, she pegged India's exposure at around 26% and flagged entry-level roles as the most automatable—and therefore the riskiest for young graduates trying to break in.Georgieva also touched on the IMF's stop-start engagement with Russia. The fund said in 2024 it would resume Article IV reviews of the Russian economy, drawing pushback from several EU states. "It was a very tricky moment because bombing was going in both directions. We decided to delay," she told Bloomberg. The review will restart "at some point," she said, without naming a date.Beyond jobs, the IMF is also flagging AI as a financial stability problem. A May blog post from its financial stability team warned that frontier models—citing Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview—could find and exploit vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser, raising the risk of correlated failures across banks and payment networks.The through-line in Georgieva's message is hard to miss. Shocks are not going away, AI is the next one in the queue, and the policy groundwork has to start now.