Services have quietly become the fastest-growing part of world trade — and artificial intelligence is now central to both the opportunity and the risk that comes with it. That’s the core message of Global Trade Update: Services are reshaping global trade, but least developed countries lag in digital exports, published in September 2026 by UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
The report tracks a decade-long shift in what the world trades and how, and dedicates a full section to what AI means for that shift. The short version: AI is set to make cross-border services faster and cheaper to deliver, but the countries best placed to capture that gain are, unsurprisingly, the ones that already lead in AI.
Services Are Eating the World’s Trade
Some context first. Services now account for 27% of global exports, up from 23% just a decade ago, and for 71% of all intermediate inputs used in production worldwide — the logistics, finance, design and data work embedded in almost everything that gets manufactured and shipped, whether or not it looks like a “service” on the label. UNCTAD calls this trend servicification: services quietly becoming the connective tissue of global production, present in physical exports even when nobody notices them.
Within that broader services boom, one segment is growing fastest of all: digitally deliverable services — things like software development, data analytics, engineering, financial services and consulting that can be sent across a border as data rather than in a container. These have grown 7.1% a year over the past decade, nearly a full point faster than services trade overall, and now make up 56% of all global services exports.
Where AI Comes In
UNCTAD is explicit that artificial intelligence is now a defining variable in how this digital trade boom unfolds — and not necessarily a levelling one. As the report puts it, AI deployment depends on a combination of advanced digital infrastructure, large-scale computing capacity, access to data, investment capital and highly skilled workers, resources that remain heavily concentrated in a small number of economies and firms.
That concentration shows up starkly in the numbers. Using the IMF’s AI Preparedness Index, UNCTAD finds developed economies scoring an average of 0.65 out of 1, against 0.43 for small island developing states, 0.41 for developing economies generally, and just 0.31 for the least developed countries (LDCs). Fewer than one in three developing countries has even adopted a national AI strategy.
The report’s forecast for AI’s effect on services trade is double-edged. On one hand, AI is expected to boost productivity, spur innovation, and cut the cost of producing and delivering digital services — good news for anyone able to use it. On the other, UNCTAD warns it may automate exactly the routine and lower-skilled digital tasks — data entry, basic support, simple back-office work — that have historically served as many developing countries’ entry point into global services markets. Remove that first rung, and the ladder gets harder to climb.
UNCTAD’s conclusion is unusually direct for a UN trade report: “unless the foundations for broad-based AI adoption are strengthened, the technology may deepen rather than narrow existing development gaps.”
The Gap Is Already Wide — and Widening
The AI risk compounds a digital divide that’s already visible in the data. Digitally deliverable services make up 61% of total services exports in developed economies, but only 16% in LDCs — and that LDC share has been shrinking even as the absolute value of their exports edges up. LDCs’ overall services exports have grown just 3% a year over the past decade, against roughly 6.7% globally, and their share of global services trade has fallen to 0.6%.
The barriers aren’t abstract. Connectivity is costly and patchy across low-income countries; cross-border digital payments are often unsupported by local banking systems; and half the countries with the world’s highest remittance-transfer costs are LDCs. UNCTAD’s own technical cooperation work in the Caribbean found creative-services exporters excluded from major digital payment platforms altogether, unable to monetise what they produce because the financial rails simply don’t reach them.
Trade Rules Haven’t Caught Up Either
Compounding the technology gap is a regulatory one. The report notes that the WTO’s moratorium on customs duties for electronic transmissions — a two-decade-old arrangement that has kept cross-border digital trade duty-free — expired in March 2026 after members failed to agree on renewing it at the WTO’s 14th Ministerial Conference. Progress has since shifted to smaller, overlapping coalitions: 66 WTO members are advancing a plurilateral Agreement on Electronic Commerce, while a separate group of 24 pledged on their own to keep the moratorium alive. Many African countries and LDCs remain outside both efforts, even as bilateral and regional trade agreements race ahead with ever more detailed digital trade provisions — 55% of the 487 preferential trade agreements signed since 2000 now include e-commerce or digital trade rules.
