How countries can end the capability overhang

AI is advancing at extraordinary speed, but many countries are not yet leveraging its full potential to benefit people and drive economic growth. There is a capability overhang between those who are taking advantage of these tools and everybody else. If that overhang continues to grow, a small number of countries will pull further ahead economically and technologically, while others risk falling behind in ways that will be difficult to reverse.

New research we’re releasing today in our report, Ending the Capability Overhang⁠(opens in a new window), shows how large this overhang has already become. The typical power user relies on about seven times more advanced “thinking capabilities” than the typical user—using AI for more complex, multi-step work rather than simple prompts.

We also observe a clear country-level gap, and it isn’t driven by income alone. Across more than 70 countries with the highest ChatGPT usage, some countries use 3× more thinking capabilities per person than others. While large economies like the United States and India lead in total users—and smaller high-income countries like Singapore and the Netherlands stand out in population penetration—advanced AI adoption is not confined to wealthy nations. Countries such as Vietnam and Pakistan rank among the world’s top users of agentic tools, with more than 2× higher per-person use of advanced tasks like data analysis, Connectors, and Codex.

Put plainly, this means some countries are already using AI to solve harder problems and move faster, regardless of how many resources they have. These differences already translate into real productivity gains, freeing people to take on harder tasks, build new products and services, and accelerate innovation in ways that drive economic growth and improve living standards.