Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is the institutional economist of the AI era’s hardest question: not whether large language models work, but whether the institutional infrastructure required to translate their capabilities into durable outcomes for the world’s majority will be built in time. As Nigeria’s Finance Minister, she published a budget—a single act of transparency that exposed the gap between what communities received and what officials spent—and watched it move institutions more than any new law could. As Managing Director of the World Bank, she redirected operations toward implementation capacity rather than project design, recognizing that the chronic failure of development was not a shortage of good ideas but a shortage of institutional infrastructure to execute them. Now, as Director-General of the World Trade Organization, she is reforming a trading system designed for physical goods to accommodate AI-generated value crossing borders at the speed of light.