Global Investment Promotion Conference: Promoting and Facilitating Investment in the Era of AI

The next wave of AI is agentic: businesses and investors will soon expect to deal with government through agents. This changes what investment promotion and business facilitation means. IPAs and SEZs are slowly entering the AI era. However, promoting investment is somehow becoming from prospection to AI-based facilitation. On the other hand, the ease of investing in a country will also depend on whether its laws and regulations are machine-readable. UNCTAD has recently surveyed how IPAs are using AI for investment promotion but also has developed a roadmap for the use of AI in investment facilitation: the government publishes its rules once, in a form machines can read. Agents then do the work, finding the rules, explaining them and preparing applications. The agent assists, the official decides.