Futures from the global south are not a smaller copy of the north
Most published futures work is written from a handful of cities. The constraints that shape technology adoption across India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East produce a genuinely different set of futures — and they are worth designing for on their own terms.
The dominant story about AI is written from a small number of places. It assumes abundant capital, mature cloud spend, stable regulation and a workforce that has been digital for two decades. Read enough of it and you start to believe there is one adoption curve and everyone is somewhere on it.
That is not what we see in the markets we work in. Across India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, organisations are not late arrivals to someone else's curve. They are running a different one, shaped by different constraints, and in several categories they are ahead.
Constraint is the design brief
Mobile-first was not an aesthetic decision here; it was the only decision. Public digital infrastructure — identity, payments, data exchange — arrived before most enterprise software modernised, so the integration surface is inverted compared with the west. Talent density is high and concentrated, but institutional process is often young enough to be redesigned rather than retrofitted.
Each of those is usually described as a limitation. In practice they compress the distance between an idea and a live product. A financial services client of ours moved 80% of trading activity to mobile not because a strategy deck said so, but because the constraint made the alternative unthinkable.
“Scarcity produces sharper design decisions than abundance ever has. The global south has been designing under constraint for a generation.”
What this means for AI programmes
Copying a northern AI roadmap into a southern organisation produces predictable failure: heavy platform spend, long horizons, and a pilot portfolio nobody can point at six months later. The sequencing has to change.
- Start where the volume is — high-frequency, low-margin operations, not the executive dashboard.
- Design for intermittent connectivity, multilingual input and shared devices as first-class conditions, not accessibility afterthoughts.
- Assume regulation will arrive after the product, and build the audit trail early so it does not become a rewrite.
- Treat public digital infrastructure as a platform to build on, not a compliance obligation to satisfy.
Why we publish this
Futures from the Global South is the strand of our research where this argument gets made in public — as a newsletter, and increasingly on video. It is not regional boosterism. It is a working position: the most instructive AI transformations of the next five years will happen in markets that were not writing the playbook.
