Is AI Reinforcing Global Talent Inequality?

AI is often described as a levelling force — a technology that would, in principle, make opportunity more accessible regardless of location. In the talent economy, the early evidence suggests the opposite.

AI-mediated hiring, evaluation, and matching systems are trained on data that already reflects unequal geographies. They reward the signals that prestige institutions already produce and penalise the signals that are harder to legibilise. Cities that already concentrate AI expertise attract more of the infrastructure that draws more of that expertise in turn.

The result is not a flat world. It is a sharper one, in which small initial advantages compound into larger spatial concentrations of capability.

What needs attention is not just who AI serves, but where AI is built, which mobility it makes legible, and whose trajectories it renders invisible.