AI is rapidly transforming financial services, from credit decisioning and fraud detection to investment access and financial planning. For wealthy and well-connected consumers, this shift promises more personalized products, lower costs, and faster service.

For the unbanked and underserved across North America, however, the outcome is less certain. AI could become the most powerful tool for financial inclusion in history, expanding access to credit, banking, and wealth-building opportunities. Or it could create a new layer of algorithmic exclusion, embedding existing inequities into automated systems that are harder to see and harder to challenge.

North America is at a decision point. The region can allow AI to accelerate financial inequality, or it can use AI as an infrastructure layer to help close the gap. The NCF community—positioned at the intersection of finance, technology, and cross-border policy, and grounded in a nonpartisan, solution-oriented approach—is uniquely positioned to help shape that choice. NCF includes experts, thought leaders, and voices that are crossing borders—both international and interpersonal—that are collectively setting an agenda for what North America does next to prepare for a world powered by AI.

The leaders assembled at the NCF need to match this moment with the collective urgency it requires. While we face one of the most consequential technologies in human history, this is not our first encounter with transformative technology. 

Across history, technological revolutions have reshaped society, commerce, and progress in every sector. By most accounts, humanity has already moved through four industrial revolutions and is now entering a fifth.

With hindsight, we can see both sides of that history: the prosperity technology helped create and the people it left behind. We also know that previous transformations could have been designed to do less harm. Policymakers and industry leaders could have better protected children and women, paid workers more fairly, improved safety in hazardous jobs, expanded education, and closed the digital divide sooner. 

The question before us now is simple: Knowing what we know, are we willing to do better this time?

On June 7, 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy delivered a speech that captured the central tension of industrial revolutions: their power to generate prosperity while also deepening poverty. 

He started his speech, “Today we stand on the threshold of a new industrial revolution— the revolution of automation. This is a revolution bright with the hope of a new prosperity for labor and a new abundance for America—but it is also a revolution which carries the dark menace of industrial dislocation, increasing unemployment, and deepening poverty.”

Kennedy’s speech addressed automation, the defining force of the third industrial revolution. But the revolution that came before it helped create one of the most powerful engines of modern economic growth: the middle class. 

The second industrial revolution moved the children of farmers into urban centers, where new industries created demand for white-collar work: business managers, bankers, accountants, lawyers, teachers, doctors, merchants, and others. Together, the second and third industrial revolutions formed the bridge to the economy we know today.

Now, the very jobs those revolutions helped create are at risk. AI is not simply changing how work gets done; it is challenging the foundations of the professional and middle-class employment model that earlier waves of innovation made possible.

Today, we still live in a human-directed, computer-assisted society. But we are moving quickly toward an AI-directed, human-assisted one. If that shift is not managed carefully, people will no longer use machines as tools; they will be shaped, directed, and displaced by them. In a region as deeply integrated as North America—across communication, commerce, industrial production, and culture—this disruption will not stop at one border. It will be felt by all.

That should alarm us—but it should also focus us. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment, and North America needs a practical agenda for governing AI before its effects are fully embedded across our economy and society.

Let’s make the following priorities as this technology scales across our region: 

• Require transparency and safety. Policymakers should insist on clear, open standards for AI systems that affect the economy and society. There should be no surprises in how these tools make decisions or distribute risk. Policy should enable less panic and more preparation.

• Coordinate across the region. North America’s supply chains, data flows, trade networks, and communications systems are deeply connected. Once AI systems are embedded across those networks, they will be difficult to unwind.This is the first industrial revolution in which the region can begin from a shared starting point—and it should not waste that advantage.

• Commit to leaving no one behind. Public education must be treated as core infrastructure for the AI era. The slower we move to help people understand and use this technology, the more likely we are to repeat the mistakes of past industrial revolutions. AI will touch every part of society, and access to its benefits cannot be limited to the already connected. Everyone must be included in this era of AI.

In this pivotal moment, the choices we make regarding AI's integration into our financial systems will define the future landscape of prosperity and equality in North America. Let us harness this revolutionary technology for our collective upliftment, ensuring that no one is left behind.