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As AI accelerates across borders, business leaders confront geopolitical competition, security threats, governance gaps, and the growing need for independent verification.
Artificial intelligence is transforming global industries, intensifying international competition and challenging existing governance frameworks. As businesses and policymakers navigate its rapid development, questions surrounding technological leadership, public safety, and economic advantage are becoming more urgent. From corporate boardrooms to technology infrastructure, AI is emerging as a global strategic concern, with its future not only promising innovation but also international cooperation amid competing national interests.
AI’s Evolution and the Slowdown Debate
Fernando Marcano, digital strategist and founder of fer.marketing, has watched AI evolve from a basic search tool into technology that now resembles science fiction. He recalls how newer models began demonstrating capabilities beyond conventional information retrieval.
” The 3.5 to 4 things started to get interesting because they were not feeling like a shuffling thing anymore… today, if we come to the present, it’s almost like sci-fi in the sense, you know, like when you see Iron Man, like Tony Stark talking to the computer, that kind of feeling,” he said.
Marcano remains skeptical of calls to slow development, describing them as a recurring media cycle.
“The slowing down AI, it seemed to me that was something people talked for like a week online, and then it vanished. Like they were like, oh, this time we have the most dangerous model. We have the most critical, the craziest update. We cannot release this. Oh, my God. But then they go like, okay, here it is.”
He sees the debate against the backdrop of global capitalism, where competitive pressure drives technological advancement.
“From the capitalism point of view, that’s how it is. It’s just a reflection of the time we’re living in. But if you go back in history, it’s always the same. Like if you don’t manufacture these cars, these competitors will win. And that’s kind of the name of the game.”
The Challenge of Global Verification
Artur Yolchyan, founder of Aland Cloud, an AWS Partner consulting firm specializing in healthcare and FinTech, has seen AI transform software development. Tasks that once required humans to copy and paste code can now be performed autonomously, including developing minimum viable products (MVPs).
He believes the next phase could make software creation increasingly automated.
“In over three, four years, you see like you don’t even need the human to copy paste it, it can do it itself, especially MVPs… it has changed a lot in the last four or five years. And I think in the next four or five years, we will see like, you can tell, make me this software and it will simply make it.”
However, slowing development requires international participation.
“All companies should come together and slow down if this is the decision. Otherwise, if someone keeps doing it, then it’s really not to slow down, but rather taking over and speeding up the things,” Yolchyan said.
He points to Cold War nuclear agreements as a possible precedent, arguing that countries need a framework based on mutual trust and verification.
“There was an example like when Soviet and US agreed to reduce the number of atomic weapons available in their arsenal, and they trusted each other but verified, and I think that will be another challenge; the framework should be in place, how you should verify that actually the other side is not developing it.”
The AI Arms Race and Model Diversity
For Gabe Arce, CEO of AgentShelf.ai, the AI arms race has moved beyond speculation. He points to malicious actors using AI agents to identify vulnerabilities and target industries and agencies.
“If it wasn’t clear that there is a bit of an arm race, I think there’s no longer any ambiguity around that now… we are already seeing bad actors using AI — more specifically, AI agents to go out and search for vulnerabilities and start to target certain industries, certain agencies. There are bad actors out there who are harnessing this technology, so now there’s a race and there’s a higher sense of urgency,” he said.
His company addresses another international concern: dependence on individual AI providers. Its no-code infrastructure enables organizations to build, manage, distribute, and share AI agents without programming expertise.
Arce emphasizes the importance of “Model dexterity, not locking yourself into a single model provider or single model family, is super important as we move forward… if a government blocks the usage of a particular family, a particular provider, well, then that becomes an issue. Our European customers noticed as well — we were using Fable, the Anthropic model, and then all of a sudden we lost access because of the government restrictions.”
He also highlights how AI agents can expand organizational capabilities.
“We have built an infrastructure layer to allow organizations and teams to be able to build, manage, distribute, and share their AI agents without needing to know how to code… a single human can go ahead and deploy not just one or two agents to do activity, they can build entire teams of agents to go out and do whatever they need to do.”
Intelligence Versus Evidence
Arjun Jaggi, technology strategist and founder of Project ZORP, identifies a growing contradiction in AI’s expansion: access to intelligence is becoming cheaper, but establishing reliable evidence remains difficult.
“Intelligence is cheap now, but evidence is not. What we see with a lot of these LLMs is they are good with coming up with confident answers sometimes which are completely wrong… Hallucinations are for real. The most important thing right now in the market is critical thinking, is having your expertise, having your domain knowledge, expedite at a speed of light by leveraging AI,” he said.
Jaggi advocates a UN-style global AI governance board to establish common ethical guidelines.
“There has to be an AI board, which is a global board. Like we have UN and all that for other issues, but I think this artificial intelligence and technology industry in general moves really fast — we need to have some sort of a framework or some sort of guidelines from all these big labs as well as political leaders of how to maneuver things on the ground in the next five to 10 years.”
He also sees opportunities in Small Language Models operating locally on laptops, alongside physical AI applications. His ZORP initiative explores local AI processing, while he anticipates advances in autonomous vehicles, robotics and smart homes.
“One of my initiatives is called ZORP — we have small language models running on your laptop… what if we can do all of that heavy lifting on the laptop without having to pay for it? Another area I see is how close we are stepping into physical AI. Things are stepping into physical AI in the next couple of years — getting into fully automated cars, robotics, smart homes.”
AI Slowdown as Business Strategy
Gilberto Herrera, founder of Profitable Pro, Inc., approaches the slowdown debate from a business perspective. He questions whether corporate calls for restraint are driven entirely by public safety, suggesting that monetization and shareholder expectations also influence decisions.
“These are CEOs, and a lot of them are trying to IPO… If we can’t control this, we can’t fully monetize it the way we want to. I don’t necessarily think they’re looking out for the best interest of the public. I really think they are pumping the brakes because something’s going on in the background that we don’t have any knowledge of. They answer to shareholders and they answer to a board, and the board looks at spreadsheets, their goal is to ensure that they stay profitable.”
“The headline says 16.3 billion in revenue and 80.7 billion in net losses… So that could be your answer. The president is saying, hey, we need to be right on par with these other countries, because they’re already light years ahead of us in technology and all these other sectors,” Herrera added.
Herrera’s own firm uses AI to help solopreneurs automate administrative responsibilities, including follow-ups, chatbots, and AI receptionists. He believes automation lets business owners focus on strategic priorities rather than routine tasks.
“We leverage AI, especially with solopreneurs, to take things off their plate — like follow-ups and chatbots and AI receptionists — pretty much figuring out how we can automate the things, the grunt work, as we call it. You as a CEO need to be carrying a mission and a vision of this company. There’s a tool that we can leverage that can help you manage your email and follow up on emails without you having to think about it.”
A Global Future Requires Cooperation
AI’s international trajectory reflects a widening gap between technological progress and the frameworks governing it. Competition, security, verification, and commercial interests are shaping decisions across borders. As these leaders illustrate, addressing AI’s future will require more than technological advancement: it will demand accountability, adaptability, and international dialogue.
