The Room Where It Shifts

I’ve been going to Davos for seven years now. Long enough to notice patterns. Long enough to know when something feels different.

This year felt different.

Not because of the panels or the headlines. Those are always impressive and always slightly beside the point. Davos has never really been about what happens on stage. It’s about what you pick up in the margins the shift in tone between one year and the next, who’s in the room that wasn’t before, which conversations have moved from theoretical to urgent. Over seven years, those shifts add up into something you can read, if you’re paying attention.

What I’m reading right now is a world that knows the old playbook is broken but hasn’t agreed on the new one.

The Return of the State

Nearly 65 heads of state turned up this January. That’s not normal. In previous years, Davos was dominated by CEOs, investors, and the occasional prime minister doing a lap of the Promenade. This year, governments arrived in force. Several G7 leaders were present. The balance of power in the room had visibly shifted from private capital to sovereign authority.

That tells you something important. When the business class was ascendant, governments came to Davos to court them. Now governments are coming because they’ve realised the stakes are too high to leave the conversation to the market. AI regulation, industrial policy, critical minerals, energy transition these aren’t being left to the private sector to figure out. The state is back, and it’s asserting itself in ways we haven’t seen in a generation.

Mark Carney captured it best when he said nostalgia is not a strategy. He was talking to middle powers, urging them to act rather than wait. But the line applies more broadly. There’s a temptation everywhere in boardrooms, in capitals, in the way we talk about the future to reach for something familiar. The familiar isn’t coming back.

AI Overhang

Every year at Davos there’s a dominant theme that people can’t stop talking about. This year it was AI, again, but the tone had changed. In 2024 and 2025, AI conversations were full of possibility what it could build, what it could unlock. In 2026, the mood was more sober. The question had shifted from what can AI do to who does AI serve.

Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, put it plainly: AI will really test us as a human species. That’s not a throwaway line from a tech founder trying to sound thoughtful. It’s an admission from someone building the thing that the building is outpacing the thinking.

Yuval Noah Harari made the point that this is not an industrial revolution with decades to adjust. The compression of the timeline is the story. We’re making decisions now about training data, about access, about whose languages and cultures get embedded into these systems that will shape power dynamics for decades. And we’re making them fast, mostly in two countries, with remarkably little input from the rest of the world.

Africa contributes less than 1% of global AI research despite representing nearly 20% of the world’s population a share projected to reach one in four people by 2050. That’s not a footnote. That’s a structural exclusion being baked into the most consequential technology of our era. The conversations I had with founders and policymakers from the Global South made clear that people see what’s happening. The window to course-correct is narrow and closing.

The Value of Consistency

One thing I’ve learned from seven years in that environment is that it rewards patience. The introduction you make in year one becomes the partnership that materialises in year three. Trust that would take years to build in normal circumstances accelerates when you’re sharing the same week, the same altitude, the same pressure.

But patience has a prerequisite: you have to actually stand for something. The people who get the most from Davos and frankly from any room where the stakes are high aren’t the ones with the best pitch. They’re the ones whose positions don’t change depending on who they’re talking to. Consistency compounds. Opportunism doesn’t.

That’s true for individuals. It’s true for companies. And I think it’s increasingly true for countries, which is why the values conversation at Davos felt less like corporate posturing this year and more like strategic positioning. Governments are working out what they stand for because they’re realising that in a fragmenting world, clarity of position is a competitive advantage. (More to follow in a fantastic interview I had with Dr. Mandee Rai, author of the Values Compass)

Where Does This Leave Us?

If I had to summarise what seven years of Davos tells me about 2026, it would be this: we’re in a transition that nobody fully controls, and the people who will navigate it best are the ones who are honest about that.

The old certainties American-led globalisation, technology as an unqualified good, growth as the answer to everything are fraying. What replaces them is genuinely open. That’s terrifying for some and energising for others. Probably it should be both.

When Dr. Rai asked me what word I’d choose for 2026, I said hope. Not the naïve kind. The intentional kind. The kind that asks you to reflect, at the end of each day, on what you actually built, who you lifted up, and what you’ll do differently tomorrow.

The future isn’t shaped by the loudest voices. It’s shaped by the most consistent ones. The people who show up, listen carefully, and know what they stand for and act with kindness in their heart.

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