Best of LinkedIn: World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026

00:00:00: provided by Thomas Allgaier and Frennis, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about WEF annual meeting, twenty twenty six.

00:00:07: Frennis specializes in B to B market research for strategy and consulting teams with a focus on tech.

00:00:13: and ICT.

00:00:14: Welcome back to the deep dive.

00:00:16: Today, we are heading up the mountain.

00:00:18: We're going to strip back all the noise and really look at the strategy and consulting trends coming out of Davos, twenty twenty six.

00:00:24: And before we dive into the big topics and believe me, there are some heavy ones, we should probably set the scene a little.

00:00:30: Yeah,

00:00:30: the vibe was.

00:00:32: different.

00:00:32: It really was.

00:00:33: If you're picturing that snowy postcard, well, Joan Guy called it a no snow Davos.

00:00:38: It was literally warm.

00:00:40: And that feels like a pretty good metaphor for the mood in the room.

00:00:42: It does.

00:00:43: We went through, I mean, tons of posts from people on the ground, consultants, CEOs, you name it.

00:00:48: And the feeling wasn't optimistic or pessimistic.

00:00:50: It was just pragmatic.

00:00:52: Right.

00:00:52: The official theme was a spirit of dialogue.

00:00:55: But the real subtext, I mean, the thing people were actually talking about was execution and resilience.

00:00:59: It feels like the age of the big visionary keynote is sort of dead.

00:01:04: Nobody's there for the promise of twenty thirty anymore.

00:01:07: They're just trying to get through twenty twenty six.

00:01:09: Exactly.

00:01:09: The patience for fluff has just evaporated.

00:01:13: With all the geopolitical tension, which we'll get to and the economic pressures, the whole conversation has moved from what if to how now.

00:01:21: It's about operational reality.

00:01:23: Okay,

00:01:23: so we've got a lot to cover.

00:01:25: We've broken it down into four main themes.

00:01:27: We'll hit AI shift from hype to action, the very tense global landscape, the physical cost of all this tech, and finally, how leadership has to change.

00:01:36: And we have to start with AI.

00:01:38: It's the obvious one.

00:01:39: But this isn't the same AI talk from a couple years ago.

00:01:41: The hype cycle is definitely over.

00:01:43: This is theme one.

00:01:45: From hype

00:01:45: to agentic execution.

00:01:47: And that word, agentic, doing a lot of work.

00:01:50: For anyone listening who's hearing that buzzword in every pitch deck, what does it actually mean here?

00:01:54: Well,

00:01:54: think about it like this.

00:01:55: We used to have chatbots.

00:01:56: You ask, it answers, it's passive.

00:01:58: It waits for you.

00:01:59: Right.

00:02:00: Agentic AI has agency.

00:02:02: It can take action, it can execute tasks, it can complete workflows all on its own.

00:02:07: It's the difference between, you know, a tool and an employee.

00:02:11: And Vivian Way had a really... sharp take on this.

00:02:14: She said the big story isn't large language models anymore.

00:02:17: In fact, she pretty much called them commodities.

00:02:20: Which is a huge market shift.

00:02:21: A few years ago, the model was the product.

00:02:24: Now it's a utility like electricity.

00:02:26: Way's point is.

00:02:27: the real story is AI operationalization, embedding it into the actual workflow.

00:02:33: so it does something.

00:02:34: She gave a great example that really makes it click.

00:02:36: She talked about EVA, the WF's own AI concierge.

00:02:40: Right, and this wasn't just some FAQ bot.

00:02:43: EVA handled seventy-five percent of attendee requests, autonomously.

00:02:47: And we're not talking simple questions.

00:02:49: We're talking about rescheduling meetings between high-level people, coordinating calendars, delivering briefs.

00:02:54: That's the agentic part.

00:02:55: It didn't just tell you the meeting moved, it moved it.

00:02:57: It went into the calendar, found a new slot, checked the other person, and confirmed it.

00:03:02: That's a live system at scale.

00:03:03: Precisely.

00:03:05: But, and this is a critical but that came up, just because the tech can do it doesn't mean companies are ready.

00:03:11: Dr.

00:03:12: Florian Mueller raised a really interesting flag about what he calls the micro productivity trap.

00:03:18: This concept really stood out to me.

00:03:20: It's the idea that we're using this revolutionary tech to do the same old things.

00:03:25: just a little bit faster.

00:03:26: It's the classic mistake.

00:03:28: Mueller says most companies are patting themselves on the back because AI writes their emails twenty percent faster.

00:03:34: That's a micro productivity.

00:03:36: If your process is broken, doing it faster just means you fail faster.

00:03:39: You're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

00:03:42: While your competitor is building a speedboat, that's the trap.

00:03:45: You feel productive, but you aren't creating new value.

00:03:48: Mihir Shuklu was on the same page, right?

00:03:50: He said, we need a real commitment to applied AI.

00:03:53: Yeah, his point was that if you're still just running pilots in twenty twenty six, you're already behind.

00:03:57: The sandbox phase is over.

00:03:59: It's time to redesign entire value chains around these agents.

00:04:03: OK, but this raises the massive workforce question.

00:04:06: If EVA is doing seventy five percent of the work of a coordinator.

00:04:10: What happens to the coordinator?

00:04:11: The

00:04:11: rules are just changing, fundamentally.

00:04:14: Gina Varju Brewer from SAP framed it as human AI power couples.

00:04:19: Sounds a little like a reality show, but I see the point.

00:04:21: It's functional.

00:04:22: It's about AI handling the speed and scale and humans providing judgment and context.

00:04:28: Vivian Way actually gave this new job a name, Agent Managers.

00:04:31: Agent Managers.

00:04:32: So your job is to manage the bot that does the job.

00:04:35: Basically,

00:04:36: yeah.

00:04:36: You supervise, you check the output, you handle the exceptions.

00:04:39: But this creates a huge new problem, which Helen Oakley flagged.

00:04:43: The governance

00:04:44: gap.

00:04:44: A massive gap.

00:04:45: Oakley said confidence in AI is high, you know, seventy to eighty percent of execs get it.

00:04:50: But there is zero clarity on ownership.

00:04:52: If an agent makes a bad trade or denies a loan,

00:04:54: who's responsible?

00:04:55: Is it the manager?

00:04:57: The CIO.

00:04:58: The vendor.

00:04:58: Nobody knows.

00:04:59: And Oakley's point is you can't scale what you can't govern.

00:05:02: If you don't know who goes to jail when it goes wrong, you can't roll it out.

00:05:05: It becomes a legal problem, not a tech one.

00:05:07: And you definitely can't roll it out if you're feeding it bad data.

00:05:12: Patrick O'Pongrats threw some cold water on a lot of these AI strategies.

00:05:16: Necessary

00:05:17: cold water, I think.

00:05:18: He pointed out that so many strategies fail because they're built on batch data.

00:05:23: Which, for anyone not deep in tech, just means old data.

00:05:26: From yesterday or last week.

00:05:27: Exactly.

00:05:28: And Pongrats used a brilliant analogy.

00:05:30: He said running an AI agent on batch data is like driving a Formula One car with a map from last Tuesday.

00:05:36: You're going two hundred miles an hour.

00:05:38: but you're steering based on where the curve used to be.

00:05:40: A recipe for a crash.

00:05:41: You need real time data.

00:05:43: Avinash Vashistha took it even further.

00:05:45: He said, we're in the era of the AI native enterprise.

00:05:47: He came up with a new metric too, intelligence velocity.

00:05:50: Which

00:05:51: I guarantee you is going to be in every consulting deck by next quarter.

00:05:54: The old model was cost per seat.

00:05:56: The new one is intelligence velocity.

00:05:58: How fast can you turn data into a decision?

00:06:00: Speed is everything.

00:06:02: So that's the internal picture.

00:06:03: Agentic AI, a need for speed.

00:06:06: a governance mess, but this is all happening while outside the world is getting, well, pretty aggressive.

00:06:13: Which is our theme too, the geopolitical landscape.

00:06:16: The Global Risks Report literally calls this the age of competition.

00:06:20: And you could feel it in Davos.

00:06:22: Yeah.

00:06:22: Klaus Schmeinsberg used the word angst to describe the mood.

00:06:26: Angst is perfect.

00:06:27: Yeah.

00:06:27: There was real anxiety about the US president's arrival, and this wasn't just about diplomacy, it was about the business environment.

00:06:34: John Stackhouse noted the US is now actively shaping the agenda, not just participating.

00:06:39: And the pivot is away from stakeholder capitalism.

00:06:42: And toward aggressive growth and AI-driven disruption.

00:06:46: The gloves are off.

00:06:47: Ornick L, who goes by Mimee, she pointed out that economic power is now just being used as a weapon.

00:06:52: It's not just about tariffs anymore.

00:06:54: It's about fragmenting trade using market access as a political tool.

00:06:59: Julio Romo connected this to corporate finance in a fascinating way.

00:07:03: He said, reputation is now a cost of capital.

00:07:06: That's a huge insight for any CFO listening.

00:07:08: He's saying your geopolitical position directly affects your borrowing costs.

00:07:12: Market access is political.

00:07:13: If you're seen on the wrong side of a dispute, your risk premium shoots up.

00:07:16: So you can't just look at the P&L.

00:07:18: You have to look at the map.

00:07:19: Pierre-Marie called it building a geopolitical muscle.

00:07:23: He says companies need to embed this kind of risk analysis into their core strategy.

00:07:27: It's not a PR issue anymore.

00:07:29: It's a survival skill.

00:07:31: But there's a more invisible layer to this competition.

00:07:34: Angelika Sher Regina and Tyler S brought up securing cognitive space.

00:07:40: This is the really scary stuff.

00:07:41: Tyler S noted that cyber insecurity is number six on the global risks list, but it's not just about hacking a power grid anymore.

00:07:49: It's about hacking the public conversation.

00:07:51: AI enabled misinformation.

00:07:53: At a scale, humans just can't counter.

00:07:56: Sherry Jean's point is we have to defend against it.

00:07:58: It's a new domain of warfare.

00:08:00: If you can destabilize a country by flooding it with lies, you don't need missiles.

00:08:04: It's terrifying.

00:08:05: AI agents running our companies and hostile AI is hacking our reality.

00:08:09: And this is the big but.

00:08:11: None of this digital world exists without the physical world.

00:08:14: And that brings us to theme three.

00:08:16: Theme three.

00:08:18: Energy, industry, and planetary boundaries.

00:08:21: The cloud isn't actually in the sky, is it?

00:08:23: It's in a data center.

00:08:24: A

00:08:24: very, very hungry data center.

00:08:26: Benoit Bego had some sobering numbers.

00:08:28: We have over eleven thousand of them now.

00:08:32: Drawing more than sixty gigawatts of power.

00:08:34: and the water use.

00:08:35: That's what got me.

00:08:36: He said semiconductor manufacturing uses over a trillion liters of fresh water a year.

00:08:41: One trillion liters.

00:08:44: In a world with water shortages, this is the collision.

00:08:47: You can't have infinite digital growth on a finite planet.

00:08:51: The physics wins eventually.

00:08:52: We'll eat.

00:08:53: cheetah connected this to the grid.

00:08:55: He said electricity demand in the Middle East and Africa is set to triple.

00:08:59: And the grids just aren't ready.

00:09:01: He's saying we have to use AI to make them more efficient, but that takes huge investment.

00:09:04: It's a chicken and egg problem.

00:09:06: And Kim Hedegard pointed to the money bottleneck.

00:09:08: He said we have to de-risk first-of-a-kind projects.

00:09:12: You hear that term a lot in heavy industry.

00:09:15: First of a kind.

00:09:16: Thanks.

00:09:16: Hate it.

00:09:17: Too much risk.

00:09:18: Hedegard is saying we need to make these big green infrastructure projects bankable, turn dialogue into delivery.

00:09:24: It feels

00:09:24: like the only way out is collaboration.

00:09:26: Michael Camerilango had a really nice line for this.

00:09:28: Great places don't compete, they complete.

00:09:30: Complete.

00:09:31: I like that.

00:09:32: Like organs in a body.

00:09:33: The heart doesn't compete with the lungs.

00:09:35: He's arguing cities and industries need to integrate.

00:09:38: Waste heat from a data center warms the local houses, that kind of thing.

00:09:42: But

00:09:42: Anne Chevrier pointed out a bitter irony here.

00:09:45: She did.

00:09:46: It's the paradox of our time.

00:09:48: Innovation cooperation is rising.

00:09:50: We're sharing open source AI.

00:09:52: But peace and security cooperation is collapsing.

00:09:56: We're building a shared digital brain while we build walls around our countries.

00:10:00: That's

00:10:00: the tension right there.

00:10:02: Technically integrated, politically disintegrated.

00:10:04: Okay, so let's pull this together.

00:10:06: We've got AI that demands a new way of working, a world that demands a new way of strategizing, and a planet that demands a new way of building, who on Earth can lead through all this.

00:10:16: And that's our final theme.

00:10:18: Theme four.

00:10:19: leadership and the human element.

00:10:20: The consensus seems to be that the hero CEO model is broken.

00:10:23: Neha Cabra had a great analogy.

00:10:25: She said we should think of modern CEOs less like geniuses and more like elite athletes.

00:10:30: It makes perfect sense.

00:10:31: It's not just about talent on game day.

00:10:33: It's about training cycles, nutrition, and, you know, recovery.

00:10:37: And recovery is the part corporate culture always ignores.

00:10:41: We celebrate burnout.

00:10:42: Cabra says that's dangerous.

00:10:44: She talks about decision hygiene.

00:10:46: An exhausted leader is a noisy leader.

00:10:48: They over control.

00:10:49: They create panic.

00:10:50: You don't need intensity in a crisis.

00:10:52: You need endurance.

00:10:53: You also need decency.

00:10:55: Shelly Zales talked about FQ, the female quotient, but she had another one.

00:10:59: DQ.

00:11:00: The decency quotient.

00:11:02: We've got IQ, EQ, now DQ.

00:11:03: Is that just another buzzword?

00:11:05: I don't think so.

00:11:06: Zales argues decency and resilience are strategic assets.

00:11:10: In a world this anxious, a leader without decency just won't keep their best people.

00:11:15: It's a retention tool.

00:11:16: And Rachel Kednack added a critical point about who is actually building all this stuff.

00:11:20: She warned that the rooms where AI is built don't look like the world that AI affects.

00:11:25: Which

00:11:25: goes right back to risk.

00:11:27: If you have a homogenous team building your AI, you are baking their blind spots right into the code.

00:11:32: Diversity isn't just nice to have, it's a quality control mechanism.

00:11:36: So for someone listening, maybe not a CEO yet, what's the practical advice to navigate all this?

00:11:40: Triennel, Chef, had the most practical, unglamorous tip of all.

00:11:45: Relentless follow-up.

00:11:46: It's not sexy, is it?

00:11:47: But she says it's what separates the talkers from the doers.

00:11:51: Execution compounds.

00:11:53: In a world full of big ideas, the person who actually sends the email and closes the loop is the one who gets things done.

00:11:59: We've all felt that.

00:12:00: It's true.

00:12:01: And

00:12:01: finally, Alina Bull completely flipped the script on networking.

00:12:05: We always think, what can I get?

00:12:07: Right.

00:12:08: Who do I need to meet in this room?

00:12:09: Exactly.

00:12:10: Bull says, stop that.

00:12:11: Ask, what do I bring to this room?

00:12:13: Focus on contribution.

00:12:14: That's a much healthier and... Frankly, a more powerful way to operate.

00:12:17: It is.

00:12:18: And in a world where an AI can get you any information, your unique human contribution is the only thing left that has real value.

00:12:26: OK, so let's try to recap.

00:12:27: We've gone from the what of AI to the messy operational how.

00:12:32: We've mapped a world where economics is a weapon and our attention is a battleground.

00:12:37: We've hit the physical limits of our digital dreams.

00:12:39: And we've learned that leadership is now an endurance sport that requires decency.

00:12:44: It's a lot.

00:12:45: But if I had to boil it down, it's this.

00:12:48: Reality is back.

00:12:49: The years of hyper over.

00:12:51: Twenty-twenty-six is about the hard, granular work of making things work in a world that's breaking apart.

00:12:57: Which leaves me with one final thought for you to chew on.

00:13:00: We talked about agent managers and human AI power couples.

00:13:04: But if an AI like EVA is already handling seventy-five percent of your tasks,

00:13:09: I think I see where you're going with this.

00:13:10: Are we just training the AI to do our old jobs?

00:13:13: Or are we being forced to evolve into the kind of strategic human leaders that an AI simply can't replace?

00:13:20: Because if your job is just the tasks, the clock is ticking very, very loudly.

00:13:24: That's the question that should drive everything we do from here on out.

00:13:27: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:13:30: Also check out our other editions on private equity, venture capital, strategy and consulting and M&A.

00:13:36: Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe.