There is no easy way to say this.
Artificial intelligence is no longer a “Plugin”. It’s the Plumbing.
At Davos 2026, the central narrative across leaders is:
1. AI is now treated as core infrastructure, not just software.
2. The bottlenecks are energy, compute, talent, and institutions, not algorithms.
3. Labour markets are facing a “tsunami” of disruption in advanced economies. Countries and firms will be sorted by AI diffusion and skills, not just by who hosts the biggest models.
4. Legitimacy and trust, not capital, are becoming decisive for the AI race.
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Translated for the Business Leaders:
1. AI must be incorporated in every workflow (amplification and automation) not a nice to have.
2 & 3. AI is only as powerful as brains you have on your team to use it. There is a near perfect correlation between the intelligence of the human, the prompt, and the AI output. Hire and Train accordingly.
4. Trust = Psychological Safety to work together toward the unknown to figure this out in a way that is better for everyone. Without it, those in your charge will think you are working to replace them.
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You cannot keep your head in the sand. AI is disrupting every knowledge and service process. That means the value of those processes are headed to zero.
In the short term, you can win on the Arbitrage,
In the long term it completely changes every job and workflow and remakes markets (Think of what Airbnb did to Hotels).
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If you’re a leader. you have to fight through the nuance and understand what this means for your region, your market, and your capabilities to deliver to that market.
