If you were looking for a totemic representation of a world balanced on the point of transition, you could hardly do better than look at the recent gathering of the global elite in Davos. The 2020s have destroyed the neoliberal order that defined the first two decades of this century, and the central meeting around which that world order revolved suddenly seems less relevant.
This was the first annual meeting not to be under the aegis of founder, and decades-long chair, Klaus Schwab, who departed in April last year, pursued by a whistleblower’s allegations – which he disputes. Suddenly, this annual point of stability was up in the air – with the Financial Times reporting that there is even some discussion about moving the meeting from Davos, although this has been denied. (A move might be a relief to some of the staff – while interviewing for a job at the WEF, one staffer warned me that attendance was mandatory, as was sharing a bedroom with multiple of my prospective colleagues. Avoiding that was one point of comfort when I didn’t get the job…)
And, indeed, if you only follow the headlines in the more mainstream media, one might think the meeting was completely dominated by the US President. He has a remarkable ability to suck all the attention from the room — rather ironically at a gathering whose motto was “A Spirit of Dialogue”. But digging behind the Trumpian noise, there were plenty of themes emerging that are worth our attention.
The substantive conversation happening elsewhere in the Swiss town gravitated towards the less polarising but more important structural dilemmas. Stripped of geopolitical distraction, four themes stand out:
- how artificial intelligence reshapes labour and trust;
- how cooperation works when trust is scarce and polarisation abundant;
- how we reimagine growth beyond traditional metrics;
- and how human capital assumes new strategic significance.
These are very much NEXT topics — some of them quite familiar ones. Let’s dig in:
The AI question isn’t “what can it do?” — it’s “how do make make use of it?”
Is it possible to have a conference or gathering without a focus on AI? Apparently not, because it was high on the agenda again this year. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva framed the discussion bluntly. AI is not an abstract innovation, but a force capable of reshaping labour markets at scale. She warned that around 60% of jobs in advanced economies and 40% globally will be “enhanced, transformed, or displaced” by AI. Alarmingly, this is likely to lead to particularly acute disruption for young and entry-level workers. This is not evolution, but a tsunami that will reshape the structure of work. Or, at least, that’s one view.
It’s worth noting, though, that there was a wide disparity of views on how bad the impact on jobs would be.
What emerged was a familiar, to NEXT Insights readers at least, call for preparedness. We cannot uninvent AI, so instead we must learn the lessons of recent decades of tech disruption. We can and must control how we allow the technology to reshape our society, and manage the impacts as they arise.
As the WEF puts it in the announcement of its Scaling Trustworthy AI into Global Practice report:
Trustworthy AI has evolved from an abstract aspiration to an operational necessity. As generative AI systems shape health, finance and public services, societies recognize that ethical principles such as fairness, transparency and accountability must become practical frameworks guiding real-world technologies.
Leaders from industry echoed similar concerns. Panels on AI and the future of work stressed that AI’s promise will be realised not through its raw power. Instead, the defining factor will be how it is deployed alongside human skills. Or even to enhance them.
The policy implications are profound. If 2030’s labour markets are shaped more by how we educate, reskill and empower people in an age of ambient AI than by breakthroughs in LLMs, then our political and corporate discourse must catch up.
AI is no longer an emerging innovation; it is a governance and societal problem writ large. We’ll need global co-operation to deal with this. Which is bad news, as that’s not exactly our strength right now.
Building cooperation in a world of fragile trust
If AI probes into the cracks left by the stresses of societies internally, the Davos discussion highlighted a wider external tension: how we manage cooperation under strain.
The Forum’s own publications framed one of the central questions for 2026 as “How can we cooperate in a more contested world?” — an acknowledgement that multilateralism no longer runs on autopilot, if it runs at all. Globalisation as a defining approach to politics is crumbling under the assault of geopolitical rivalry, regional blocs, and competitive national agendas.
According to the programme overview for this year’s gathering:
This new era is defined by contested norms, shifting alliances, and the erosion of trust. As volatility and compounding risks intensify, organizations of all types must now continuously adapt to a highly complex set of dynamics.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its nature, the tone of Davos 2026 was pragmatic: cooperation will persist, but not on the old terms. We need to build functional multilateralism — networks of collaboration tailored to specific problems we can’t avoid, and so must confront — such as climate resilience, supply chain stability, and public health.
This suggests that the future of global order will leave grand pacts behind, and focus on the quality of connective infrastructure between states and sectors. Institutional trust is not a given; it is difficult to build, and easy to shatter. And we clearly need a rebuilding effort right now.
Rethinking growth in an era of unpredictability
Economic growth is a concept as old as modern economics itself. For decades, the only question that seemed to matter was how fast GDP could grow; now, we find ourselves asking what kind of growth is meaningful.
Davos 2026 did not abandon growth as a political and corporate ideal. Heaven forbid. The Davos crowd are amongst the least likely globally to embrace degrowth. Indeed, one of the themes of the conference was explicitly the search for new sources of growth:
The outlook will increasingly depend on the ability of economies to not only confront near-term shocks but also harness innovation to boost long-term productivity. Moreover, economic policy should remain attuned to the workforce and the public at large, ensuring that the benefits of growth reach and reward more people.
But that last clause is worth examining, as it starts to challenge existing wisdom. Sessions and side events repeatedly linked growth to sustainability, resilience, inclusivity, and capability building — rather than our traditional short-term output metrics. This subtext was dangerously close to text: traditional models of growth — reliant on demand stimulus and incremental productivity gains — are encountering real limits from demographic shifts, environmental constraints, technological changes, and a negative reaction from populations who don’t feel they are benefiting from it.
Growth + Resilience = ?
Two elements of this shift stood out:
- Re-embedding growth within resilient systems: Rather than treating economic expansion as a natural consequence of innovation, growth is something that must be engineered — through industrial strategy and public-private investment in foundational sectors (like clean energy and digital infrastructure). And AI is particularly infrastructure-heavy in its demands. There was plenty of talk about the need for AI infrastructure build-out.
- Expanding success metrics: GDP growth is no longer the sole scoreboard. The Davos-goers are increasingly talking about resilience indicators — workforce adaptability, energy security, institutional trust — as complementary measures of progress. The lessons of Covid and Ukraine, harsh as they were, are being learned.
While it’s lovely to see other people come around to our way of thinking and start to hug the system, this is not before time. Events have tested the resilience of many systems and found them wanting. But, in those failures, the importance of these often underestimated systems has been made clear. Here’s the IMF’s Georgieva again:
My message to everybody is learn to think of the unthinkable and then stay calm, the world now is truly, genuinely multi-polar. Technology is moving so rapidly, changes are happening so fast, what is surprising in this story is the incredible resilience of the world economy.
But, of course, redefining growth is not the same thing as abandoning growth, as the same article mentions:
“For humans, standing still is not an option”, said Guy Parmelin, President of the Swiss Confederation in his opening remarks as he quoted philosopher Henri Bergson, “to exist is to change”.
Success in the 2030s may be defined not by quarterly GDP numbers, but by how well economies absorb shocks, integrate technological change, and broaden economic participation – while still making numbers go up.
Human capital as strategic infrastructure
Perhaps the most consequential shift at Davos 2026 was the attempt to reposition people away from the role of passive victims of change. Instead, we need them to be active parts of the infrastructure of future systems. And what’s making this an urgent challenge? You guessed it:
Top executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting said that while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies which were planning layoffs anyway.
Or, so reported Reuters’ Jeffery Dastin. The idea that we need to plan for this job transition now, rather than react later, is a good sign. It is, though, precious little comfort to those already caught in the transition. But even the tech guys – whose businesses have been at the forefront of job losses over the past couple of years – were singing from the reskilling song sheet. Here’s Cisco SVP Guy Diedrich on LinkedIn:
Our most essential investment in this digital moment is human, and it will determine who can keep up, who can innovate, and who will lead.
People are discussing human capital — people’s skills, creativity and, crucially, adaptability — in the same way they do physical infrastructure such as transport networks and energy grids. These are systems whose resilience is critical to keeping our societies running. But they are also systems under increasing strain.
The Post-AI reskilling agenda
Investing in people is not a social policy luxury; it is a strategic imperative for national and global resilience, especially if AI does lead to mass unemployment. This shift has brutal, unforgiving economic logic. As routine tasks become automated, the premium paid for scarcity moves to skills machines cannot easily replicate. Unfortunately, exactly what those skills are is a moving target as technology evolves. It’s possible that in an AI-infused world, what were once “soft skills” become core economic capacity.
If that happens, education infrastructure, and, in particular, lifelong learning capability, become competitive assets. These could become key inputs of national performance in a way previously reserved for capital markets or industrial outputs.
And, if you’ll permit me a return to the global politics, labour, jobs, and human well-being are not peripheral but central to global stability. Nations that fail to integrate people into their strategic planning risk not just slow growth, but fracturing of their social structures, and the rise of populism. We see clear evidence of what happens when their citizen’s expectations and opportunities diverge.
Davos and the decade ahead
Davos 2026 is done, but its real impact lies in what the pattern of quiet debate reveals. What will the world look like the next time the great and the good gather in the Swiss ski town (if that’s where the next gathering is)?
Taken together, these themes suggest we are already in a period of massive institutional recalibration rather than cyclical disruption. This is what we often call the permacrisis. And the response to that could involve structural rewiring of how societies govern technology and define collective progress.
Davos, despite the lurking bogeyman of irrelevance in a changing world, remains a valuable barometer. Why? Its very nature: it brings elites into a shared environment. Even if co-operation shifts from ideological to pragmatic, and the nature of the elites themselves is changing, we still face challenges that are too big for one country or one company to tackle alone.
There’s a place for the big ski town talking shop yet.
Image generated by Midjourney based on the text of this article.
