If Davos 2025 felt “nervously optimistic,” Davos 2026 felt more like realism setting in, with candid disagreements unrestrained by orthodoxy. The theme this year was dialogue, especially in geopolitics, and unlike recent years, it truly dominated the mountain.
More than 60 heads of state were in attendance, and the tone was shaped early in the week by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s stark description of a “rupture” in the world order and his call for middle powers to resist coercion by superpowers.
That geopolitical sparring consumed a lot of oxygen. But what struck me was that it didn’t paralyze business leaders. If anything, it sharpened their focus. Unlike last year — when AI absorbed almost all attention — leaders came to Davos this year with a broader growth agenda, explicitly shaped by risk: rising defense spending in Europe, renewed urgency around energy transition, and the need to rethink how capital, technology, and talent are deployed in a more fragmented world.
Here are five key takeaways from the 2026 World Economic Forum at Davos that stayed with me, with implications for corporate and political leaders in all regions:
1. Europe faces pressure to accelerate independence and unlock growth
Europe is being forced to fly solo, and that may finally unlock growth as it takes charge of its future through investments in defense, AI, infrastructure, and the energy transition.
At Davos, the region arrived under intense pressure: tariffs, Ukraine, energy security, and even Greenland. The mood was notably different from 2025, when concern over regulation and competitiveness dominated. This year, the conversation shifted toward agency.
Nowhere was this clearer than in defense. Europe is taking far greater responsibility for its own security, with sharply increased military spending, especially on hardware and advanced technologies. This is a strategic necessity but also has the potential to become an economic stimulus across the EU and NATO Europe, including the UK, provided execution keeps up with ambition.
Beyond defense, the Savings and Investments Union emerged as an attempt to channel trillions in savings towards AI, data infrastructure, industrial renewal and the energy transition. Europe does not lack capital. It lacks a functioning financing continuum, speed, and will. There is much that national governments can do, and the EU must accelerate too. That gap — a project we’ve been working on closely with the World Economic Forum — remains Europe’s biggest constraint.
Europe’s opportunity is real, but only for organizations prepared to navigate fragmentation, standardization challenges, and slower policy execution. The winners will help shape the ecosystem, not wait for it to settle.
2. AI moves from hype to real-world impact
AI is moving from fascination to friction, and that’s progress. It was everywhere, but the conversation shifted from promise to practice, and from experimentation to organizational focus and friction. While government leaders jousted, corporate leaders focused on the transformation facing the global economy and how to turn risk into opportunity.
At our Transformation Breakfast, the discussion centered less on models and more on people. Oliver Wyman Forum’s survey of some 300,000 people globally over the past five years shows that personal fulfillment is now the second most important workplace priority, alongside continuous skill-building, and empathetic leadership. As NatWest Chair Rick Haythornthwaite put it, winning in an agentic AI world requires “primacy of relationship” with customers and employees — at a time when trust in institutions remains stubbornly low, particularly in advanced economies.
We heard practical examples of progress. J.P. Morgan Asset Management CEO George Gatch explained at the same breakfast how proprietary AI tools are now embedded into workflows — accelerating adoption, improving decision making, and even replacing external proxy advisers. Financial services is likely to be among the earliest large-scale adopters, but success will hinge on trust as much as technology. This message came across loud and clear at our events and in this year’s State of the Financial Services report.
One issue that became more pressing this year is data sovereignty. Governments and companies alike are grappling with how national rules on data, cloud infrastructure, and AI models may reshape global operating models. This is a fault line that will increasingly influence investment, resilience, and scale.
AI advantage will come not only from access to technology but increasingly also from trust, workforce strategy, and governance — including how you manage data across borders.
3. Healthcare’s productivity and cost problem is now unavoidable
Healthcare has always been part of a Davos conversation but this year it felt unavoidable rather than aspirational. At our Health Breakfast, we shared Oliver Wyman’s latest research showing global healthcare spending nearly doubling by 2040 — from almost $12 trillion to over $23 trillion. That trajectory is unsustainable, even for advanced economies where the sector’s productivity seems to be stuck in neutral.
Aging populations, workforce shortages, and rising costs are pushing systems toward breaking points, particularly in the US, Europe, China, and Japan, where the percentage of the population over 65 is approaching or exceeding 20%. Productivity, long stagnant, is now the central issue.
AI, robotics, and quantum technologies could offset as much as 60% of the projected increase. CEOs’ like Takeda’s Christophe Weber shared concrete plans to deploy these technologies at scale to increase productivity and better control costs. But the consensus was clear: Productivity alone won’t scale without reimbursement reform and clearer liability frameworks.
4. Sports steps into a new era of influence
The sports industry has emerged as a serious economic and societal platform. One of the more distinctive conversations this year was around the sports economy. Generating roughly $2.3 trillion annually and growing at double-digit rates, sports no longer represent just recreation, entertainment, inclusion, and community cohesion. Sports are now also economic drivers, drivers of global tourism, asset classes, and increasingly levers for public health — objectives sometimes in conflict.
Yet that growth is fragile. Health and environmental pressures could erode up to 14% of industry revenue by 2030 if left unaddressed. Our work with the World Economic Forum identified three practical levers: better resource stewardship, sports centered cities, and access to purpose driven capital. Sports offer a rare chance to align commercial returns with societal impact, but only if sustainability is treated as a growth strategy and not a constraint.
5. Global capital is abundant, but the system is fragmenting
The appetite for financing remains enormous. Banks, asset managers, and corporates all want to invest in data infrastructure, AI, energy transition, and new growth platforms. The surge in data-center development alone is reshaping energy demand and reinforcing the importance of transition investment. While the US appears to have lost some momentum, most other regions are moving full tilt.
At the same time, financial fragmentation is becoming a material risk. Tariffs, or at least the threat of them, along with regulatory divergence are making capital more expensive and less mobile. This tension between abundance and access may become one of the defining constraints on global growth.
Why converting volatility into advantage is key for leaders
Davos 2026 reflected a world that feels less comfortable but also more honest about the risks and challenges ahead. Compared with 2025, optimism was more conditional and ambition more grounded with volatility expected along the way.
The opportunity for leaders is not to avoid uncertainty but to convert it into advantage through disciplined execution, trust-based leadership, and investment choices that align growth with resilience. Those that do will help shape the next decade to their advantage.