The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos 2026 is off to a strong start under a new leadership team. A significant leadership transition took place in 2025 when Klaus Schwab stepped back from his role at the World Economic Forum. In response, the Board of Trustees appointed André Hoffmann and Larry Fink as interim Co-chairs.
Fink, the Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, leads the world’s largest asset manager with more than USD 13 trillion in assets under management, while Hoffmann, the fourth-generation family representative at Roche, serves as its Vice Chairman and brings the perspective of one of the world’s oldest and largest healthcare companies.
The Forum continues to be overseen by its Board of Trustees, a group of distinguished leaders who safeguard its mission, values, and commitment to global citizenship. Its renewed Managing Board—led by President and CEO Børge Brende—functions as the Forum’s executive body, ensuring effective governance and strategic direction.
This will be the first annual meeting to be held without the leadership of its Founder Klaus Schwab. Maintaining its legacy, Davos has brought together a galaxy of global leaders from various fields.
The meeting brings together around 400 senior political leaders, including nearly 65 heads of state and government, creating one of the most globally representative gatherings of the year. Among the high-profile attendees are European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, Chinese VicePremier He Lifeng, French President Emmanuel Macron, and US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, reflecting the forum’s broad geopolitical reach. US President Donald Trump will participate, with his sharp focus on his plans for Greenland.
European leaders at Davos are very tense about the unfolding scenario and will follow President Trump’s statements very closely.
Leading voices from the corporate world, including Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Alex Karp of Palantir, add a strong business and technology dimension to the discussions.
A Spirit Of Dialogue
Under the theme , the meeting focuses on five pressing global challenges where public-private cooperation is critical to success:
How can we cooperate in a more contested world?
How can we unlock new sources of growth?
How can we better invest in people?
How can we deploy innovation at scale and responsibly?
How can we build prosperity within planetary boundaries?
The meeting unfolds against a challenging global backdrop marked by escalating US–EU trade frictions—particularly disputes over tariffs and Arctic security that continue to strain transatlantic relations. At the same time, the world economy faces slowing growth, supplychain fragilities, and lingering concerns about future pandemic risks, all of which add pressure to seek coordinated solutions.
Compounding these issues is a rise in global fragmentation, with nations increasingly prioritising resilience in trade, technology, and energy systems as they navigate an uncertain international environment. Global value chains are undergoing a fundamental shift, with a new WEF report showing that structural volatility has replaced temporary disruption as the defining feature of global production.
According to the report, nearly three-quarters of business leaders now see resilience investments as essential, with 74 per cent viewing resilience not just as protection but as a driver of growth. Developed with Kearney, the Global Value Chains Outlook 2026 argues that geopolitical fragmentation, rapid technological change and tightening resource constraints are forcing both companies and governments to rethink how they operate as instability becomes permanent rather than cyclical.
Competitive Advantage And Coordinated Ecosystem
WEF Managing Director Kiva Allgood notes that competitive advantage increasingly depends on foresight, flexibility and coordinated ecosystems, as these capabilities help nations and firms secure investment, safeguard supply and support growth amid fragmentation.
The evidence of this structural shift is already visible: in 2025, tariff escalations reshaped over USD 400 billion in global trade flows, and disruptions along major shipping routes drove container shipping costs up 40 per cent year-on-year. Manufacturing output in advanced economies has slowed to its weakest level since 2009, while more than 3,000 trade and industrial policy measures were introduced worldwide in 2025—over triple the annual number a decade earlier.
Another WEF report on AI says that global enterprises are seeing significant gains from emerging technologies if they prepare well. As investment accelerates and expectations rise, the findings highlight a growing divide between companies that have built the capabilities to scale AI and those still struggling to deploy it effectively, showing how this gap can be bridged through lessons drawn from real-world use cases.
“Trusted, advanced AI can transform businesses, but it requires organising data and processes to achieve the best of technology and – this is key – it also requires human ingenuity to maximise returns on AI investments,” said Manish Sharma, Chief Strategy and Services Officer at Accenture. “We encourage organisations to have a clear game plan, and focus on responsible innovation, as they seek to implement and scale AI.”
An independent Impact Council examined hundreds of cases across more than 30 countries and over 20 industries, ranging from healthcare to energy and infrastructure, and found clear patterns among the most successful examples. Their analysis shows that the most promising initiatives integrate AI into strategic decision-making, redesign work to enhance human–AI collaboration, strengthen core data foundations, modernise technology platforms, and ensure all these efforts are supported by responsible governance. |
