As leaders gather in Davos, the conversation is often described as a clash of urgencies: geopolitics, AI, growth, climate, trust. Still, when the first day is read from its signs — opening speeches, official summaries from the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the sessions that gained visible traction — what stands out is not the fragmentation but the convergence around a shared set of constraints.
Growth remains the common goal, but the debate has moved to the high cost of maintaining it. Capital intensity, duplicated investments and frictions dominated, shifting the tone of ideology towards the functioning of diversification and earnings compounding in environments of high debt and high cost of capital, in which resilience is a precondition for survival.
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Geoeconomic tensions were treated less as a crisis and more as a reality. The discussion quickly moved from whether fragmentation persists to how companies operate within it.
The session entitled “Governments as economic super-agents” named what many have thought for a long time: the State is no longer just an arbitrator, but also a player — normalizing the instrumentalization of economic tools.
What has remained largely unsaid is that many of these dynamics today function as negative-sum systems. Capital is increasingly deployed defensively—trapped in duplicate supply chains, regulatory protections, and parallel infrastructures—rather than creating options.
Even where GDP growth appears resilient, hidden losses accumulate through higher financial costs, slower deployment and defensively tied up capital. The game has changed; how to measure performance, to a large extent, does not.
AI was discussed less as a promise and more as a premise. Accountability, auditability, and infrastructure repeatedly appeared as practical constraints.
This anchored the conversation in control and safeguards, leaving largely untouched the most difficult strategic choice: While technology companies fine-tune models for volume and scale, many traditional companies—which hold the deepest industry expertise in the world—have not yet “AI-transformed the business” by training systems with their own proprietary knowledge.
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Even recent cross-border rapprochement initiatives have sounded less like alignment and more like system maintenance: keeping channels open, reducing risks of extreme events, and preserving room for maneuver — with the goal of stabilizing markets, not seeking a new grand consensus.
Davos continues to excel in diagnosis. Where it has historically failed is in continuity. Urgency prevails, the long term escapes, and fundamental risks accumulate even when leaders recognize them.
What feels different this year is not awareness but restraint. Leaders now understand that many of the tools of yesterday no longer produce the results they once did.
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Three perspectives that matter
1. We are optimizing for urgency and accumulating long-term losses.
The problem is not awareness, but sequence. Urgent risks repeatedly displace fundamental ones, even when they make those worse. It’s not a blind spot; it is a recurring pattern in which the immediate suppresses the inevitable.
2. We are stuck in negative-sum games and still measuring wins.
Geoeconomic confrontation is increasingly treated as a tool to protect growth. In practice, it raises financing costs, delays replacements and erodes trust. Even when growth is sustained, the system absorbs hidden losses through compressed margins, slower deployment, and defensively tied up capital.
3. Independence is over — understanding interests is the core competency.
There is no longer a neutral input. Identical events now produce conflicting business headlines because interests differ. The implication for leaders is not cynicism but discipline: asking not just what the information says, but why it is coming now and from whom. This applies to both human judgment and AI systems.
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With executive turnover accelerating, leaders can no longer rely on staff tenure to sustain the long horizon. Thus, some implications arise:
- Boards need to start treating trust, resilience and information quality as balance variables, not as cultural or reputational factors.
- Strategy today is the discipline of sustaining multiple horizons, not of extending the present. From this perspective, the distinction between consolidated and growth markets collapses: markets are built by capacity, often imperfect partnerships but with defined stakes, and timing — not by inherited positions.
- AI adoption is no longer enough. Cost gains made from efficiencies are surpassed in next year’s budget, and organizations need to be willing to codify their own judgment and expertise into systems — or leave that power elsewhere.
So far, WEF 2026 has shown its strength in bringing together public and private sector leaders. It didn’t change the direction of the trajectory, but it defined the playing field. And it serves as a reminder: as the game changes, leaders need to find new ways to keep score.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary articles are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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