Davos 2026 the key trends, AI and Who Gets to Use It

Guest post by Iaros Belkin, Founder of Belkin Marketing

The WEF Annual Meeting 2026 brought together nearly 3,000 leaders from 130+ countries. The official theme was cooperation. The actual agenda, in the rooms behind the sessions, was control. I was invited to speak at the unDavos Summit this year, and brought several of the projects I advise. That combination put me in a number of closed-room conversations that don’t make it into the session recordings. What I want to share here came from those rooms.

Davos 2026, the Adoption Question Is Closed. The Control Question Is Open.

Every conversation I walked into started with AI and ended somewhere else within twenty minutes. Clearly because the real question had already replaced the surface one.

The surface question: how do we adopt AI and scale it? And that one is settled. WEF’s own documentation confirms that leading organizations have moved from potential to performance, embedding AI into core strategy, redesigning workforces.

The real question: who controls the infrastructure that AI runs on, and what happens to everyone who doesn’t control it?

Sovereign tech stacks are not a 2030 concern. Countries are building their own compute infrastructure, their own model training pipelines, their own data governance frameworks right now. Because they watched what happens when critical infrastructure runs on someone else’s terms. The WEF Global Risks Survey 2026 named economic confrontation the top near-term global risk, displacing armed conflict. Technology decoupling is economic confrontation in practice.

For any founder building in AI or frontier tech: this is your operating environment. Already. Whether you have mapped it or not.

The Number That Ended the Optimism Conversation

PwC’s Global CEO Survey, presented at Davos 2026, found that 56% of CEOs reported seeing neither revenue growth nor cost reduction from AI over the past year. More than half. Among the most resourced organizations on the planet.

That figure didn’t surprise anyone in the rooms I was in. It named something people already knew but hadn’t said plainly.

A WEF analysis of AI scaling challenges across nearly 2,000 companies confirmed the pattern: the technical capability is rarely the constraint. Governance and institutional readiness are. The companies capturing value from AI built accountability structures from the start. The ones that didn’t are sitting on expensive pilots that never scaled.

Trust is not a growth differentiator in 2026. It is the prerequisite for scale. Founders treating governance as a later-stage concern are making the same mistake companies made with GDPR: assuming compliance is something you retrofit onto a product that already works. It isn’t.

The Gap Nobody Is Closing Fast Enough

The WEF Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026, developed with Accenture, found that roughly one-third of organizations still lack any formal process to validate AI security before deployment. One third. At the same time, structured AI governance reviews nearly doubled from 37% of organizations in 2025 to 64% in 2026.

That gap is where the competitive opportunity sits. And it is also where the investor conversation has moved.

The founders leaving Davos with something durable weren’t the ones who attended the most sessions. They were the ones asking a specific question: how do we demonstrate to an institutional investor, today, that our governance is auditable? That question has a concrete answer. And serious capital is currently selected for founders who already have it. The structural shift in how tech founders access investors in 2026 runs directly through this: governance legibility is now the filter, not the follow-up.

The AI infrastructure race is real. The governance gap is real. The founders who close the second one are not doing something virtuous. They are doing something strategic.

Iaros Belkin is a founder of Belkin Marketing, a boutique agency serving as Strategic Advisor to Deep Tech, Web3 and AI Founders. Two decades of experience navigating high-stakes global markets and orchestrating everything a good venture team needs: from grants and key partnerships to VVIP events elevated experience.

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