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With U.S. President Donald Trump on the way to Davos for the next day of sessions, there was plenty of speculation about how geopolitical trade restrictions would affect the AI boom.
Today, AI and tariff wars were often intertwined as themes at the World Economic Forum (WEF), where U.S. President Trump is supposed to address the crowd and have “many meetings” with key AI infrastructure stakeholders, world leaders, and policymakers.
Even without the bombastic Greenland and tariff rhetoric, Trump’s “America First” agenda in many ways runs counter to the WEF ethos of “globalization. Earlier today, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told WEF attendees, “globalization has failed the West and the United States,” which he said left American workers behind with offshoring of jobs and the hollowing out of industries. While the Cato Institute last week released a paper, “America’s Manufacturing Renaissance is Missing in Action,” some headway has been made, with TSMC, Apple, Ford, IBM, Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, Stellantis, Hyundai, Westinghouse and others pledging to invest billions over the next few years.
With Trump en route to Davos, many WEF sessions were exploring AI, and how to responsibly build and scale AI to the benefit of humanity, rather than its detriment. Some highlights from yesterday afternoon’s and today’s early-morning sessions include:
“Humans in the lead: what it takes to scale AI in practice,” a session led by Accenture, Visa, Saudi Aramco, and Royal Philips executives, all of whom talked about the importance of building reliable data foundations, as opposed to just throwing GPUs at problems and expecting to create value. The panel encouraged investment in infrastructure and in programs that would help people understand how AI will function in practice. For example, healthcare was cited as a sector in which AI could deliver value at scale, but that urgency is meeting constraint, with AI advancing rapidly, with a need for “care pathways” to be reworked, with automation of tasks and upskilling of clinicians to work with new systems so that success can be realized. “Spend as much time on adoption as on the technology development. Adoption is ultimately where success is measured,” said Roy Jakobs, president and CEO of Royal Philips. The consensus was that AI is a systems challenge as much as a technology one, spanning people, data, and infrastructure.
“A power play, no referees” session with Microsoft, the International Monetary Fund, the Ministry of Investment of Saudi Arabia, and the Minister of Electronics and Information and Broadcasting of India explored the “tsunami hitting the labor market,” with IMF’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, saying an average 40% of jobs are touched by AI either enhanced or scrapped or changed quite significantly without implications for better pay. In advanced economies, she pointed out 60% of jobs are affected, but in low-income countries, the average is about 26%.
In a later session, “The day after AGI,” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also discussed AI’s impact on jobs, especially entry-level roles, which they said would greatly affect undergraduates unless they were given the chance to become extremely proficient with emerging tools. They pointed to a recent paper jointly created by WEF and CapGemini, “AI Agents in Action: Foundations for Evaluation and Governance,” which clarifies how organizations can balance AI agent adoption with employee safeguards.
“Workers in the driver’s seat” was a session that looked into the correlation between “peaceful societies” and “social cohesion,” which Adecco Group CEO Denis Machuel said would come with linear rather than exponential progression. “We have to ensure AI does not happen to people,” he said, noting that the majority of employees want to be involved in their upskilling. “Companies underestimate the appetite to go with the flow for many workers.”
Energy security was another prominent topic, with the session “Who is winning on energy security” featuring Crescent Petroleum CEO Majid Jafar, who pointed out that a one-minute video is an hour’s use of electricity for an average Western household, and one data center’s use equals that of an average town. Panelist Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, credited not only AI and data centers for growing demand, but also growing use of air conditioners and electric cars — a demand he said would be met by a combination of renewables, natural gas and nuclear power. He said in this “age of electricity,” there should be three golden rules: diversification, predictability for investment, cooperation and partnership. He added, “Choose your partner right…The countries who might the right decisions are the winners.”
In the same session, AES CEO Andrés Gluski contended that there was too much politicization, with a need for more technical talk about how to be smarter with existing infrastructure. He said that although AI is part of the problem, it’s also part of the solution, particularly as a means to increase the productivity of developing countries. “It’s going to be a decade before we have small modular reactors, but we need to think about the pipeline, resources and manufacturing capacity: It’s not a game-changer today.”
Enterprise AI was a focus for Microsoft CEO and Chairman Satya Nadella, who says Microsoft will focus on enterprise adoption of AI as an “important part of the global economy’s ongoing technological transformation.” In his conversation with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who is also interim co-chair of WEF, Nadella examined the way AI will impact productivity and workflows in every sector, from health to education. He emphasized the need for public-private cooperation to ensure that the AI revolution is supported by energy infrastructure and data sovereignty. “We as a global community have to get to a point where we are using AI to do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries,” he said.
With that session, the WEF promoted a new paper it produced with the McKinsey Health Institute, entitled “The Human Advantage: Stronger Brains in the Age of AI,” which looks at how AI reshapes work, with competitiveness, depending on how effectively human and machine strengths complement one another.
The report, like the conversations that took place in Davos the past couple days, made the case for investing in people and their skills as much as in AI and advanced technologies. The goal is a healthier balance of technology and societal health. To see all the WEF sessions that have taken place, go here.
