Moving between panels, hotel lobbies, and meetings this week, it often felt like two conferences were happening in the same snowy Swiss village.
In one Davos, the mood was strikingly optimistic. Executives and investors spoke about artificial intelligence moving from hype to production, terms like “world models” and “physical AI” were being thrown around, with discussions about the enormous pools of capital ready to back it.
In the other, a number of conversations seemed to end up back at tariffs, Greenland, geopolitical tensions, and a growing sense that the global rules investors have relied on for decades are shifting in real time.
Both worlds overlapped constantly. Often, in the same conversation.
“What Davos highlighted this year is not a crisis of innovation, but a crisis of coherence and loss of trust,” Chavalit Frederick Tsao, chairman of Singapore-based family-run trading business Tsao Pao Chee, said on the sidelines. “Technology is advancing faster than our collective wisdom.”
