Every January, a small ski town in the Swiss Alps becomes the most crowded room in the world. From 19 to 23 January 2026, the World Economic Forum held its 56th Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters under the theme "A Spirit of Dialogue." The phrase was a hope more than a description. Trade was fracturing, alliances were being tested, and artificial intelligence was rewriting the economics of work and power. Nearly 3,000 leaders came from 130 countries. A record 400 were political leaders, among them close to 65 heads of state and government and most of the G7. Close to 830 chief executives and chairs joined them, with almost 80 founders of unicorns and young technology companies. Some 200 sessions ran through the week. Davos still does one thing no other place does. It puts a head of government, a central banker, a technology founder and an investor in the same corridor for five days.
FIVE QUESTIONS The Forum built its programme around five questions. How can we cooperate in a more contested world? How do we find new sources of growth? How do we invest in people? How do we deploy innovation at scale, and responsibly? How do we build prosperity within the planet's limits? The first one dominated. The Forum's own Global Risks Report named geoeconomic confrontation the top risk of 2026, and the week proved it.
GREENLAND The loudest arrival was Donald Trump's. On Wednesday 21 January the American president told the Forum he was "seeking immediate negotiations to discuss the acquisition of Greenland." He said he would not use force. His message to Denmark and its allies was blunt: "You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative. You can say no, and we will remember." Within hours the mood changed. After meeting NATO's secretary general, Mark Rutte, Trump announced a framework for a "future deal" covering what he called "the entire Arctic Region," and dropped tariffs on eight European countries that were due to start on 1 February. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the envoy Steve Witkoff were named to lead the talks, and America's planned Golden Dome missile shield was part of the discussion. Europe exhaled. Nobody in Davos believed the argument was over.
A RUPTURE, NOT A TRANSITION The speech people kept quoting came from Canada. Mark Carney told the hall that the old order was breaking. "We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition," he said. The rules-based system was imperfect, he argued, but worth defending, and middle powers were not powerless. His warning to them: "If we're not at the table, we're on the menu." The hall stood for him. The next day Trump answered from the same stage. "Canada lives because of the United States," he said, adding: "The next time you speak, Mark, watch yourself." China's vice-premier, He Lifeng, brought Beijing's line early in the week. "Tariff and trade wars have no winners," he said, and called for open trade.
DINNER, INTERRUPTED The tension did not stay on stage. At a private dinner hosted by Larry Fink, the BlackRock chief who now co-chairs the Forum, the US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, belittled Europe's economies. Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, walked out. Others heckled, and Fink ended the dinner early. For a meeting built on dialogue, it was an unusually public failure of it.
AI MOVES FROM PROMISE TO INFRASTRUCTURE Artificial intelligence ran through almost every session, and the conversation had changed. Nobody was marvelling at chatbots any more. The talk was of chips, power, data centres and who would control them. Nvidia's Jensen Huang called robotics a "once in lifetime" opportunity for European countries. Microsoft's Satya Nadella pushed for results: "We as a global community have to get to a point where we are using it to do something useful." Elon Musk predicted AI "smarter than any human by the end of this year, I would say no later than next year." The more sober voices worried about readiness. Anthropic's Dario Amodei warned that entry-level office jobs would be disrupted, and said that "not selling chips to China is one of the biggest things we can do to make sure we have time to handle this." Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis expected "new, more meaningful jobs" and called for shared safety standards. The computer scientist Yoshua Bengio warned against machines built to seem human. The historian Yuval Noah Harari put it most sharply: "The most intelligent entities on the planet can also be the most deluded." For Europe, the question was practical: reliable power, access to computing and rules clear enough to invest under.
THE GROWTH QUESTION Five Nobel laureates in economics presented their research during the week, and the growth sessions kept circling the same three worries: a fragmented Europe, the size of the AI dividend, and the damage tariffs could do to the trading system most of the room had built its fortunes on.
CAPITAL IN A POLITICAL WORLD Behind the speeches sat a harder reality for business. Industrial policy, sanctions, subsidies, export controls and national security now shape where money goes. A factory's location, a supplier's passport or dependence on one market can change a company's prospects overnight. Markets are still global. The old habit of optimising for cost alone is gone.
PEOPLE AND THE PLANET The quieter sessions produced the most concrete results. The Forum's Reskilling Revolution is on track to reach more than 850 million people, close to its target of a billion. An India Skills Accelerator was launched. A new programme, SmartStart USA, aims to prepare a million young Americans for manufacturing and supply-chain jobs by 2035. A framework for "digital embassies" set out to give smaller economies access to sovereign AI infrastructure, and five new Fourth Industrial Revolution centres were welcomed, in the UK, France, the UAE and India. On energy and climate, Brazil became the 15th government to join the First Movers Coalition, a new Forest Future Alliance was formed, and 23 factories joined the Global Lighthouse Network of advanced manufacturing sites. Energy security and decarbonisation are now the same conversation.
WHAT DAVOS CAN AND CANNOT DO "This is a moment of uncertainty, but also possibility; not a moment to retreat, but a moment to engage," said Børge Brende, the Forum's president. Davos makes no binding decisions. Its value lies in the meetings that happen in hotel rooms and corridors, the ones that never make a press release. Its weakness is the same: a room full of powerful people is not a mechanism for collective action. The Forum's own year showed how fast things move. A month after the meeting, Brende stepped down, and Alois Zwinggi was named interim president and chief executive. For one week in January, Davos gave a fragmenting world a common room. The next test came quickly: the Forum's Global Collaboration and Growth Meeting in Jeddah, set for 22 and 23 April. The harder work belonged to the months that followed.