February 10, 2026
Key Takeaways to Shape the Year Ahead
Some of the world’s top editors came together recently for our annual post-Davos panel, The Editors’ Perspective On The Year Ahead. Kamal Ahmed, Executive Editorial Director at Fortune, Faisal Islam, Economics Editor, BBC News, and Rachana Shanbhogue, Business Affairs Editor, The Economist, provided insight into what went on behind closed doors at the WEF in Davos in a panel chaired by Hannah Diddams, SVP, Global Marketing, Studios & Events at Business Insider.
Here are some key takeaways from their discussion to shape the year ahead.
Geopolitics and the ‘New Sheriff’
Faisal Islam, who has been going to Davos for two decades, described this year’s event as “definitely the most surreal World Economic Forum I’ve ever seen.” Trump, the “New Sheriff” in Davos (as described by his own Secretary of State), dominated every conversation, but not in the way many anticipated.
Whereas in individual meetings with the US president, corporate and world leaders often lean towards explaining the world as they feel he wants to hear it, our panel agreed – that doesn’t work in Davos. Not only was President Trump amongst his contemporaries – other world leaders listening to him – he was also surrounded by corporate leaders who are starting to worry about the consequences of totally unnecessary geopolitical instability.
The result is what Islam described as “a certain assertion of conventional reality that would never have happened anywhere else.”
Geography Versus Geography
Fortune’s Kamal Ahmed noted a fundamentally different shift from previous years. “It wasn’t about politics versus business, which was the financial crisis paradigm. It was geography versus geography.”
Business leaders know that the era of greater free trade is over, marking the end of the “steady state” of increasing globalisation. Instead, it’s now about how to operate amongst the key geographies – in America, Europe, India and China.
This means developing a “twin track approach”: maintaining strategic focus whilst building in a “tolerance for noise” that accounts for geopolitical volatility. Executives now operate knowing that 20% of the time there’s going to be this tolerance noise at the edge of their business.
AI Use Cases Emerging, but ROI is Slow
The shift from AI hype to applied AI was unmistakable this year. Addressing the question of how valuable AI really is for businesses, The Economist’s Rachana Shanbhogue said the ROI isn’t quite there yet: “Everybody talks a really great game about this, but my impression is people are still experimenting.” Although there’s a lot of interest in what AI could do for healthcare, for example, it’s still a future promise rather than something happening now.
However, genuine use cases are emerging. IBM’s pre-Davos announcement that 94% of their Human Resources functions are done by AI, resulting in redeploying headcount, demonstrates that with the right approach in the right discipline you can have a big ROI impact.
Ahmed said companies are talking about businesses moving beyond “vertical AI” – the division-by-division efficiency gains – towards “enterprise model” AI that connects data across the entire organisation.
Voice to Reinvent the Workplace
We were presented with a surprising vision of how we’ll be interacting with AI systems in a few years. Tech leaders suggest that voice interfaces will replace keyboard data input sooner than we think. “Within two years, you’ll just speak with your objective-driven AI, into your ear, and it will create workflows, presentations, data and you will never touch a keyboard,” Ahmed said, potentially forever changing the workplace as we know it.
On the subject of when AGI (artificial general intelligence that can actually start to think like a brain) is likely to be widely available, what tech leaders are describing as “years away” realistically means just 3-5 years.
Adding to the complexity, social backlash against AI is building. Concerns range from energy consumption to job displacement. One executive suggested that governments might need to freeze layoffs in the interim to allow society to adjust to AI.
Ahmed expressed the uneasiness some leaders are feeling about AI and the direction of travel for their business. They’re heading “downhill, in a good way, but it’s shrouded in fog. They can’t quite see the bottom of the valley, but they know it’s there. So, there’s still a sense of trepidation.”
Even before AI has reached its peak, the next wave is looming on the horizon. “The next big moment of tech (and fog) is Quantum,” Ahmed said. But with Quantum technology comes a whole range of new issues. As Islam pointed out “When it works, it will break every single encryption, not just cryptocurrency, financial services or government.”
Media’s Renaissance: Signal Over Noise
One of the most optimistic themes of the discussion was the renewed value of trusted journalism. As Islam put it: “In many ways, the media is the front end of the application of unbelievable computing power to traditional industries.”
There’s been a crucial shift in behaviour now audiences have started to experience AI slop. Once people start seeing AI-generated drivel in their feeds, Islam said, “they want it to be real; just want a human being to have touched this in some way.”
The numbers back this up. BBC viewer figures show 12 million people viewed President Trump’s Davos speech and 47 million viewed “Liberation Day”. More niche subjects are also attracting attention – a piece about TSMC chip manufacturing achieved a surprising 3 million views – suggesting audiences are returning to trusted journalism to make sense of the world around them.
The commercial model is shifting too. As Ahmed observed, media is “moving away from the clicks game into the value game,” and people will pay for quality. He said one of the biggest changes he’s seen in his career is that “we now listen to audiences intensely about what it is they want”, rather than simply producing commodity news.
An Optimistic Outlook for the UK
Amidst the geopolitical turbulence, the UK emerged with a surprisingly positive narrative. Both Google’s Sundar Pichai and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang identified the UK as a potential “powerhouse in AI”. Islam, who had recently interviewed both leaders, said Britain’s potential seems “blazingly obvious to the most important people in the world,” even if this narrative hasn’t yet broken through domestically.
Mark Carney’s speech served as a pivotal reality check moment, with one editor noting how it helped burst the “reality distortion field” that can form around power. The former Bank of England governor’s return to the Davos stage represented a kind of recalibration, reminding attendees of what good economic discourse is supposed to sound like.
The World Keeps Turning
It is increasingly clear that the rest of the world is recalibrating regardless of American direction. Trade deals that languished for years such as the EU-India agreement, have suddenly gained momentum. “In a lot of cases, these deals that have been talked about for a really long time have been hastened,” noted Shanbhogue. “Suddenly there’s impetus to actually sign.”
America, which was 40% of the world economy a few decades ago, is now just 23%. While still significant, what we’re now seeing is that if the US starts to go off on its own, the rest of the world will not be afraid to do what they need to, in their own country’s best interests.
The panel concluded on an optimistic note. As the global order reconfigures around new geographic realities, businesses find genuine uses for transformative technology and audiences tire of AI-generated slop, the ability to provide signal – whether through trusted journalism, practical AI applications or clear strategic thinking – has never been more valuable.