Some of the world\u2019s top editors came together recently for our annual post-Davos panel, The Editors\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here are some key takeaways from their discussion to shape the year ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Geopolitics and the \u2018New Sheriff\u2019 <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Faisal Islam, who has been going to Davos for two decades, described this year\u2019s event as \u201cdefinitely the most surreal World Economic Forum I\u2019ve ever seen.” Trump, the \u201cNew Sheriff\u201d in Davos (as described by his own Secretary of State), dominated every conversation, but not in the way many anticipated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 that doesn\u2019t work in Davos. Not only was President Trump amongst his contemporaries \u2013 other world leaders listening to him \u2013 he was also surrounded by corporate leaders who are starting to worry about the consequences of totally unnecessary geopolitical instability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The result is what Islam described as “a certain assertion of conventional reality that would never have happened anywhere else.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geography Versus Geography<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Fortune\u2019s 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Business leaders know that the era of greater free trade is over, marking the end of the “steady state” of increasing globalisation. Instead, it\u2019s now about how to operate amongst the key geographies \u2013 in America, Europe, India and China. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n AI Use Cases Emerging, but ROI is Slow<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s Rachana Shanbhogue said the ROI isn\u2019t quite there yet: “Everybody talks a really great game about this, but my impression is people are still experimenting.” Although there\u2019s a lot of interest in what AI could do for healthcare, for example, it\u2019s still a future promise rather than something happening now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ahmed said companies are talking about businesses moving beyond “vertical AI” \u2013 the division-by-division efficiency gains \u2013 towards “enterprise model” AI that connects data across the entire organisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Voice to Reinvent the Workplace<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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,\u201d Ahmed said, potentially forever changing the workplace as we know it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cyears away\u201d realistically means just 3-5 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s still a sense of trepidation.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even before AI has reached its peak, the next wave is looming on the horizon. \u201cThe next big moment of tech (and fog) is Quantum,\u201d Ahmed said. But with Quantum technology comes a whole range of new issues. As Islam pointed out \u201cWhen it works, it will break every single encryption, not just cryptocurrency, financial services or government.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Media’s Renaissance: Signal Over Noise<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s 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, \u201cthey want it to be real; just want a human being to have touched this in some way.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 a piece about TSMC chip manufacturing achieved a surprising 3 million views \u2013 suggesting audiences are returning to trusted journalism to make sense of the world around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s seen in his career is that \u201cwe now listen to audiences intensely about what it is they want”, rather than simply producing commodity news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An Optimistic Outlook for the UK<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s potential seems “blazingly obvious to the most important people in the world,” even if this narrative hasn’t yet broken through domestically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The World Keeps Turning<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. \u201cIn a lot of cases, these deals that have been talked about for a really long time have been hastened,\u201d noted Shanbhogue. \u201cSuddenly there\u2019s impetus to actually sign.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n America, which was 40% of the world economy a few decades ago, is now just 23%. While still significant, what we\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2013 whether through trusted journalism, practical AI applications or clear strategic thinking \u2013 has never been more valuable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Key Takeaways to Shape the Year Ahead Some of the world\u2019s top editors came together recently for our annual post-Davos panel, The Editors\u2019 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":116,"featured_media":27950,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"news-category":[1729],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/world-media-group.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27949"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/world-media-group.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/world-media-group.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world-media-group.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world-media-group.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27949"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/world-media-group.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27955,"href":"https:\/\/world-media-group.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27949\/revisions\/27955"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world-media-group.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/world-media-group.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world-media-group.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world-media-group.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27949"},{"taxonomy":"news-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/world-media-group.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-category?post=27949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}