If the main focus of last year’s World Economic Forum in Davos was the need for large-scale private and public investment to support the development of artificial intelligence, this year’s event was focused on proving the rewards.
Packed into the crowded AI House, one of the conference’s limitless corporate spaces, the house’s co-organizer Rasmus Rothe of Merantix declared 2026 “the year of AI ROI.” Slogans plastered on the promenade in Davos guarantee that companies like Cisco and IBM have found a formula for profiting from their AI investments.
Meanwhile, OpenAI executives announced new initiatives in education, health, and cybersecurity, framing the move as part of an effort to ensure all markets, not just the United States, benefit from the technology.
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed,” the company’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, said at a press conference, quoting science fiction author William Gibson. Lightcap added: “That’s exactly the case with this.”
This rhetoric is indicative of the current anxiety about AI. Many investors are concerned about the sector’s massive commercial growth, which justifies its big spending and lofty valuations. OpenAI, an unprofitable startup, has pledged to spend more than $1.4 trillion on data centers and AI chips over the next few years, including signing several deals with cloud providers and chip makers that have been criticized as cyclical. (At Davos, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said she wants to “completely reject” that label.)
But there was also a lot of optimism among Davos attendees, with AI leaders emphasizing business traction. For example, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei highlighted the benefits of the company’s focus on enterprise customers.
“It’s a more stable business than the consumer,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait. “We can really directly create value.”
Anthropic was the most talked about topic at the conference thanks to Claude Cowork, a new tool that is intuitive and can tackle a wide range of work tasks on your behalf. Although this is still a “research preview” and limited to certain paid users, the Cowork product offers a glimpse into how advances in AI can lead to increased productivity for a wide range of professionals.
Top AI developers like Anthropic and OpenAI have worked to prove the value of their services in everything from healthcare to financial services. In software engineering, AI tools are speeding up the process of writing and debugging code.
OpenAI said in Davos that revenue from its software business, where developers pay to connect to its application programming interfaces, has increased by about $1 billion “over the past few weeks” and 19% on a weekly basis. Anthropic previously announced that Claude Code reached a $1 billion revenue run rate in just six months. “It’s not vibe coding anymore,” says Tariq Shaukat, CEO of Sonar, a startup that assesses code quality for enterprises. “That’s real production.” Shaukat, who previously worked in sales at Google Cloud, recalled spending a year closing a deal with a major financial company. Banks are currently using AI products that were released just a few months ago, he said. He predicts that nearly a third of banks’ code will be generated by AI this year.
Timothy Young, CEO of Jasper, another AI startup networking in a Swiss village, cited a maxim from his old company, VMware, to explain how coding tools can lead to sales across industries.
“The value of AI cannot be realized fast enough. In addition to general anxiety about the pace of AI spending, U.S. and European technology companies also face an uncertain geopolitical landscape that could complicate global strategy.”
Looming every conversation, even when it came to enterprise AI, was Donald Trump’s arrival at Davos and the tense standoff with Europe over Greenland. Those who flew in from Silicon Valley were secretly worried that Europe would respond to President Trump’s tariff threats by abandoning American technology.
“I have nothing but sympathy for my former colleagues who are going through very complicated days,” George Osborne, a former British politician who now runs OpenAI for Countries, said the morning before Trump’s speech.
There was also debate among high-tech executives about the extent of the threat posed by China. Google’s head of AI, Demis Hassabis, told Bloomberg’s Emily Cheung that there was a “massive overreaction” to Chinese startup DeepSeek a year ago, noting that the country’s tech companies remain about six months behind the frontier AI of big Western labs.
In a separate conversation, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch described the idea as a “fairy tale.” China is “not lagging behind the West,” he said.
Shaukat said China’s open source model is “ubiquitous.” Young, whose Jasper AI services the marketing industry, said more customers are requesting Chinese-made models because they are cheaper. Christian Klein, CEO of software company SAP, also said there is growing interest in integrating with Alibaba’s AI models across Asia and even within Europe.
“Some companies are saying, ‘Obviously, we’re going to be affected by tariffs. OK, let’s look at certain alternatives,'” Klein said.
If this situation continues, other technology companies may be forced to rethink the pricing of their AI models, making it more difficult to recoup their investments.
Bergen writes for Bloomberg.
