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good morning. I’m in Davos, Switzerland, attending this year’s World Economic Forum. As Diane wrote yesterday, US President Donald Trump’s arrival later this week with a large delegation of US officials will overshadow all other discussions at Davos this year. But people here aren’t talking about Trump, they’re talking about AI.
At Davos last year, the hype around AI agents was shattered by the impact of DeepSeek’s R1 model, which was released during the conference. We’ll see if similar news changes the AI story this year. (There are also rumors that DeepSeek is planning to develop another model.) But other than that, business leaders aren’t surprised by this year’s hype surrounding AI and seem more interested in the nitty-gritty of how to successfully deploy the technology at scale.
On Monday, Srini Thalapragada, Salesforce’s chief engineering and customer success officer, said the company is leveraging “forward-based engineers” to strengthen the feedback loop between customers and product teams. Salesforce also offers pre-built agents, workflows, and playbooks to help customers redesign their businesses and avoid being stuck in “experimental purgatory.”
Meanwhile, a side event in Davos called ‘A Compass for Europe’ focused on how to restore the continent’s declining competitiveness, with AI at the forefront. Christina Kosmowski, CEO of LogicMonitor, told the assembled CEOs that to make AI successful at scale, companies need to take a “top-down” approach, where CEOs and leadership must identify the most valuable use cases and drive collaboration across the organization to make them happen. Neeti Mehta Shukla, co-founder and chief impact officer at Automation Anywhere, said it’s important to move away from measuring the impact of automation solely through the lens of labor savings. She gave specific customer examples where improving data quality, improving customer satisfaction, or assigning more employees to new tasks are better metrics than simply looking at cost per unit of output. Finally, Lila Tretchikov, head of AI strategy at the NEA, said Europe has enough talent and capital to build a world-leading AI company, but what it lacks is the ambition and willingness to make big bets.
I then met with Bastian Nominacher, co-founder and co-CEO of process analytics software platform Celonis. He reiterated some of these points and said that achieving ROI with AI generally requires three things. It’s about strong leadership commitment, establishing a center of excellence within the business (which led to 8x higher revenue than companies that didn’t do this!), and finally, having enough live data connected to the AI platform.
For more AI insights from Davos, see below. luckEye on AI newsletter. meanwhile, luck is hosting numerous events throughout the week in Davos. Check out the lineup here. And my colleagues will be providing more reporting from Davos to CEO Daily and Fortune.com throughout this week.—Jeremy Kahn
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com.
