While the houses host events and serve as networking hubs, the big show is inside the Congress Center. On Tuesday morning, I kicked off my official Davos experience there by moderating a panel with the CEOs of Accenture, Aramco, Royal Philips and Visa. The topic was scaling up AI within organizations. All of these leaders represented companies that have gone from pilot projects to large internal implementations. It was, for me, a fascinating conversation. You can watch the whole thing here, but my takeaway was that while there are plenty of stories about AI being overhyped (including from us), it is certainly having substantive effects at large companies.
Aramco CEO Amin Nasser, for example, described how that company has found $3-5 billion in cost savings by improving the efficiency of its operations. Royal Philips CEO Roy Jakobs described how it was allowing healthcare practitioners to spend more time with patients by doing things such as automated note-taking. (This really resonated with me as my wife is a pediatrics nurse, and for decades now I’ve heard her talk about how much of her time is devoted to charting.) And Visa CEO Ryan McInerney talked about that company’s push into agentic commerce and the way that will play out for consumers, small businesses, and the global payments industry.
To elaborate a little on that point, McInerney painted a picture of commerce where agents won’t just shop for things you ask them to, which will be basically step one, but will eventually be able to shop for things based on your preferences and previous spending patterns. This could be your regular grocery shopping, or even a vacation getaway. That’s going to require a lot of trust and authentication to protect both merchants and consumers, but it is clear that the steps into agentic commerce we saw in 2025 were just baby ones. There are much bigger ones coming for 2026. (Coincidentally, I had a discussion with a senior executive from Mastercard on Monday, who made several of the same points.)
But the thing that really resonated with me from the panel was something Accenture CEO Julie Sweet—who has a view not only of her own large org but across a spectrum of companies—said: “It’s hard to trust something until you understand it.”
I felt like that neatly summed up where we are as a society with AI.
Clearly other people feel the same. Before the official start of the conference I was at AI House for a panel. The place was packed. There was a consistent, massive line to get in, and once inside I literally had to muscle my way through the crowd. Everyone wanted to get in. Everyone wanted to talk about AI.