How collaboration and technology are shaping the future economy

The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, embodied constructive optimism, fostering collaboration and tangible solutions. Key outcomes included economic growth strategies, AI governance, climate action and health advancements.

Leaders prioritized stability, innovation and cooperation to address global challenges. The meeting underscored AI’s transformative power, the importance of democratizing technology and the need for resilient infrastructure, shifting from crisis narratives to practical, forward-looking action.

If there can be one defining element of an event as extensive and multifaceted as the Forum’s Annual Meeting, then it was one of constructive optimism this year. At its heart is a collective need to maintain a positive outlook while mobilizing widespread effort to achieve results.

It has emerged as a realistic response to our current context. Importantly, it doesn’t seek to gloss over the challenges but instead puts them front and centre, inviting everyone to express their ideas and debate solutions with respect and without prejudice.

As I also witnessed during the week, there are a lot of bright spots worldwide. Many individual countries and regions have strong underlining fundamentals, a sentiment that is in line with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's global gross domestic product forecasts for 2025 and 2026.

The task now is to build on these fundamentals rather than focusing on division. But building on economies’ fundamentals and addressing systemic challenges is only going to happen if we prioritize stability and focus on finding tangible solutions to the challenges we face, many of which are shared.

This is why I was heartened that we made progress in several key areas during the meeting. In bringing together senior leaders and giving them the space and opportunity to exchange, interact, disagree, and ultimately seek solutions, we ended the annual meeting with the expansion of our Transitioning Industrial Clusters initiative.

This saw 13 new cities and regions join – including five from India – taking us to 33 clusters worldwide, in which companies and public institutions pledge to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions while also boosting economic growth and job creation.

We enjoyed similar success in the area of health; I was delighted to be the signatory of the Forum’s letter of intent with Nigeria’s health ministry to establish Nigeria as the first activator in the Global Activator Network on Maternal Health.

Women’s health is so often overlooked and yet vital to socio-economic development and it’s heartening to see progress being made towards this vital part of SDG 3.

The Annual Meeting underscored just what a strategic priority AI has become but also highlighted the variations in maturity and adoption by sector, region and country. Increasingly, technologies like AI are the paramount driver of change and disruption throughout sectors.

What strikes me as different from the transformations that we’ve witnessed in the past is not only the speed – which frontier technologies have supersized – but the fact that the Intelligent Age is transforming everything simultaneously. Never in human history have we witnessed this level of change.

Scaling up pilots and concept proofs remains a huge challenge but as we get this right, one that is offering a massive opportunity. This underscores the invaluable nature of the work that our country-based centres undertake. They are constructive optimism in action, taking frontier technologies and using them to address pressing local social and economic challenges.

Among the vital areas that the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution India is currently pursuing are: AI for India 2030, which seeks to unlock AI’s potential for broad, societal benefit; the Climate Technology programme, which focuses on developing climate-smart urban centres; AVIATE, which is exploring how future aerial mobility can counter urban congestion and improve rural connectivity; and the Future of Space Economy initiative, which is supporting the country’s quest to become a leader in this important area.

What was apparent from the Annual Meeting – and is evident in these areas of work – is the need to ensure that frontier technologies ultimately offer opportunities for all. This means democratizing technologies, which will, in turn, make them easier to govern and with better governance, misuse becomes far less likely or acceptable.

It also means collaboration. A theme that emerged from the event was that in this rapidly developing Intelligent Age, businesses and nations must decide where their competitive advantages lie and direct attention and funding into these areas rather than try to replicate the unachievable.

They can also encourage the growing use of open markets and supply chains, which will, in turn, reduce the over-reliance on proprietary systems.

Underscoring the security element in all this, government and business must work out how best to protect critical infrastructure and technologies and build capacity in those areas where they are strategically weak.

The annual meeting left me feeling positive, despite the scale and number of the challenges we face. I sense that we’ve moved away from talk of polycrises that was so evident at the Annual Meeting in 2023 to work out tangible means to address them.

How participants choose to instil this sense of constructive optimism into their respective organizations and governments will, of course, differ, underscoring their diversity but at the concept’s heart is a willingness to exchange, cooperate and then act, sentiments that were in abundance at this year’s meeting.