4 takeaways from Davos 2026: New deals, a reckoning, dialogue and more questions than answers 

More than a century ago, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his letters to a young poet urged them to "live the questions now", to embrace uncertainty as the necessary condition for eventual answers.

Or, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put it in Davos this week: “We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for the world we wish to be.”

Carney was just one of more than 60 heads of state and a record 400+ political leaders and 830 CEOs and Chairs who came to the Magic Mountain under the theme 'A Spirit of Dialogue'.

It was a week where the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting facilitated the making of history, not by providing the answers, but by creating the conditions under which deeply polarized actors could begin to live the most consequential questions of our age.

Those questions themselves became sharper and the pathways, if not yet clear, at least visible.

Middle powers found their voice, dialogue reasserted itself as necessity, and the shape of a new geostrategic dynamic began to emerge.

Here are four ways Davos 2026 clarified what's at stake.

There was a tense moment on Wednesday, when news landed that Air Force One had turned back, delaying US President Donald Trump's arrival in Davos. But his Special Address to a packed Congress Hall was delivered on schedule.

He spoke at length about wanting to see a "strong Europe": "We believe deeply in the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization. I want to see it do great. That's why issues like energy, trade, immigration and economic growth must be central concerns to anyone who wants to see a strong and united West."

And he changed his stance on Greenland, saying "we probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable... But I won’t do that”.

He acknowledged it was "probably the biggest statement I made, because people thought I would use force”.

It's clear there's a rupture between the US and Europe and it was a recurrent topic of conversation throughout the week, with leaders offering differing thoughts on whether it was irreparable.

We might be just at the beginning of a "once-in-century" breakdown of the global order, said Gita Gopinath, Harvard Professor of Economics and the former First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF.

"I think what's long-lasting is the complete breakdown of trust between the US and Europe."

"Europe is looking for strategic autonomy. They are figuring out how to rely... on their own internal economy, their own internal security. So there's no going back on that, regardless of how this week goes."

"Nostalgia is part of our human story, but nostalgia will not bring back the old order and playing for time and hoping for things to revert soon will not fix the structural dependencies we have," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

"If this change is permanent, then Europe must change permanently too. It is time to seize this opportunity and build a new independent Europe."

Carney sounded a note of optimism and took the lead on bold statements of middle-power defiance that defined the week.

"We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it... but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.

"This is not niave multilateralism... It's building coalitions that work, issue by issue with partners who share enough common ground to act together."

Speaking on Thursday morning, Gavin Newsom, Governor of California and a US presidential hopeful, said transatlantic relations were "dormant not dead".

And the view from China? "Tariffs and trade wars have no winners," said Vice-Premier He Lifeng.

Meanwhile, negotiations were taking place, with the green shoots of new deals sprouting.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced in her Special Address the EU and India were "on the cusp" of an historic free trade agreement with India.

And the UK's Chancellor Rachel Reeves said she'd secured deals worth more than $2 billion in private investment.

There was a new deal for actor Matt Damon's Water.org charity - he announced the Get Blue initiative, which partners with corporations to help scale up their work. Gap, Amazon, Starbucks and Ecolab are already on board.

Before the Annual Meeting began, the Forum published the Global Risks Report 2026. Extreme weather events dropped from second down to fourth place in the ranking this year - not because they are any less urgent a risk, but because geoeconomic fragmentation and societal polarization have become more pressing.

"We live in a world of more frequent, exogenous shocks," said Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the IMF, and they will "continue to come".

Every year, the Annual Meeting's penultimate session on Friday is the Global Economic Outlook, where leaders explain where they see the economy heading in the coming year.

Here Georgieva expounded on her theme of facing facts and accepting how things are: "We need to look at the world as it is changing... We are not in Kansas anymore."

Director-General of the World Trade Organization Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala echoed the view, offering her advice for business leaders and policymakers amidst uncertainty.

"If I was running a country, I would be trying to strengthen myself and my region and build resilience... Maybe we'll have a slightly steadier state for the future, but I don't believe we're going back."

We live in a world of noise - and as speakers proved throughout the sessions, the noise exists from the macro level right down to the individual.

In the business of solving global problems, crises accelerate when you're putting out fires.

Christine Lagarde warned that "we are heading for real trouble" if we don't pay attention to the distribution of wealth and the disparity that is getting "deeper and bigger". She urged leaders to think very carefully about the people - and "distinguish the signal from the noise" in terms of what the numbers show.

It was a note sounded again and again throughout the week - in our increasingly tech-fuelled quest for growth and productivity, we risk focusing on the wrong things.

“If we want peaceful societies, we have to ensure social cohesion," said Adecco Group CEO Denis Machuel in the session Workers in the Driver's Seat. "We don’t see any place where people are immune from these forces that are happening.”

André Hoffmann, Vice-Chairman, Roche Holding and the Forum's Interim Co-Chair outlined the stark reality we face on the environment: “If you have no nature, you have no humanity, you have no business, you have no dividend, you have no shareholders.”

“We now have overwhelming evidence of the need to transition the global economy within prosperity, within planetary boundaries,” said Johan Rockström, Director, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

On health, Mosa Moshabela, Vice-Chancellor and Principal, University of Cape Town warned. "Between 2011 and 2030, the world will spend more than $30 trillion tackling non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Instead of incurring the expenses, we could be preventing them and investing that money more in prevention."

While Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency said he had "never seen" the energy security risks multiplying like this: "Energy security should be elevated to the level of national security.”

Public debt and the need for humanitarian aid loomed large.

Georgieva reminded her audience that some developing countries are spending more on debt repayments than on healthcare and education - and urged them to restructure debt.

Rebeca Grynspan, Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, said a public-debt crisis is one of the shocks she fears most - with developing countries caught between a rock and a hard place on fiscal choices.

"They don’t want to default on the debt, but they’re defaulting on development."

David Miliband, President and Chief Executive Officer, International Rescue Committee, said the humanitarian aid sector had shrunk by 50% in 2024: "The need for new thinking about how to finance development finance comes into sharp relief."

Understandably, conversations on AI permeated many of the sessions. From the technology's impact on jobs, to the equitable diffusion of its benefits and the effect that exposing our children to it will have on them, the subtext was very much about how to safeguard our humanity.

"Being creative is really about your ability to tolerate uncertainty," said Becky Kennedy CEO & Founder, Good Inside, explaining that the shortcuts offered by AI paradoxically mean we run the risk of children never learning the skills to thrive in an age of AI.

"That is no way going to be possible if we are downgrading the experience along the way. That's the part of the AI conversation that I haven’t heard surfaced enough.”

"As a child, if you don’t get a chance to develop these cognitive skills, to develop the neural pathways, we’re in trouble,” echoed Anna Frances Griffiths (Vignoles), Director of the Leverhulme Trust, in a session on Defying Cognitive Atrophy.

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, laid it on the line: “We let these companies hack our attention, with devastating cognitive and emotional results, now we’re letting them hack our attachment. And that will be catastrophic for humanity."

And here's a very prominent growth dilemma: 40% of jobs globally are going to be impacted by AI over the next couple of years, Georgieva said, either by being transformed or eliminated. In advanced economies the figure is 60%. The IMF itself is not immune to this trend, she said – it’s gone from 200 translators to just 50.

Khalid Al-Falih, Minister of Investment Saudi Arabia said: “The essence of AI's power is it has to be accessible… Diffusion is not just within economies that have to compete, but I believe it has to be done globally.”

Leaders from technology companies addressed the opportunities AI presents - and the guardrails required. NVIDIA's Jensen Huang said AI was likely to close the technology divide: "I'm fairly optimistic about the potential of AI to lift and to empower people."

"We have to reinvent processes and amplify the potential of humans rather than eliminate work," said Ravi Kumar S., CEO, Cognizant. As a global community have to get to a point where "we are using [AI] to do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said.

"It's a moment of uncertainty but also possibility," said Forum President Børge Brende on Monday, as the Annual Meeting kicked off with the Opening Concert. "It's also a moment when dialogue is not a luxury, but a necessity. There is no way we can move the world forward without starting to speak to each other."

Larry Fink, Interim Co-Chair of the Forum, said, "the most important thing we must do is listen. We're not going to agree on everything. In fact, I'm sure we're going to disagree. But can we find a way to have a conversation – openly disagree? But through the disagreement, can we deepen our understanding of each other?".

The fact that close to 3,000 leaders from more than 130 countries travelled all the way to Davos "says something", said Mohammed Al-Jadaan, Saudi Arabia's Minister of Finance.

We need to make sure we embrace dialogue and cooperation - and embrace international, multilateral organizations like the World Bank and the IMF "because uncertainty requires these kind of institutions to provide support".

He Lifeng summed up the situation in two neat analogies, which in themselves were a recurrent rhetorical feature.

"Amidst the rage and torrents of a global crisis, countries are not riding separately in some 190 small boats but are rather all in a giant ship on which our shared destiny hinges."

Away from the public programme, dialogue continued. High-stakes geopolitical negotiations, and bilateral discussions signalled significant shifts in global economic and security architecture.

On Wednesday morning, speaking in the session Can Europe Defend Itself? NATO chief Mark Rutte acknowledged “there are tensions at the moment" around Trump's designs on Greenland. "But the only way to deal with it is through thoughtful diplomacy.”

At lunchtime, Trump assured the world he "won't use force" to acquire Greenland in his Special Address - and by Thursday morning, Trump and Rutte had announced a Greenland "framework deal" enhancing Arctic security while averting tariff threats.

Attention turned to Ukraine on Thursday, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave a Special Address. He later met with Trump to finalize the terms of security guarantees and told reporters that trilateral talks (US-Ukraine-Russia) would begin in Abu Dhabi on 23 January.

“Everyone has to be ready, not only Ukraine,” he said. “It’s better than not having any type of dialogue.”

"We are not supposed to be an echo chamber of consensus," said Brende in his closing speech. "Real dialogue requires patience, commitment and creativity, but it is really necessary, because the absence of this course deepens division."

Unlike previous years, this Davos was framed around 5 defining questions:

Over the course of the week, many more questions were asked.

Sessions themselves posed questions like, Is Everyone Falling Behind?, Who is Winning on Energy Security?, Who Brokers Trust Now?, Is Democracy in Trouble?, Will We Ever Have a Global Plastics Treaty? and Can Europe Defend Itself?

Yes, said Rutte on that last question.

Perhaps most crucially, we must ask ourselves what people want, said Georgieva.

"My message to everybody is learn to think of the unthinkable and then stay calm, the world now is truly, genuinely multi-polar. Technology is moving so rapidly, changes are happening so fast, what is surprising in this story is the incredible resilience of the world economy.

"And I think if you step back, what do people want? They want peace and well-being for them, for their families."

There’s a tension between economic and geopolitical policies and worker’s rights, said Roxana Mînzatu, Executive Vice-President for Social Rights and Skills, Quality Jobs and Preparedness, European Commission: “How do we stay human-centric as AI is introduced to our production processes?”

We need to think about what it means to have a quality job in the context of a human working with an AI agent: "AI is a tool for now, but it depends on how each organization deploys it."

Historian, Yuval Noah Harari said nobody has any experience in building a hybrid human-AI society. "I don't know what the answer is. The question is, how do we build a self-correcting mechanism, so if we take the wrong bet, this is not the end?"

But asking the right questions is a step toward solving them and being comfortable with uncertainty.

"For humans, standing still is not an option", said Guy Parmelin, President of the Swiss Confederation in his opening remarks as he quoted philosopher Henri Bergson, "to exist is to change".

As Brende said: “We are standing at the start of a new reality, the contours of which are still to be defined."

We must now live the questions.