Davos Crowd Focuses on AI Returns After Year of Heavy Investments

If a key focus at last year’s World Economic Forum in Davos was the need for massive private and public investments to support artificial intelligence development, this year’s event was more about proving the payoff.

Packed into the crowded AI House, one of the conference’s endless corporate spaces, Rasmus Rothe, from the house’s co-host Merantix, declared 2026 the “year of AI ROI.” Slogans plastered across the Davos promenade guaranteed companies like Cisco and IBM had found the formula for returns on AI investment.

OpenAI executives, meanwhile, debuted new education, health and cybersecurity initiatives, framing the moves as part of a push to ensure all markets — not just the US — see gains from the technology. At a press huddle, Brad Lightcap, the company’s chief operating officer, quoted the sci-fi author William Gibson: “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.” Lightcap added: “That very much rings true on this.”

The rhetoric hints at the anxiety of this moment for AI. Many investors are getting antsy to see significant commercial growth that justifies the sector’s enormous expenditures and lofty valuations. OpenAI, an unprofitable startup, has committed to spend more than $1.4 trillion on data centers and chips for AI in the coming years, including striking several deals with cloud providers and chipmakers that have been criticized as circular. (At Davos, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said she wants to “completely refute” that label.)

But among attendees at Davos, there was also plenty of optimism, with AI leaders highlighting their business traction. Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei, for example, touted the benefits of his company’s focus on enterprise customers. “It’s a business that’s more stable than consumer,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. “We can just very directly create value.”

Anthropic earned the most buzz at the conference, thanks to Claude Cowork, a new tool that’s gone viral in tech circles for being intuitive and tackling a wider range of work tasks on the user’s behalf. Though it’s still a “research preview” and limited to certain paid users, the Cowork product offers a glimpse of how advances in AI could translate into greater productivity for a broad mix of professionals.