Just like it is every year, this year’s Imagination in Action Davos event was something big. The effort that it takes to get all of the participants together, to take care of all of the logistics, and to make things run smoothly, is substantial.
As the World Economic Forum convened for its 56th annual meeting in Davos, the Imagination in Action forum returned for its ninth year in the Davos Dome, dedicating January 21 to a full day of intensive discussions on how artificial intelligence is reshaping economies, institutions, security, and the physical world.
Curated as a counterpoint to hype-driven technology showcases, the program brought together leading researchers, technologists, policymakers, and investors to examine where AI is moving—and where human systems are struggling to keep pace. Speakers ranged from foundational AI researchers and university leaders to executives building large-scale infrastructure and next-generation systems. Davos – Jan 2026.
But it’s important: in these times, when everything is changing so fast, it’s necessary, in my opinion, to have a central place every year to assess the state of the world, the state of technology, and where we are headed. That’s abundantly true with artificial intelligence. To put it another way, all of us are out in the world doing our work throughout the year, but Davos gives us an inflection point, a coalescing of thought and deliberation, that will stand us in good stead as we move through 2026 – a reference point, and a moment of clarity on our hopes, our challenges, our relationships, to people and to tech.
I say our relationships, because what we do, we do together, sharing a set of goals for humanity. We want to integrate AI safely, fairly, and without harm. In business, in academia, in local communities, and around the globe, we work to safeguard the future. That’s also very evident when you’re “under the dome” at IIA Davos, where dozens of passionate and principled people added their voices to the mix.
Let’s talk about that a little – about who was represented, just to highlight that sense of relational work between national, social, economic and institutional groups, where so many bright stars stand out as individuals, doing our collective work.
Research and Implementation
One thing you can see from looking at the slate of speakers this year is that we had a lot of researchers, people working in labs on model theory, but also individuals with responsibility at places working on compute, on power, on networking. Putting all of this together gives the resulting convocation some depth, and reminds us that there is a link between research and eventual production or deployment of technology.
The Voice of Academia
Along with professors and other faculty running labs and working with students, the event had a number of institutional leaders who steer agendas and budgets, including MIT’s president Sally Kornbluth and major lab/center leadership (Daniela Rus at MIT CSAIL; Stanford HAI leadership like James Landay). That diversity helps us to think about how to connect frontier research to education, talent pipelines, and policy posture. It’s a lineup optimized for “what should the system become,” not only “what can we build.”
Money Movers
Capital was at the table, too. We had investors like Aramco Ventures’ CEO Mahdi Aladel, and a Bain Capital senior advisor, Steve Paglucia, along with Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi of UBS Global Wealth’s CIO for Global Equities, and others bringing experience with venture capital and market analysis.
Why is that important? It shows us the role of markets in these advances, and encourages a range of practical debates about financing power/compute, scaling go-to-market, and the gaps between exciting prototypes and durable businesses.
Media and Culture
In any such lineup, you don’t want to overlook the role of artists and thinkers and performers, and journalists who bring their own skill sets to the table. At Davos IIA, we had Forbes well represented, as well as people from NPR, the Economist, and other esteemed publications.
Then, too, the speaker lineup included several ambassadors from the field of entertainment. will.i.am of Black Eyed Peas fame is an annual participant with a great contribution to the conversation, but there were others, too, and this brought a depth and richness to the day. At the end of the day, even though we’re talking about tech, we’re talking about people, and the arts, the humanities, must also play a role.
Government and Policy
Public sector administrators were also not left out of the roster, and some of those representing national governments spoke boldly about policy, about how to navigate a world where it often seems like AI is “calling the shots.” Devendra Fadnavis, Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Alon Stopel of the Israel Innovation Authority, United Nations official Frederic Werner, and UAE Presidential Court representative H.E. Mariam Almheiri were just some of the names included here, as we work to understand the reactions of nations to the tech concerns that span the globe.
That’s just a little bit about a broad slate of speakers, not to mention our fine audiences, and all of the people working behind the scenes, to make this event happen. As we go onward, we have our memories of the conference to bank on, while we continue to encounter the effects of artificial intelligence in our everyday lives.
Overall the Summit Featured
The AI Sumit featured many amazing speakers including: Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist, formerly with Meta, David Rubenstein, Former Chairman, Carlyle Group, Noubar Afeyan, Founder & CEO, Flagship Pioneering, Joseph Ucuzoglu, Global CEO, Deloitte, Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor, Stanford University, Max Tegmark, Professor of Physics & AI Research, MIT, Sandy Pentland, Professor, MIT & Digital Economy Fellow, Stanford, Yoshua Bengio Professor at the University of Montreal, Yuval Noah Harari, Celebrated author & historian, Andrew Ng, founder and CEO of DeepLearning.AI, James Landay, Stanford HAI, Llion Jones, Sakana AI, Daniela Rus, Director & Professor, MIT CSAIL, Richard Socher, CEO, You. Com, Chase Lochmiller, CEO, CrusoeAI, Will.i.am award winning musician, Sally Kornfield President of MIT to name just a few of the 275 speakers.
A major focus was what comes after today’s large language models. Leading researcher Yann LeCun argued that future breakthroughs will depend less on incremental improvements to text-based systems and more on “world models” that integrate physics, biology, chemistry, and sensory data—advances expected to underpin what many referred to as “physical AI.” While still several years from maturity, these systems would transform manufacturing, energy, logistics, and scientific discovery.
Throughout the day, sessions reinforced a central conclusion: AI strategy is shifting from experimentation to institutional transformation. Speed of decision-making, workforce adaptation, and strategic positioning now matter more than vendor selection or feature comparisons.
Imagination in Action was convened in collaboration with MIT, Stanford, Deloitte,and Forbes.