Hi. I’m in Davos, Switzerland, this week for the World Economic Forum. Tomorrow’s visit of U.S. President Donald Trump is dominating conversations here. But when people aren’t talking about Trump and his imposition of tariffs on European allies that oppose his attempt to wrest control of  Greenland from Denmark, they are talking a lot about AI.

The promenade in this ski town turns into a tech trade show floor at WEF time, with the logos of prominent software companies and consulting firms plastered to shopfronts and signage touting various AI products. But while last year’s Davos was dominated by hype around AI agents and overwrought hand-wringing that the debut of DeepSeek’s R1 model, which happened during 2025’s WEF, could mean the capital-intensive plans of the U.S. AI companies were for naught, this year’s AI discussions seem more sober and grounded.

The business leaders I’ve spoken to here at Davos are more focused than ever on how to drive business returns from their AI spending. The age of pilots and experimentation seems to be ending. So too is the era of imagining what AI can do. Many CEOs now realize that implementing AI at scale is not easy or cheap. Now there is much more attention on practical advice for using AI to drive enterprise-wide impact. (But there’s still a tinge of idealism here too as you’ll see.) Here’s a taste of some of the things I’ve heard in conversations so far:

CEOs take control of AI deployment

There’s a consensus that the bottom-up approaches—giving every employee access to ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, say—popular in many companies two years ago, in the initial days of the generative AI boom, are a thing of the past. Back then, CEOs assumed front line workers, closest to the business processes, would know how best to deploy AI to make them more efficient. This turned out to be wrong—or, perhaps more accurately, the gains from doing this tended to be hard to quantify and rarely added up to big changes in either the top or bottom line.

Instead, top-down, CEO-led initiatives aimed at transforming core business processes are now seen as essential for deriving ROI from AI. Jim Hagemann Snabe, the chairman of Siemens and former co-CEO at SAP, told a group of fellow executives at a breakfast discussion I moderated here in Davos today that CEOs need to be “dictators” in identifying where their businesses would deploy AI and pushing those initiatives forward. Similarly, both Christina Kosmowski, the CEO of IT and business data analytics company LogicMonitor, and Bastian Nominacher, the cofounder and co-CEO of process mining software company Celonis, told me that board and CEO sponsorship was an essential component to enterprise AI success.

Nominacher had a few other interesting lessons, including how, in research Celonis commissioned, establishing a center of excellence for figuring out how to optimize work processes with AI resulted in an 8x better return than for companies that failed to set up such a center. He also said that having data in the right place was essential to running process optimization successfully.

The race to become the orchestration layer for enterprise AI agents

There is clearly a race on among SaaS companies to become the new interface layer for AI agents that work in companies. Carl Eschenbach, Workday’s CEO, told me that he thinks his company is well-positioned to become “the front door to work” not only because it sits on key human resources and financial data, but because the company already handled onboarding, data access and permissioning, and performance management for human workers. Now it can do the same for AI agents.

But others are eyeing this prize too. Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce’s chief engineering and customer success officer, told me how his company is using “forward deployed engineers” at 120 of Salesforce’s largest customers to close the gap between customer pain points and product development, learning the best way to create agents for specific industry verticals and functions that it can then offer to Salesforce’s wider customer base. Judson Althof, Microsoft’s commercial CEO, said that his company’s Data Fabric and Agent 365 products were gaining traction among big companies that need an orchestration layer for AI agents and a unified way to access data stored in different systems and silos without having to migrate that data to a single platform. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy meanwhile thinks the deep expertise his company has is maintaining cloud-based data pools and controlling access to that data combined with newfound expertise in creating its own AI coding agents, make his company ideally suited to win the race to be the AI agent orchestrator. Ramaswamy told me his biggest fear is whether Snowflake can keep moving fast enough to realize this vision before OpenAI or Anthropic move down the stack—from AI agents into the data storage—potentially displacing Snowflake.

A couple more insights from Davos so far: while there is still a lot of fear about AI leading to widespread job displacement, it hasn’t shown up yet in economic data. In fact, Svenja Gudell, the chief economist at recruiting site Indeed, told me that while the tech sector has seen a huge decline in jobs since 2022, that trend predates the generative AI boom and is likely due to companies “right sizing” after the massive pandemic-era hiring boom rather than AI. And while many industries are not hiring much at the moment, Gudell says global macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty are to blame, not AI.

Finally, in a comment relevant to one of this week’s bigger AI news stories—that OpenAI is introducing ads to ChatGPT—Snabe, the Siemens chairman had an interesting answer to a question about how AI should be regulated. He said that rather than trying to regulate AI use cases—as the EU AI Act has done—governments should mandate more broadly that AI adhere to human values. And the one piece of regulation that would do more than anything to ensure this, he said, would be to ban AI business models based on advertising. Ad-based AI models will lead companies to optimize for user engagement with all of the negative consequences for mental health and democratic consensus that we’ve seen from social media, only far worse. 

With that, here’s more AI news.

Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn

Beatice Nolan wrote the news and sub-sections of Eye on AI.

FORTUNE ON AI

Wave of defections from former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s $12 billion startup Thinking Machines shows cutthroat struggle for AI talent–by Jeremy Kahn and Sharon Goldman

ChatGPT tests ads as a new era of AI begins—by Sharon Goldman

A filmmaker deepfaked Sam Altman for his movie about AI. Then things got personal—by Beatrice Nolan

PwC’s global chairman says most leaders have forgotten ‘the basics’ as 56% are still getting ‘nothing’ out of AI adoption–by Diane Brady and Nick Lichtenberg

AI IN THE NEWS

EYE ON AI RESEARCH

Researchers say ChatGPT has a “silicon gaze” that amplifies global inequalities. A new study from the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Kentucky analyzed over 20 million ChatGPT queries and found the AI systematically favors wealthier, Western regions, rating them as “smarter” and “more innovative” than poorer countries in the Global South. The researchers coined the term “silicon gaze” to describe how AI systems view the world through the lens of biased training data, mirroring historical power imbalances rather than providing objective answers. They argue these biases aren’t errors to be corrected, but structural features of AI systems that learn from data shaped by centuries of uneven information production, privileging places with extensive English-language coverage and strong digital visibility. The team has created a website–inequalities.ai–where people can explore how ChatGPT ranks their own neighborhood, city, or country across different lifestyle factors.

AI CALENDAR

Jan. 19-23: World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland.

Jan. 20-27: AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Singapore.

Feb. 10-11: AI Action Summit, New Delhi, India.

March 2-5: Mobile World Congress, Barcelona, Spain.

March 16-19: Nvidia GTC, San Jose, Calif.

BRAIN FOOD

Is Claude Code Anthropic’s ChatGPT moment? Anthropic has started the year with a viral moment most labs dream of. Despite Claude Code’s technical interface, the product has captured attention beyond the developer pool, with users building personal websites, analyzing health data, managing emails, and even monitoring tomato plants—all without writing a line of actual code. After several users pointed out that the product was much more of a general-use agent than the marketing and name suggested, the company launched Cowork—a more user-friendly version with a graphical interface built for non-developers.

Both Claude Code and Cowork’s ability to autonomously access, manipulate, and analyze files on a user’s computer has given many people a first taste of an AI agent that can actually take actions on their behalf, rather than just provide advice. Anthropic also saw a traffic lift as a result. Claude’s total web audience has more than doubled from December 2024, and its daily unique visitors on desktop are up 12% globally year-to-date compared with last month, according to data from market intelligence companies Similarweb and Sensor Tower published by The Wall Street Journal. But while some have hailed the products as the first step to getting a true AI personal assistant, the launch has also sparked concerns about job displacement and appears to put pressure on a few dozen startups that have built similar file management and automation tools.

FORTUNE AIQ: THE YEAR IN AI—AND WHAT’S AHEAD

Businesses took big steps forward on the AI journey in 2025, from hiring Chief AI Officers to experimenting with AI agents. The lessons learned—both good and bad–combined with the technology’s latest innovations will make 2026 another decisive year. Explore all of Fortune AIQ, and read the latest playbook below: 

–The 3 trends that dominated companies’ AI rollouts in 2025.

–2025 was the year of agentic AI. How did we do?

–AI coding tools exploded in 2025. The first security exploits show what could go wrong.

–The big AI New Year’s resolution for businesses in 2026: ROI.

–Businesses face a confusing patchwork of AI policy and rules. Is clarity on the horizon?

Trump published a text message on Tuesday that he received from French President Emmanuel Macron, confirmed as genuine by Macron’s office.

Starting with “My friend,” Macron’s tone was more deferential than the criticism that France and some of its European partner nations are openly voicing against Trump’s push to wrest Greenland from NATO ally Denmark.

Before broaching the Greenland dispute, Macron opted in his message to first talk about other issues where he and Trump seem roughly on the same page.

“We are totally in line on Syria. We can do great things on Iran,” the French leader wrote in English.

Then, he added: “I do not understand what you are doing on Greenland,” immediately followed by: “Let us try to build great things.”

That was the only mention that Macron made of the semi-autonomous Danish territory in the two sections of message that Trump published. It wasn’t immediately clear from Trump’s post when he received the message.

Trump breaks with tradition

World leaders’ private messages to each other rarely make it verbatim into the public domain — enabling them to project one face publicly and another to each other.

But Trump — as is his wont across multiple domains — is casting traditions and diplomatic niceties to the wind and, in the process, lifting back the curtain on goings-on that usually aren’t seen.

This week, a text message that Trump sent to Norway’s prime minister also became public, released by the Norwegian government and confirmed by the White House.

In it, Trump linked his aggressive stance on Greenland to last year’s decision not to award him the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” the message read.

It concluded, “The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.”

On Tuesday, Trump also published a flattering message from Mark Rutte, secretary general of NATO, which the alliance also confirmed as authentic.

“I am committed to finding a way forward on Greenland,” Rutte wrote. “Can’t wait to see you. Yours, Mark.”

Rutte has declined to speak publicly about Greenland despite growing concern about Trump’s threats to “acquire” the island and what that would mean for the territorial integrity of NATO ally Denmark. Pressed last week about Trump’s designs on Greenland and warnings from Denmark that any U.S. military action might mean the end of NATO, Rutte said: “I can never comment on that. That’s impossible in public.”

Macron’s relationship with Trump

Macron likes to say that he can get Trump on the phone any time he wants. He proved it last September by making a show of calling up the president from a street in New York, to tell Trump that police officers were blocking him to let a VIP motorcade pass.

“Guess what? I’m waiting in the street because everything is frozen for you!” Macron said as cameras filmed the scene.

It’s a safe bet that Macron must know by now — a year into Trump’s second spell in office — that there’s always a risk that a private message to Trump could be made public.

Macron said Tuesday that he had “no particular reaction” to the message’s publication when a journalist asked him about it.

“I take responsibility for everything that I do. It’s my habit to be coherent between what I say on the outside and what I do in a private manner. That’s all.”

Still, the difference between Macron’s public and private personas was striking.

Hosting Russia and Ukraine together

Most remarkably, the French leader told Trump in his message that he would be willing to invite representatives from both Ukraine and Russia to a meeting later this week in Paris — an idea that Macron has not voiced publicly.

The Russians could be hosted “in the margins,” Macron suggested, hinting at the potential awkwardness of inviting Moscow representatives while France is also backing Ukraine with military and other support against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

Macron wrote that the meeting could also include “the danish, the syrians” and the G7 nations — which include the United States.

The French president added: “let us have a dinner together in Paris together on thursday before you go back to the us.”

He then signed off simply with “Emmanuel.”

Making nice only goes so far

Despite Macron’s persistent efforts, in both of Trump’s terms, not to ruffle his feathers, any payback has been mixed, at best.

Trump bristled on Monday, threatening punitive tariffs, when told that Macron has no plans to join Trump’s new Board of Peace that will supervise the next phase of the Gaza peace plan, despite receiving an invitation.

“Well, nobody wants him because he’s going to be out of office very soon,” Trump told reporters, even through the French leader has more than a year left in office before the end of his second and last term in 2027.

“I’ll put a 200% tariff on his wines and champagnes and he’ll join,” Trump said.

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Lorne Cook in Brussels, Sylvie Corbet in Paris and Kostya Manenkov in Davos contributed.

“I’ve always been like this, I’m reading basically every spare minute that I have,” Andreessen told the How I Write podcast in 2023.

The billionaire previously carved out two hours of reading time on most weekdays, according to a detailed version of his weekly schedule he published in 2020. However, with the business world only becoming more pressurized, he’s ramped up his knowledge intake—something made possible from “the single biggest technological leap” in his life: AirPods. 

Andreessen now spends two to three hours a day glued to audiobooks—typically alternating between histories, biographies, and material in new subject areas like artificial intelligence. Collectively, his practice amounts to nearly an entire 24-hour day dedicated to learning, each week.

Research suggests that listeners retain roughly the same amount of information from audiobooks as they do from reading text, making Andreessen’s shift in format less a compromise than an optimization.

“If nothing else is going on,” Andreessen added. “I’m always listening to something.”

Andreessen didn’t respond to Fortune’s request for further comment.

Mark Cuban and Bill Gates agree: reading will drive you to success

Andreessen’s approach is far from unusual among the ultra-wealthy. Reading ranks as the most commonly cited behavior tied to long-term success, according to a JPMorgan report that surveyed more than 100 billionaires with a combined net worth exceeding $500 billion.

Bill Gates, for example, has long championed reading—often finishing 50 books a year and releasing annual lists to encourage others to do the same.

“Reading fuels a sense of curiosity about the world, which I think helped drive me forward in my career and in the work that I do now with my foundation,” he told TIME in 2017.

Former Shark Tank star Mark Cuban has similarly cited reading as a critical habit that helped set him apart—and put him on the billionaire path.

 “I read more than three hours almost every day,” Cuban wrote on his blog in 2011.

“Everything I read was public,” the now 67-year-old added. “Anyone could buy the same books and magazines. The same information was available to anyone who wanted it. Turns out most people didn’t want it.”

Reading, as a whole, remains a cornerstone of nuanced thinking and communication—skills that are increasingly critical for business leaders, according to Brooke Vuckovic, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.

“Reading long-form fiction, biography, and history demands focused attention, tolerance with ambiguity and unanswered questions or unrevealed nuance in characters and situations, and a willingness to have our preconceptions upended,” Vuckovic previously told Fortune. “All of these qualities are requirements of strong leadership [and] they are in increasingly short supply.”