Guest Column: AI oligarchs meet Wall St and Washington in the Swiss Alps.

Adrian Monck, a World Economic Forum board member and former head of communications, shares what he's watching in Davos this week.

Klaus Schwab built Davos on a single proposition: get enough important people in one room and something good happens. Now he’s gone, and this year we get to find out if he was right.

First-timers expecting Alpine glamour are always disappointed. Davos is not St. Moritz. It’s a flat-roofed, brutalist Swiss valley. The Congress Centre is a Soviet gymnasium. The dowdiness is deliberate: access is more important than accessories.

The power dynamics have shifted too. Larry Fink has put himself at the heart of the new Davos. When the man who manages $14 trillion calls, CEOs answer. It’s no longer stakeholder capitalism – he’s the capitalist holding their stake. This is Wall Street in the Alps.

Donald Trump speaks Wednesday, bringing the largest US delegation ever. The MAGA veterans know Davos well. Older WEF attendees recall Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick from the old days at Barry’s Bar in the Hotel Europe, hitting the piano keys late into the night. Back then globalization was unstoppable and America’s president was a TV host.

On Tuesday, before Trump speaks, we’ll hear from Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron – and Canada’s Mark Carney. Consider the Europeans’ position. Trump arrives fresh from demanding Greenland and threatening punitive tariffs for anyone resisting.

The American security guarantee that allies have relied on since 1949 now comes with cartographic conditions. What do you say on a Davos stage when the leader has casually suggested re-carving your map?

Yet if anyone understands the global village, it’s Canada’s new prime minister. Carney served on the WEF Board of Trustees whilst running the Bank of England, chaired the Financial Stability Board, and knows these corridors as well as anyone alive. He greets staffers by name and he’ll speak on Tuesday, followed by dinner with the trustees – the ultimate global insider now wielding state power.

Carney represents what Davos could still be: the place where someone who genuinely understands both finance and governance can broker conversations that wouldn’t happen elsewhere. His presence is a reminder that the network the Forum built wasn’t merely window dressing. To use the power that Davos provides requires persistence, political savvy and not a little luck.

But relationships formed here have shaped central bank coordination, climate finance architecture, pandemic response. The question is whether that machinery can still operate when the biggest players have stopped pretending to share assumptions.

Chinese Vice-Premier He Lifeng and Scott Bessent could brush shoulders as Beijing posts a $1 trillion trade surplus. Will they meet? Davos is used to back-channel diplomacy.

The AI oligarchs will also convene. Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis are all in town. The private dinners where they debate whether they’re building humanity’s greatest tool or its last invention won’t be livestreamed.

Xi Jinping hasn’t attended since 2017. Modi goes to SCO summits instead. The Forum risks becoming a gathering of those who still crave American shelter, rather than emerging power centres. Carney – straight from Beijing – gets this.

And yet. Despite the naysayers, Davos remakes itself every January. This year’s absentees could be next year’s keynotes.

What it can still do is provide a space where competing powers occasionally find it helpful to talk – not because they share a vision, but because proximity sometimes prevents the worst outcomes.

That is a more modest ambition. It may also be a more necessary one.

The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting runs January 19–23. Over 200 sessions will be livestreamed at weforum.org. The ones that matter won’t be.

Adrian Monck writes the Substack newsletter 7 Things.

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