Davos 2026: AI’s Year of ROI and Risk
- Prity Jha
- Jan 23
- 2 min read
As the snow settles on the 2026 World Economic Forum, the collective mood of global leaders has shifted from the wide-eyed wonder of 2025 to a pragmatic focus on execution. For those of us at Nestria, the takeaways are : a validation of our “mission” and a confirmation that the era of "AI for the sake of AI" is officially behind us.
Here is what the world’s most influential rooms were buzzing about this week:
The Bullish Horizon: AI moves from “cool” to “core”
The EU Gets Serious: There is a palpable shift in European strategy. The EU is finally moving beyond just regulation to active enablement, signaling a push to support a unified, EU-incorporated model. In the race to define technological advancement, the "Sovereign AI" movement is no longer a talking point; it’s a survival tactic.
2026: The Year of AI ROI: If 2025 was the year of the "massive spend," Bloomberg reports that this year was about proving the payoff. Enterprises are no longer satisfied with pilots; they are hunting for the measurable returns on their heavy investments.
The Bearish Reality: The price of autonomy
The "Agentic" Vulnerability: As AI agents become pervasive, they’ve opened a Pandora’s box of new attack vectors. CrowdStrike’s recent warnings on prompt injections highlight a scary truth: enterprises are deploying intelligent systems they aren't yet prepared to defend.
The End of "Decision Durability": In a world of ultra-fast tech evolution, strategic partnerships and diplomatic niceties are losing their shelf life. Leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to make decisions that last more than a quarter. In this volatility, some are even joking, half-seriously, that "more power to gold" might be the only stable hedge left.
Nestria’s Path Forward
For us at Nestria, the mission could not be clearer. We are going full steam to make our vision a reality.
As we champion deep AI transformation of core workflows, we also know one thing: intelligent systems will only be trusted at scale if they are reliable and secure by design, not patched later. Mission-critical operations need high-assurance AI automation built for futurist scalability and an evolving threat landscape, including the new risks introduced by autonomous agents and prompt-based attacks.
We aren't just building for the innovation of today; we are strengthening the foundation for the autonomy of tomorrow.
The Davos takeaway is simple: Intelligence is power, but secure intelligence is enduring advantage .
