Exponential View
Exponential View by Azeem Azhar
🔮 Davos 2026 and the end of the rules-based order
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🔮 Davos 2026 and the end of the rules-based order

Listen to my notes from the ground

At Davos 2026, the mood was unlike any previous World Economic Forum gathering. With Donald Trump arriving amid escalating geopolitical tensions and European leaders sounding alarms about sovereignty, I recorded live dispatches from the ground.

In this special episode, I bring together observations from four days at the annual meeting - tracking the seismic shifts in global order alongside the practical realities of AI adoption in the enterprise.

I speak about:

  • What Trump’s two-hour Davos speech revealed about the new geopolitical reality

  • Why technological sovereignty suddenly became urgent for European leaders

  • The real state of AI adoption in the enterprise, from executives who are actually doing it

  • The startup building AI agents that have completed 115 million patient interactions…

Skip to the best part:

(05:28) Mark Carney’s speech

(06:13) Why European leaders are sounding the alarm

(07:13) Why technological sovereignty is urgent

(14:24) What leaders really have to say on AI adoption

Last week, I set out the underlying argument in an essay on how the breakdown of old geopolitical assumptions is part of a broader upgrade to civilisation’s operating system.

Exponential View
🔮 The end of the fictions
I just got back to London after a week at the Annual Meeting at Davos. For the past few years, the World Economic Forum had become a kind of parody of itself, a place where billionaires flew in on private jets to discuss climate change and “stakeholder capitalism” while nothing much seemed to happen. But this year was different…
Read more

Enjoy!

Azeem

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