Davos 2026 - size does matter as enterprise scaling of AI takes center stage on Day One

The first full day of the World Economic Forum gathering of the good and the great and the ‘rich-enough-to-be-here-anyway’ in Davos and a simple truth has already been aired by one panel chair who observed that much of the week would be taken up by talk of AI when the main subject of conversation wasn’t Donald Trump!

So with the US President twiddling his thumbs mid-air on Truth Social, the panel discussions kicked off with a debate around what it takes to get AI to scale, with an indicative show of hands from the audience highlighting that this is an issue that is widespread to say the least. Since the corporate jets last touched down here, AI pilots have become commonplace; AI success stories at scale are a lot less thick on the ground than the Swiss snow on the streets.

But things have moved on since last year, insists Davos regular Julie Sweet, CEO of services giant Accenture, not least a shift among clients towards greater outcomes awareness:

One of the things we really learned is that we started a conversation around AI that was so focused on productivity and not actually the full outcome. So in pharma, one of the biggest things when you take drugs to market is you have to comply all of the content to explain the drugs to physicians. You have to comply with lots of regulations around the world. Most pharma companies have a lot of different  processes for that. We are working with a pharma company where we standardized the processes . They can do what took months to days, so they're able to get to market more quickly.

But actually the most interesting insight was that the people who used to spend time saying, 'How do I get legal approval?', are now spending time saying, 'Who needs this? Was the content helpful?'. Before, once you got it approved, the last thing you wanted to do was update the content and go through the same approval process. So, they're spending more time thinking about how to get the drug to the right places, make sure they understand it, which, of course, helps revenue, but it's really helping patients.

That’s one example, but it’s happening more and more, she adds:

There are many examples of that across the globe, in different industries and different things where it's not just productivity. And in fact, our latest survey, this is last quarter, 78% of the C suite believe that AI is actually helping growth more than productivity in terms of the value of it. So I think it's a really important part, and that's a learning over the last 12 months, as you've started to see a lot of these things begin to scale.

Value 

Over at Saudi energy giant Aramco, CEO Amin Nasser is a prime example of how AI focus is shifting to value-delivered:

Everybody talks about AI, the impact of AI, but where is the value? Where is that in dollar figures,. This is what we are able to establish. We want to turn the energy sector to be more intelligent in terms of capitalizing on AI, and we have the applications and the talents and the infrastructure. The most important things in all of these is the data quality. It's garbage in, garbage out, if you don't have the data quality. And we have built data quality over 90 years. We kept everything because we had the infrastructure that allowed us to scale now and be at this level.

Last year I talked about 400 use cases that we came up with in Saudi Aramco; this year, we're talking about 500 use cases. A hundred use cases went from the pilots to actual deployments. We measured our progress in terms of what we call technology-realized-value every year. We used to have like $200 million to $300 million in  previous years, in terms of technology-realized-value. In '23 and '24 we achieved $6 billion, 50% of that is AI related. For '25 - we should publish our numbers next month after we finish the third party verification - we're looking at $3 to $5 billion , more than 50% AI-related.

But he returns to the importance of foundational work in all this:

We've seen the benefits of the huge infrastructure that we have built over 90 years, the 6,000 talents that we trained on AI. These are subject matter experts that come up with the use cases, not the data analysts. We have a couple of hundreds of those, but it is the subject matter experts who understand where to create the pipeline for the opportunities. We established the operation model, basically capitalizing on our digital company, and we created the AI Center of Excellence, which established the pathway for taking ideas from the front lines to full piloting and then full deployment, establishing the processes and taking it into account.

That need to focus on underlying infrastructure is leading more and more organizatons to take a long hard look at what their tech stack currently looks like. It’s often not a pretty picture, suggests Sweet:

The ability to look at the tech stack and say, 'What do I really have to do and to do that at scale?’, that has been something that's super-expensive, that for years people haven't wanted to do. [There are] companies that have done it early, like Aramco, or think about McDonald's, who created their data foundation very early, and now they're surging ahead. But it's also about the operating model and the processes. We're working with a lot of clients who are saying, 'We have to really re-think and move from a project [mindset] to how do we have to operate? How do we have to have our operations?’.  One of the biggest barriers to scale has been the lack of discipline or willingness to say, 'I'm going to put a value on this. I have to be able to see it in my P&L, I have to be able to embed it in the objectives of my leaders'. All of these are best practices.

And every industry sector will also have its own particular battles that its participants need to win in, she notes:

If you're in consumer goods or retail, agentic commerce is a must win battle right now. It's a brand new channel. It's rapidly evolving. It may be early, because you can't yet buy a ton in that way, but it's going to move fast....So there's much more sophistication now, and really not talking about AI, but going back to basics - What's my strategy? Is the basis of competition in my industry changing? And if so, I've got to focus there while I build out the foundation’.

Commerce

The theme of agentic commerce was picked up  Ryan McInnerney, CEO of Visa, as a good example of how AI application is beginning to scale, albeit with a long way to go:

Last year, most consumers started to use these platforms and these AIs to shop for things, for discovery, to look for [things], move off of maybe one of the search platforms or the commerce platforms. But when they actually went to buy something, they went to the native merchant seller site. This year, in 2026, I think most of us will continue to shop on our AI platform of choice, but now we'll be able to buy natively on the platform. The buy button will be there. I won't need to leave, whether it's Chat GPT or Gemini or Claude or Copilot or what have you.

As we start to emerge from 2026 and look beyond that's when you'll start to see a shift to real agentic commerce, not just me pressing the buy button on one of these platforms, but me empowering an agent on my behalf to go shop for something, find it, and then buy it on my behalf. But for that to work, we need to invest in trust. You need to trust your agent that they're not going to go crazy and buy something you don't want to buy or spend more money than you want to spend. Merchants need to trust that if an agent is showing up at their digital doorstep that it is actually there on your behalf, and you've empowered it,. And your bank needs to trust that when they get a request to authorize a transaction on your behalf that you really wanted that to happen.

Of course, credit cards will be in great use at the Forum meeting this week, he notes:

When most people came here to Davos, they didn't think about kind of how they were going to pay for stuff when they got here. They knew that they had a Visa card in their wallet. They knew that it would work when they got here. As they walked on the promenade to buy a coffee or a gift to bring home, they know that transaction is going to work, and so does the seller. They trust from people from all different types of countries around the world. That's the type of scale that we're trying to put in place with agentic commerce in 200 countries and territories around the world.

But size isn’t everything, he concludes:

I have a thesis that agentic commerce could be an amazing leveler and empower for small businesses around the world. Today, most of our commerce happens as users on a small number of commerce platforms, or search platforms. I believe once we all are using agents to go search the world's inventory to find the right item for my wife's birthday, the right price for that airplane ticket that I want to take, or the right combination of features that I'm looking for, you have small businesses all around the world that have the ability to make their inventory available, to make their services available. I think there's a real chance that this third wave of digital commerce, this wave of agentic commerce, will empower small businesses to grow significantly.

My take

Final, cautionary, word to Sweet:

When people say, 'Why aren't things scaling across the enterprise?', you have to have the data right...Keep in mind, the stats are pretty stark. Over 90% of the data work that companies have to do, when you look across the globe, is still to come.

So, same time, same place next to see how far we’ve come...or not?