Davos Decoded: Ten Tech Truths Shaking Up 2026
Sandy Carter
Somewhere between the third espresso, Taylor Swift, and my phone hitting a single digit battery, it hit me. Davos 2026 was not about predictions anymore. It was about things that are impacting our future. JPMorgan is live on Ethereum, a third of Gen Z wants an AI boss, and Quantum risk for blockchains!
The World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos has always been where global anxiety becomes a catalyst. This year, technology dominated but broadened to impacting geopolitics and country competition.
So what does any of this have to do with Taylor Swift? When my Gen Z daugther picked me up from the airport and I tried to explain what I learned, she cut me off two sentences in. “Boring.” So I translated to her language and her fandom of Taylor Swift.
Here are ten moments that mattered.
1. JPMorgan Goes Live on Ethereum
Taylor re-recorded her albums to her own masters. JPMorgan just did the same thing with money.
The world’s largest bank is now officially on Ethereum. JPMorgan’s first real world asset product, the Onchain Net Yield Fund (MONY), is powered by JPM Kinexys. This is not a pilot or a proof of concept. It is a live, institutional blockchain infrastructure from the most traditional of traditional finance players.
2. One Third of Gen Z Wants an AI Boss
Taylor writes her best songs after breakups. Gen Z is writing theirs about human bosses.
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Ana Kreacic, COO of the Oliver Wyman Forum, delivered her annual Davos report. Oliver Wyman’s survey of 300,000 voices revealed a striking finding: one third (37%) of Gen Z respondents said they would prefer an AI manager over a human one.
Oliver Wyman’s survey of 300,000 voices revealed one third of Gen Z would prefer an AI manager over a human one.
Oliver Wayman
Their reasons?
Consistency, transparency, and fairness. This generation is not rejecting leadership. They are rejecting unpredictability. In my discussions with Dr Efi Pylarinour, Global Fintech Thought Leader, she said that “they are not longing for a robot CEO. They are longing for the consistency, transparency, and fairness they rarely see in humans.”
3. AI Becomes Geopolitics And Competitive
Taylor moved from country to pop. AI just moved from Tech to Geopolitics.
AI crossed a threshold at Davos this year. It is no longer simply a technology topic. It is an economic and geopolitical one, with trust and regulation dominating the tone across sessions and side conversations alike.
Elon Musk, in his first ever Davos appearance, predicted that AI could surpass any individual human by the end of this year. By 2030, AI will be smarter than all of humanity combined.
Elon Musk makes a surprise visit to Davos.
Sandy Carter
He painted a vision of “abundance for all” where robots outnumber people and the global economy explodes.
But while Musk was outlining this utopia, Autodesk was laying off 1,000 employees, betting on AI to automate their jobs. The world’s leaders are grappling with this very tension, pushing for “trusted AI.”
4. Quantum Risk Is Uneven Across Blockchains
Taylor hides Easter eggs in every album. The quantum threat to crypto has been hiding in plain sight too.
During Davos week, the Citi Institute released a deep dive on the quantum threat to blockchain, revealing that risk is unevenly distributed: Bitcoin has roughly 25 percent of coins exposed while Ethereum and Solana face far higher vulnerability over 65 percent.at Accenture.
Ronit Ghose, Managing Director, Citi Institute, told me that “Citi Institute believes the starting gun has been fired on a trillion dollar security race now underway for banks and blockchains to move to post quantum cryptography”
5. Post Quantum Cryptography Is Ready. We Are Not.
Taylor drops vault tracks to release when the world is ready. The fix for quantum has been sitting in the vault too.
The standards exist. NIST has published them. Regulators are pushing timelines. The problem is execution. Quantum readiness requires mapping exposure, prioritizing critical systems, enabling crypto agility, and executing multiyear migrations. This may be the largest cryptographic upgrade in human history, potentially exceeding the cost and complexity of Y2K.
In chatting with Steve Suarez, CEO of HorizonX and a contributor to the report, he noted that “as the field matures, it’s becoming increasingly clear that progress will depend on how effectively the ecosystem bridges advances in hardware with practical, deployable applications. This will be the largest software upgrade in history with over 20 billion hardware devices that will need to be upgraded. ’The takeaway: social consensus and coordinated upgrades will determine which ecosystems survive the quantum transition intact.
Quantum Panel at the Accenture House in Davos
Sandy Carter
The Accenture panel on Quantum was one of the best I saw. “The quantum conversation is moving from cryptographic circles to boardrooms. Companies need to act the same with Quantum as they do with AI,” Tom Patterson, Managing Partner at Accenture, told me. “In AI they don’t just try it out, they just do it. Quantum needs the same mindset.:
6. Cognizant Demos Multi Agent Vibing
The Eras Tour features every version of Taylor performing together. Multi agent AI works the same way.
Cognizant showcased their open source multi agent platform with a live demo. Babak Hodjat, their Chief AI Officer explained to me “that the system is itself a multi agent system that designs and builds other multi agent systems through dialogue.
The future Hodjat envisions? Agents that can merge responsibilities, split when overloaded, and form new connections spontaneously. The open source repo is live here.
7. Data Is the Real AI Spend, And Chief AI Officers Have a Limited Length of Time
Everyone talks about concerts, but the real money is made at the merch table. AI works the same way.
One of the most interesting things I heard was the HFS research report. The report indicates that for every $2 spent on AI initiatives, enterprises should invest roughly $2.50 on data modernization, governance, and management.
In addition, the report laid out the ideal length of time that an ideal Chief AI Officer should remain in office. The three year lifespan of the Chief AI Officer discusses the stabilize, focus, embed, and dissolve phases.
From the HFS research report in the Cognizant House, on the lifespan of the Chief AI Officer.
Sandy Carter
Leading AI companies like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic are each spending roughly a billion dollars a year on human provided training data alone. The mantra has shifted from more data to better data, and that means humans in the loop at scale.
8. Crypto Takes the Main Stage
Taylor went from opening act to headlining statuiums. Crypto just did the same at Davos.
CZ, Binance co-founder and former CEO, and Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, both spoke at official WEF sessions, a sign of just how far crypto has come from the sidelines.
CZ predicted a Bitcoin supercycle in 2026 and revealed he is advising roughly a dozen governments on asset tokenization. He described a future where AI agents transact natively in crypto, and where traditional payment rails like Visa and Mastercard sit on top while stablecoins settle behind the scenes.
Yat Siu was equally bullish, calling stablecoins a pillar of future financial growth and predicting the Clarity Act will pass this year, triggering a wave of US tokenization.
9. World Models Get Their Moment
Taylor made music videos as important as the songs. World models are doing the same for AI, learning from video instead of just text.
The concept is straightforward: instead of predicting the next word like ChatGPT and its peers, world models predict what happens next in the physical world. They learn from video, simulation, and spatial data to build internal representations of how objects move and interact over time.
Google, Nvidia, and Fei Fei Li’s World Labs are all investing heavily. For leaders building on AI infrastructure, the question is whether the next breakthrough comes from scaling language models or from teaching machines to perceive physical reality.
10. The Web3 Declaration Gets Signed
Swifties trade friendship bracelets to show they belong to something bigger. Davos just did the same thing for Web3.
At the Davos Web3 House, leaders gathered to sign the Web3 Declaration, celebrating the progress made across the ecosystem over the past year. It was a moment of reflection in a week defined by forward momentum. Ajeet Khurana, the founder of the Web Davos House, told me that “web3 has made such progress in 2026 that we wanted to drive more value around crypto, DePin, stablecoins, and more into the fabric of global companies.”
Ajeet Khurana, the founder of the Web3 Davos House, said “web3 has made such progress in 2026 that we wanted to drive more web3 technology around crypto, DePin, stablecoins, and more into the fabric of global companies.”
Davos Web3
Davos 2026 made one thing clear: the lines between AI, blockchain, quantum, and geopolitics are dissolving. The question is no longer whether these technologies will converge. It is whether organizations can move fast enough to keep up. Taylor Swift figured out how to stay ahead of every era. Can you?