unDavos Summit

95% of AI pilots fail to deliver measurable ROI (MIT, 2025). 72% of CIOs are breaking even or losing money on AI (Gartner, 2025). This 90-minute session confronts those numbers head-on — no buzzwords, no framework decks, just hands-on AI application and a clear-eyed look at the real barriers in pharma, medtech, and health insurance. WHAT THIS SESSION COVERS Where AI actually delivers ROI in health...

"I would rather overspend by $200 billion than be on the wrong side of that bet." — Mark Zuckerberg on AI infrastructure. Professor Vijay Gurbaxani argues we are at the dawn of the next industrial revolution — and most companies are approaching it myopically. **WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS** → Why AI is not just another efficiency tool — it is a general purpose technology that shifts the entir...

Dr. Vitaly Peretashenko presents Vendor Energy System, a solid-state parametric electrodynamic generator that operates without fuel, batteries, wind or solar — just physics. After a patient died during a blackout early in his medical career, Vitaly pivoted to energy research and concluded that the bottleneck isn't energy itself but architecture: centralised grids where any single line can bre...

Laura Herman (Potentiary), Richard Hong (TNE.AI, ex-Microsoft) and Mark Terrell (unDavos) debate whether trillion-dollar data-centre buildouts are the battleships of our era. Richard reveals how his company shrunk a one-trillion-parameter cloud model to 1.7 billion parameters — running on a $1,000 laptop at 25 watts instead of 20 kilowatts — while delivering the same results for enterprise KYC and...

In five-minute lightning rounds, ten speakers delivered ideas ranging from how desire drives every mass media technology adoption cycle, to why an Oscar-winning animation was made for $4 million, to how Harvard neuroscientists are using real-time EEG to predict brain injury before it happens. Ignite Talks at unDavos 2026 packed more paradigm shifts per minute than any other session of the week. WH...

Only 2% of Americans say they trust the media "a great deal." Meanwhile, AI-generated misinformation is spreading faster than anyone can fact-check it, and the economic models that once sustained journalism are collapsing. Yet at unDavos 2026, a panel of media veterans and tech builders found unexpected reasons for optimism — from teens asking for newspaper subscriptions to the first rea...

Sri Lanka surpassed its estimated government revenue by 10% in 2025 — the highest overshoot in the country's history. One year after a party once labelled "extremist" took power, diplomats who feared the worst are now stunned by the results. At an intimate breakfast in Davos, the Prime Minister and Deputy Finance Minister made their case directly to investors. WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS...

Wendy Starland got 48 rejections before anyone would listen to her pitch for an unknown artist dressed “like a clown.” That artist became Lady Gaga. Jessica Chaijaya arrived in San Francisco from Indonesia speaking only “yes” and “no” in English, cleaned an entire school for free to earn her place, and has since met King Charles, Prince Albert of Monaco, and a half-dozen heads of state. This panel...

Todd Ault failed so many times his wife says an average person wouldn’t survive a single week of what he endures. Clayton Thomas built a social commerce fintech deployed in 80 countries and has been sued more times than he can count. Riadh Bouaziz arrived in France from Tunisia with nothing but a high school diploma and now runs a luxury linen company present in 85 countries. And a 30-year-old fro...

Tether makes $16–19 billion a year with roughly 100 employees — and it will never register in Europe, guaranteed. Meanwhile, the Genius Act in the US is creating a framework where banks and stablecoin issuers may soon compete head-to-head on yield, and Norway’s central bank just shut down all CBDC activity to pivot entirely to stablecoins. This panel of lawyers, regulators, and operators unpacks t...

In Switzerland alone, 300 billion in female money sits uninvested. Globally, the figure is 40 trillion. Meanwhile, a 30-year-old hedge fund manager from Tel Aviv who grew up in a 25-square-meter public housing unit now manages billions using quantum-physics-based algorithms that returned almost 90% in the worst year since the financial crisis. This panel brings together radically different investm...

Todd Ault had $200 million in the bank and couldn’t make payroll. During COVID, with bank branches physically closed, his company was debanked for the seventh time — including his wife’s Girl Scout Cookie account. The founder of Hyperscale Data (NYSE: GPUS) and the 34th largest public Bitcoin holder in the world delivers a raw keynote on how systemic debanking drove him to DeFi, politics, and buil...

700,000 people die from suicide every year. Over a billion suffer from mental health conditions. Yet psychiatry still diagnoses depression by asking patients if they feel sad — and current medications work for only 30% of people. Mariam Khayretdinova, CEO of Brainify AI, shares the story of Jay, a brilliant, successful woman who was assessed as “low suicide risk” and died two hours after being dis...

A LiDAR sensor that sees through mud and rain. A foundational brain model trained on half a million patients. A computer vision system that boosts farm profitability 35% using just a smartphone camera. And a nonprofit exploring how machines might one day talk to bacteria. Four founders showcase AI technologies at wildly different stages of maturity — from commercial deployment with BMW and Volkswa...

If the majority of AI’s value comes from cutting jobs, only a select few will become billionaires while the rest of us become jobless. SandboxAQ’s Doron Amir argues we’re at a fork in the road: Large Language Models optimize efficiency, but Large Quantitative Models — trained on physics and mathematics rather than internet text — can create entirely new sciences, new industries, and new jobs. This...

There are now more crypto users — over 400 million — than the combined populations of the United States and Canada. Eight out of ten banks are experimenting with blockchain rails. Yet the Cardano Foundation just completed the first-ever on-chain financial audit with a cryptographic signature from Grant Thornton, and Filecoin is backing up government data from Bermuda. This panel goes beneath the p...

AI could boost the Swiss economy by 85 billion over the next decade — but the real signal is what’s happening at the infrastructure level. Crusoe is building a 1.2-gigawatt data center in Texas as part of Project Stargate, Jiro AI rejuvenated mice using physics-informed models trained on 100 million medical records, and Beebop is turning residential heat pumps into grid-balancing assets. This pane...

With 40% of government workers set to retire within five years and China deploying dark factories that build hundreds of thousands of cars without humans, this closing session asks the room to name their industry's burning platforms — and stop pretending the fire is not already lit. From tariff shocks to the Klarna rehiring debacle, the urgency is personal, corporate, and geopolitical. WHAT T...

MIT's Ramesh Raskar and Prof. Dr. Kathrin Kind map the enterprise of 2030-2035: organizations that shrink in headcount but expand in capability, where every employee creates their own AI models and the 'internet of AI agents' replaces today's siloed copilots. From automotive simulation at 21 million virtual miles to the first room-temperature quantum computing startup, this fir...

From NVIDIA's AI factories to the EU AI Act's command-center approach, this panel maps the infrastructure layer that makes enterprise AI possible — or impossible. An NVIDIA public sector lead, a Microsoft Asia architect, a Visium CEO, and the architect of Europe's AI regulation debate what it really takes to move from isolated pilots to scalable, interoperable AI systems. WHAT THIS...

A philosopher, a Microsoft adoption leader, a Swisscom trust executive, and an innovation strategist walk into a fireside chat — and agree on one thing: the biggest barrier to AI-native organizations is not technology but the cognitive dissonance between the C-suite and the workforce. From Karuana Gatimu's blunt take on Copilot to a neuroscience-backed argument for slowing down, this panel ch...

In a data-dense keynote, Alvin Graylin argues we are walking a razor's edge — not choosing between utopia and dystopia, but balanced on a ledge where the next five years will determine which side humanity falls. With AI models already scoring 140+ IQ and producing hours of autonomous work, the question is no longer whether jobs will be displaced but how fast the transition curve drops. WHAT T...

The ITU's AI for Good initiative and Deloitte's global research converge in a new report mapping where AI creates real impact — from detecting diabetes through voice analysis to predicting disasters that cost $460 billion annually. This fireside chat unpacks sovereign compute, the global skills gap, and why access to infrastructure, not talent, is the real barrier to AI equity. WHAT THIS...

What does AI adoption actually look like inside Pfizer, a London specialty insurer, and Procter & Gamble? Three practitioners share real deployments — from AI-driven drug discovery and digital twin manufacturing to agentic underwriting and enterprise-wide upskilling — revealing where the technology delivers and where culture still stalls. WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS Pfizer is embedding AI across th...

Kenya’s diaspora sent $5 billion home last year — more than any other sector including tourism. Before colonization, African lands were sacred, communal, and could not be sold outside the community. The property rights regime imposed by colonial powers is still causing land disputes, mining conflicts, and unsustainable extraction today. This closing session pairs Kenya’s Ambassador to Switzerland...