Davos asks where the returns are
The forum is in the Grisons this week and the mood has changed. Last year it was panic about new models; this year boards are asking what the spending produced.
The World Economic Forum runs in Davos from 19 to 23 January 2026. Reporting from the meeting describes a clear shift: away from model launches and towards returns, infrastructure cost and sovereignty.
For once a Davos theme is directly useful to a Swiss SME, and not because of anything said on a panel.
What the shift actually means
Large companies spent heavily on AI in 2024 and 2025. Their boards are now asking what came back, and in many cases the answer is uncomfortable: pilots that never became processes, licences that went unused, and a great deal of activity that did not reach a profit-and-loss statement.
This blog has described the small-company version of that all year. The failure modes are identical at both scales: nobody owned the decision, the process was never written down, and staff did not use the tool that was bought for them.
The advantage a company of thirty has here
A genuine one, and it is worth naming. You can answer the return question in twenty minutes because your numbers are small enough to see.
The three figures from 3 October — what you spent, how many people used it, one process that changed — are exactly what large organisations are now paying consultants to reconstruct. You can pull them from an invoice and a conversation.
What not to take from Davos
The infrastructure and sovereignty discussion is real and has nothing to do with you. Gigawatts, national compute strategies and chip supply are decisions taken several layers above your purchasing.
They will eventually reach you as prices and as the European data-centre answer from 25 September. That is the only channel through which any of it touches a company of thirty people, and it operates on a scale of years.
The useful sentence from this week
If the largest companies in the world are struggling to show returns on AI spending, a Swiss SME is under no obligation to spend faster. Monday’s post takes the return question seriously and answers it at your scale.