As leaders across business and government return home from Davos, one theme continues to dominate the 2026 World Economic Forum: We are witnessing a fundamental rewiring of the operating systems of the global economy, and it is being driven by AI.

From experimentation to production

This week made clear that AI is becoming the hub connecting industry, technology, government, and the global economy. Davos matters because it convenes an unusually broad range of perspectives on the most consequential global issues, shaped by the diversity of its participants and the singular experiences they bring to the table. It’s that mix of viewpoints that strengthens decision-making by broadening context and challenging assumptions. 

Weighed together, these perspectives settled on a common conclusion about AI’s role in the economy. AI has passed the experimentation phase and is now firmly in production.

It’s not just about possibility or promise anymore—it’s about deployment and value creation. 

The boardroom reality check

Over the last five years, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with CEOs and boards about AI. Through all of them, I’ve seen three themes consistently surface in the board room: 

1. A strategic imperative or initiative 
2. A structural and significant cost to the business
3. An existential threat 

Framed another way, these topics map to growth, cost, and risk. While most initiatives across the life of a business may hit one or two of these criteria, AI hits the generational trifecta of all three—ensuring it will remain in the board room for the foreseeable future.

At CoreWeave, we see this journey with granular clarity and purpose. Our CEO Mike Intrator laid it out plainly in an interview with CNBC this week: “AI will continue to pay dividends for the next 100 years.” 

Scale is the defining challenge

AI represents the fastest technology shift modern enterprises have ever had to absorb. What we see every day is relentless demand from AI innovators. And it’s growing. Infrastructure at an unprecedented scale is required to build and iterate on increasingly complex problems, all in search of solutions to the world’s greatest challenges.

At that scale, security cannot be an afterthought. It must be embedded end-to-end from the application layer down through silicon and into the physical substrate itself. How this is done matters. A purpose-built, AI-native platform for training, inference, and agentic workloads is no longer optional. It’s foundational. This is the work ahead of us, and it defines why CoreWeave buildsThe Essential Cloud for AI for our customers.

Learn how CoreWeave accelerates every stage of AI development. 

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