- In today’s CEO Daily: Fortune’s AI editor Jeremy Kahn reports on the AI buzz at Davos
- The big story: SCOTUS could upend Trump’s leverage to acquire Greenland.
- The markets: Jolted by Trump’s renewed tariff threats.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. I’m on the ground in Davos, Switzerland, for this year’s World Economic Forum. As Diane wrote yesterday, U.S. President Donald Trump’s arrival later this week along with a large delegation of U.S. officials eclipses pretty much every other discussion at Davos this year. But when people here aren’t talking about Trump, they are talking about AI.
At Davos last year, the hype around AI agents was pierced by the shock of DeepSeek’s R1 model, which was released during the conference. We’ll see if a similar bit of news upends the AI narrative again. (There are rumors that DeepSeek is planning to drop another model.) But, barring that, business leaders seem to be less wowed by the hype around AI and more concerned with the nitty-gritty of how to implement the technology successfully at scale.
On Monday, Srini Tallapragada, Salesforce’s chief engineering and customer success officer, told me the company is using “forward deployed engineers” to tighten feedback loops between customers and product teams. Salesforce is also offering pre-built agents, workflows, and playbooks to help customers re-engineer their businesses—and avoid getting stuck in “pilot purgatory.”
Meanwhile, at a side event in Davos called A Compass for Europe that focused on how to restore the continent’s flagging competitiveness, AI was front-and-center. Christina Kosmowski, the CEO of LogicMonitor, told the assembled CEOs that to achieve AI success at scale, companies should take a “top down” approach, with the CEO and leadership identifying the highest value use cases and driving the whole organization to align around achieving them. Neeti Mehta Shukla, the cofounder and chief impact officer at Automation Anywhere, said it was critical to move beyond measuring automation’s impact only through the lens of labor savings. She gave specific customer examples where uplifting data quality, improving customer satisfaction, or moving more workers to new tasks, were better metrics than simply looking at cost per unit output. Finally, Lila Tretikov, head of AI strategy at NEA, said Europe has enough talent and funding to build world-beating AI companies—what it lacks is ambition and willingness to take big bets.
Later, I met with Bastian Nominacher, co-founder and co-CEO of process analytics software platform Celonis. He echoed some of these points, telling me that to achieve ROI with AI generally required three things: strong leadership commitment, the establishment of a center of excellence within the business (this led to an 8x higher return than for companies that didn’t do this!), and finally having enough live data connected to the AI platform.
For further AI insights from Davos, check out Fortune’s Eye on AI newsletter. Meanwhile, Fortune is hosting a number of events in Davos throughout the week. View that lineup here. And my colleagues will be providing more reporting from Davos to CEO Daily and fortune.com throughout the week.—Jeremy Kahn
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top leadership news
SCOTUS tariff watch continues
The U.S. Supreme Court could as soon as today rule on whether President Trump has the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. A ruling against the president could derail his threats to enact tariffs against allies who oppose his plan to acquire Greenland.
Best practices for AI adoption
New PwC research shows that more than half of companies say they’re getting “nothing” out of AI adoption. PwC global chairman Mohamed Kande told Fortune in Davos that companies not seeing a payoff have forgotten the basics like clean data, processes, and governance.
The jobs most exposed to AI
Microsoft researchers found that roles like historians, translators, writers, and sales representatives are among the jobs most exposed to generative AI—and probably more likely to be replaced by the technology. Jobs like dredge operator and water treatment plant operators were among those least exposed.
The markets
S&P 500 futures were down 1.82% this morning; U.S. markets were closed yesterday. STOXX Europe 600 was down 1.27% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 1.34% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 1.11%. China’s CSI 300 was down o.33%. The South Korea KOSPI was down 0.39%. India’s NIFTY 50 was down 1.45%. Bitcoin was at $91K.
Around the watercooler
Barry’s cofounder meets with ‘random’ young people who send him cold emails and LinkedIn DMs—it’s how he hired the current CEO by Orianna Rosa Royle
Elon Musk says that in 10 to 20 years, work will be optional and money will be irrelevant thanks to AI and robotics by Sasha Rogelberg
Pinterest CEO: the Napster phase of AI needs to end by Bill Ready
America’s ‘Achilles Heel’ of national debt is exposed by Trump’s Greenland tariff threat, warns Deutsche Bank by Eleanor Pringle
CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams, Claire Zillman and Lee Clifford.
