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  • In today’s CEO Daily: luckJeremy Khan, Artificial Intelligence Editor at Davos Magazine, reports on the AI ​​hype in Davos
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Good morning. I am in Davos, Switzerland to attend this year’s World Economic Forum. As Diane wrote yesterday, the arrival later this week of US president Donald Trump with a large delegation of US officials is largely overshadowing all other discussions in Davos this year. But when people here aren’t talking about Trump, they’re talking about artificial intelligence.

At Davos last year, the hype around AI agents was fueled by the shockwave caused by the DeepSeek R1 prototype, which was released during the conference. We’ll see if there’s similar news that upends the AI ​​narrative again this year. (There are rumors that Deepsea is planning to drop another model.) But beyond that, business leaders seem less dazzled by the hype around AI this year and more interested in the nitty-gritty of how to successfully implement the technology at scale.

On Monday, Srini Tallapragada, chief engineering and customer success officer at Salesforce, told me that the company uses “forward-deployed engineers” to tighten feedback loops between customers and product teams. Salesforce also offers pre-built agents, workflows, and playbooks to help customers re-engineer their business — and avoid falling into “pilot purgatory.”

Meanwhile, at a side event in Davos called “A Compass for Europe,” which focused on how to restore the continent’s declining competitiveness, artificial intelligence was at the forefront. LogicMonitor CEO Kristina Kosmowski told the gathered CEOs that to achieve AI success at scale, companies must take a “top-down” approach, where the CEO and leadership identify the highest value use cases and drive the entire organization to align around achieving them. It’s essential to move beyond measuring the impact of automation through the lens of labor savings alone, said Neeti Mehta Shukla, co-founder and chief impact officer at Automation Anywhere. She gave specific examples of clients where improving data quality, improving customer satisfaction, or moving more workers to new tasks were better metrics than just looking at cost per unit of production. Finally, Leyla Tretikov, head of AI strategy at NEA, said Europe has enough talent and funding to build world-leading AI companies, what it lacks is the ambition and willingness to make big bets.

I later met with Bastian Nomenacher, co-founder and co-CEO of operations analytics software platform Celonis. He echoed some of these points, telling me that achieving ROI with AI generally requires three things: strong leadership commitment, creating a center of excellence within the company (which resulted in 8x higher ROI than companies that didn’t!), and finally having enough live data connected to the AI ​​platform.

For more AI insights from Davos, visit this article luckEye on AI newsletter. Meanwhile, luck It hosts a number of events in Davos throughout the week. View that lineup here. And my colleagues will report more from Davos to the CEO daily and to Fortune.com throughout the week.—Jeremy Khan

Connect with the CEO daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

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2026-01-20 09:53:00

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