In January 2026, KBI was on the ground at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The team attended across the week — not for the headline panels, but for what happens in the margins.

The question comes up every year: is Davos worth it? Our answer is that it depends entirely on why you go. For KBI, the value is not in sitting in an audience. It is in the fact that for roughly 72 hours, many of the usual barriers between problems and decision-makers compress. The distance between a challenge and the person with the authority to act on it can shrink to the length of a coffee line. That is a specific and rare kind of opportunity, and we take it seriously.

What WEF 2026 made clear: the bottleneck is people, not infrastructure.

Three voices said versions of the same thing across the week:

Jensen Huang (NVIDIA) described a trillion-dollar infrastructure buildout already underway — and noted that what is missing is not more software, but the people with the tradecraft to operate what he called the "AI factories" of the near future. Kristalina Georgieva (IMF) warned that even the most prepared economies are not moving fast enough given the speed at which the labour market is shifting. Marc Benioff (Salesforce) pointed to the emergence of Digital Labour — and the new kind of judgment required to manage both human and automated workforces simultaneously.

KBI's position is straightforward: the talent the world needs already exists. It needs structured pathways to develop and be recognised. That is what the ETO programme — and ETO Western 2026 at InHolland — is built to do.

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