Azeem Azhar

Welcome back to Exponential View.

I'm Azim Azhar, and this is a special episode.

A collection of live dispatches I recorded on the ground at Davos 2026.

Over four days at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, I brought you into the corridors, the queues, and the conversations as they happened.

From the unprecedented buzz around Donald Trump's arrival, Mark Carney's stirring call for sovereignty, and the practical realities of AI adoption in enterprise.

This is Davos as I experienced it.

On day one, I had just arrived at the Congress Center.

The big story everyone was talking about was, of course, Trump.

He would be speaking in a couple of days and the geopolitical tension was palpable.

But to begin with, my focus was tracking three things, the state of AI and its move into enterprise, the startup ecosystem, and the energy transition.

Welcome everyone, it's Azeem here and I'm in Davos for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

This is day one of some very brief Substack Live reports I will give.

Donald Trump is going to be here.

He's going to be speaking on Wednesday.

It is a momentous moment, I think, given all of the tensions in the world today.

The geopolitics of it, shall we say, is a little bit frenetic and frantic.

We have had, of course, Venezuela, but now the

Greenland issue and the frictions between the US and European nations, many of whose leaders are going to be here, Macron speaking as well this week.

So that is perhaps part of the overarching mood.

It's meant that there are more political leaders than usual here.