Davos 2025 in a Nutshell: AI, Energy, and Optimism
Davos 2025 was packed with ideas, inspiration, and crucial updates in tech.! The Swiss town was teaming with leaders from across tech, government, and finance converging to discuss the future.
Catch Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman fresh off a week of incredible meetings and conversations as they share their thoughts on the key trends, innovations, and strategic outcomes from the event including 👇
- AI is THE dominant theme: From CEOs to policymakers, everyone is focused on how AI will reshape our world.
- Sustainability takes center stage: Companies and governments are showing a genuine commitment to decarbonization and energy efficiency, with insightful discussions on the role of technology in achieving these goals.
- Optimism abounds: Despite global challenges, there’s a sense of hope and excitement about the future, driven by innovation, deregulation, and a focus on growth.
Learn more at Futurum Group and Moor Insights & Strategy.
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Transcript
Daniel Newman: It’s funny because a lot of people, when they hear about Davos, this is actually what they imagine. They imagine the mountains, they imagine the fog, they imagine we’ve got skiers in the background. They haven’t seen what we experienced, which was sunshine. I thought it was busier.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Daniel Newman: And you being a first-timer…
Patrick Moorhead: A novice.
Daniel Newman: … me being a wily, experienced second-year veteran, it was different. The streets were busier, the energy was higher. Maybe it was all the excitement about what we think is going to be several years of growth ahead. Maybe people just like seeing the sun? Hey, everyone. Welcome to Davos. Daniel Newman here back again, and joined, by the way, first time, brought my bestie with me, Patrick Moorhead.
Patrick Moorhead: I know I have given this event, World Economic Forum, a lot of grief prior. But I have to tell you, when it comes to the combination of meeting with senior leaders in tech, with governments, and finance, this is the best event for that. And we’re all in one place, we are literally on one street.
Patrick Moorhead: Chuck, thanks for coming on the show.
Chuck Robbins: It’s great to be here.
Patrick Moorhead: No, it is.
Chuck Robbins: This weather’s terrible too, huh?
Daniel Newman: No, they tell me it’s always like this.
Chuck Robbins: It’s always like this. It’s an incredible place. You can actually spend a lot of time talking to companies about next-generation technologies, what’s going on, the geopolitical dynamics that are happening around the world. It’s just a great convening, a lot of great people to spend time with. It’s highly efficient.
Anand Swaminathan: It creates a level of energy when you have so many people across the world coming together to discuss both business as well as the social impact item.
Daniel Newman: You and I get used to coming to tech events, and the focus is products.
Patrick Moorhead: That’s right. What are we launching?
Daniel Newman: Here, that’s not why these CEOs are here. You’re seeing the CEOs engaging with these countries, with these leaders, with these policymakers, pundits. It was all about, how does the world absorb this AI movement?
Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road with a View from Davos.
Antonio Neri: Thank you for having me and welcome to Davos, an amazing place in an interesting time.
Ken Wong: Happy to see both of you. My friend here.
Daniel Newman: Talking tech. You’re empowering women. I don’t know if I’m going to do your whole speech for you, but welcome to the show.
Cristiano Amon: Very happy to be here, is my favorite thing to do.
Patrick Moorhead: I appreciate that. Thank you. You probably say that to all the folks.
Rupal Shah Hollenbeck: Ransomware attacks on the rise, 90% increase. You can probably imagine what the cause of that is.
Patrick Moorhead: Sure.
Rupal Shah Hollenbeck: It’s startling.
Daniel Newman: Wait, wait. Were we supposed to say AI?
Rupal Shah Hollenbeck: You are.
Daniel Newman: Okay, hold on.
Rupal Shah Hollenbeck: You missed your cue.
Antonio Neri: AI is top of agenda for all governments. They have to control the destiny with these amazing technology.
Cristiano Amon: And we had, for example, the Prime Minister of Belgium, the Finance Minister of Germany, the AI Minister of France. It was good, having conversation, as you saw, about importance of Europe to understand the need for innovation and how they’re going to reshape, I think, their policies.
Patrick Moorhead: I felt like it was more affirmation, of course they want less regulation, particularly across doing commerce cross-border.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I think that was really, the tone was set with our rooftop conversation with the Chief Commercial Officer at IBM Rob Thomas.
Rob Thomas: The thing I’m the most hopeful on, as you look out the next four years is less regulation. We want to be able to create growth, create jobs, do M&A. And I think the incoming administration gives us a lot of opportunity to do that, so really excited about that. Growth solves every problem.
Dr. Joel N Myers: Well, clearly there are going to be changes, different views of climate, and business, and hopefully it’ll be positive. One thing we’re going to see is greater government efficiency, but a big change obviously is coming.
Patrick Moorhead: There’s not a single government or business who doesn’t agree that doing more with less energy is a good thing.
Daniel Newman: And to hear the CEOs, finally, acknowledge it, it was a safe space.
Sarah Antor: What I like to say, and this might sound a little bit controversial, but it’s a little bit like feeding vegetables…
Daniel Newman: It’s fun for the camera, go-
Sarah Antor: … feeding vegetables to your children. We need to cover up the decarbonization technologies with some returns and future-proofing these legacy industries. I think those industries are ready now. And what I hope is the younger generations are going to embed those new technologies.
Dr. Joel N Myers: AI is going to demand more and more energy, and I think a lot of the forecasts that we’re reading of how much energy we will need over the next 10, 12 years are too low. I could see the demand doubling over the next 12 years. Most of it’s going to come from the traditional sources, oil, and gas, and even coal. The only answer, ultimately, for humanity is fusion, because fusion produces no greenhouse gases and will be a real breakthrough. But how far off it is and is it going to be available on a huge scale, that remains to be seen. But AI may help us solve that problem.
Christina Crawford Kosmowski: All of the customers are saying, especially in the IT departments, they’re like, “I have got to deliver all this innovation, but I also have to think about the long-term sustainability of both cost and energy at compute, so how do I think about managing that?”
Daniel Newman: Right.
Christina Crawford Kosmowski: And so, we’re able to bring all that metadata together as well and give those recommendations around, “How do you think about where those workloads go? How do you think about fulfilling this demand?”
Jonathan Ross: So what we did that’s very different than GPUs, GPUs have a lot of external memory. And they will do part of the problem, bring stuff in from memory, and then do part of the problem and bring stuff in from memory.
Daniel Newman: Right.
Jonathan Ross: It’s very slow, very energy intensive. So we use about a third of the energy versus the GPU because what we do is we’ll take hundreds or thousands of our chips, lay the problem out completely in those chips, so we don’t touch any external memory, and it’s like an assembly line. We’ll just go through that very quickly. So we take advantage of that double exponential and we’re the first to do this.
Jeetu Patel: There’s only two types of companies in the world, one’s that are going to be AI forward, what I like to call is people that know how to take advantage of AI really well. They have high dexterity with AI. And others that are going to struggle for relevance. And so the first, the great ones, I think they want to move fast, but they’re being held back because of safety and security in AI, so that’s an area that we have really doubled down on at Cisco.
Rupal Shah Hollenbeck: Our report said that 67% of organizations said, “Yes, AI will have the biggest impact to my security posture,” but only about 30% are doing anything about it. And that’s where it’s really important to consult with and partner with the cybersecurity professionals around you.
Patrick Moorhead: 2025, really the march, and I don’t think it was an unrealistic march, that they wanted to start seeing return on investments from what the investments they’re making into AI infrastructure, AI SaaS, and everything in between.
Ken Wong: On an aggregate basis, our customer is saying that they’re going to spend three times more around AI. So there’s a lot of experimental things that we see here and that have happened in the past few years. How to do that, so that we can maximize the return on investment? So those are the feedback that we have got from our customer. And as a result, we announced, together with NVIDIA, a new framework, which is called the Lenovo AI Hybrid Advantage as a framework of solution with an aim to help our customer to land AI use cases fast and with ease.
Jim Stratton: I can be more efficient. I can get stuff done. There’s things that used to take me hours or I couldn’t even do at all, that are very, very easy to get done. That actually helps companies retain 20 to 30% higher retention rates. That’s money directly back into the customer’s hands.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, we came into Davos 2025, the World Economic Forum, really, in a moment of change. It was really interesting because what I was wondering is, were people going to be a little bit nervous and uncomfortable with what is to come? Or are people going to be feeling super optimistic?
Cristiano Amon: There was an optimism right now in the industry and especially about the U.S. economy, I think there’s expectation. There’s going to be growth. The combination of availability of energy, deregulation, and technology innovation usually is a good combination.
Rob Thomas: I think we hit a pain point at the right time on resiliency, which is every company is trying to say, “How do I have an infrastructure that can stand the test of time, is not going to be exposed to threats?” I think we hit something with Concerts. You’ll see more on that in May.
Patrick Moorhead: Looking forward to it. Nice little tip there.
Jeetu Patel: We made an announcement last week on a product called AI Defense that really helps take out the unpredictability from AI.
Daniel Newman: Christina, you had a pretty big few months. First of all, you raised a little money.
Christina Crawford Kosmowski: Just a little bit.
Daniel Newman: Just a little bit. Several hundred million at-
Christina Crawford Kosmowski: 800 million, yeah.
Daniel Newman: I said several hundred.
Christina Crawford Kosmowski: Yeah, yeah, yeah…
Daniel Newman: That was, effectively…
Christina Crawford Kosmowski: … exactly the same.
Daniel Newman: … but I didn’t have it memorized.
Christina Crawford Kosmowski: Yes, yeah.
Patrick Moorhead: I think the correct word, is almost a billion dollars.
Jonathan Ross: Rumors are we may have taped out a four nanometer chip that may be coming soon. I’m not going to confirm or deny.
Antonio Neri: Ten, 20 customers, large CAPEX deployments in the tens of billions of dollars. They soon will be consuming million GPUs. They already are in the tens of thousands, in some cases, hundreds of thousands.
Daniel Newman: We came, we saw, we conquered. We had so many great conversations, many memories.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Daniel Newman: I’ll leave you with this question, 12 months from now, will you be back here in Davos?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. I think my answer would be a conditional yes, probably match it next year, closer get experience that I would like to have, and to be able to live better value to our audience and also our clients.
Daniel Newman: Well, I think that’s a great way to wrap it up. I will plan to be back. We’ll see what happens. Next year is going to be fast-paced and furious. And of course, you can keep up with most of what’s going on. We only pick the good stuff to talk about here on The Six Five. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for coming to Davos with us. See you in 2025 on the next show.