Every January, the world's most powerful people descend on Davos.
CEOs, heads of state, investors, policy makers all convene to discuss the global economy at the World Economic Forum.
It's where the future is supposed to be debated. Growth, risk, geopolitics, markets, climate. Big ideas, big egos, big agendas.
This year, though, something was different.
Or maybe not different, just impossible to ignore.
Based on nearly every panel recap, article, and post-mortem we read afterward, one thing was clear: all anyone wanted to talk about was AI.
Tech "houses" lined the streets with logos from Palantir, Workday, Infosys, Cloudflare, C3.ai, and others — a not-so-subtle reminder of who's actually shaping the economic agenda right now.
On the main Promenade in Davos, the street is lined with “houses,” or retailers that are temporarily converted into meeting hubs for various corporate sponsors.
Our invite must have gotten lost in the mail.
Trust Always Lags Understanding
One line from Accenture CEO Julie Sweet from her panel about AI really stuck with us:
"It's hard to trust something until you understand it."
This isn't unique to AI. The same thing happened with electricity, the internet, cloud computing, smartphones. When new technology shows up, people don't trust it. Not because it doesn't work, but because they don't understand it yet.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, pointed out that 2025 was one of the largest years for venture capital on record, and most of that money went to what he called “AI-native companies.”
But what does it actually mean to be AI-native? Because in our opinion, most companies still aren't.
Being AI-Native
Today, most companies think they are AI-native because they add an AI chatbot to their website, automate a workflow, or update their website to say "AI-powered." But that's not AI-native.
Being AI-native means restructuring how you approach problems based on what these tools now make possible. It's a mindset shift before it's a technical one.
Here's an example from our own work:
While building Padel Browser, our intelligence platform for the up-and-coming padel industry, we needed data on hundreds of padel clubs including reviews, amenities, ceiling heights, locations, and more. If we took a traditional approach, that would have required at least three weeks of very manual research and data entry.
We knew there had to be a better way, so we asked ourselves: how can we automate this so AI does it for us overnight?
The answer was to build agents that spin up headless browsers, research each club, extract and structure the data, populate our maps, and generate SEO-optimized pages, in groups of agentic sessions lasting multiple hours each.
This is a development strategy that didn’t even exist 1 year ago, but we’ve completely shifted our processes to optimize for what the tech allows for today.
The outcome is the same, but it’s a completely different operating model, and one that saves us A LOT of time.
What Does AI-Native Mean to You?
So as you hear highlights from Davos and Elon Musk talking about aliens (which he did), we encourage you to think about how embracing AI might improve your work and actually impact your day-to-day.
Robots and aliens and Musk, oh my!
Here are three ways to become more AI-native in your life:
Start with friction, not features. Look for work that's slow, repetitive, or mentally draining. The first step is to recognize that there can be a better way.
Design workflows assuming agents are collaborators. AI can do more than write a birthday card or an email. Think about AI as an extension of yourself, as your own personal assistant who can research, draft, test, and iterate, all on your behalf.
Invest in understanding. Trust follows understanding. If you don’t understand the tools, you’ll limit yourself. Try a new app. Watch a YouTube video. Read a newsletter (like this one). It’s still early — if you’re learning, you’re already ahead.
Stay curious,
Julia & Russell
