All right. Hello everyone. I'm Dave Lawler, the national security editor for Axios. I'm here with our co-founder and CEO, Jim VandeHei, to talk about all the themes this week in Davos. Jim, thanks for making the time.
Jim, you're taking a lot of meetings here in Davos. I'm curious, what are you asking people? What are you trying to take away this week? What are you hoping to learn?
I think every single conversation I've had has been about one topic: AI, not Trump, which I've been surprised by. In the past, it's been very much like people wanted to better understand the president. They just... the obsession with AI is off the charts. And it's gone from being kind of a curiosity and an aspiration to like, okay, holy cow, we've got to now implement this technology quickly. That has implications on like how you're operating a company, but then also how you deal with your employees if you know that there's going to be this really fast transformation. And so almost every conversation centers around that. And there's just like, there's an energy this year that I haven't picked up in the last couple of years. So I think that energy comes from people know a lot of changes going on. There's a lot of deals to be done. I think there's a lot of mystery about AI. So people really just want to dig into it.
I want to come back to that energy. But you mentioned that people are talking about what this means for their workforce, AI in particular. Are they talking about we got to retrain people? We got to refocus people? Or are they talking about we're going to make real changes to hiring and firing on the basis of this technology that's coming onto the market?
It's both, to be blunt. I mean, every company, almost every CEO you talk to is having the same conversation. They've kind of identified the jobs that they have that they think will be automated or done by AI. They used to think it would be in 18 months. They now think it'll be in six months. So they're thinking about, oh, on the good side, they're like, this is awesome. I'm going to have greater productivity, lower cost, higher profit. But they're also AI scared. They're like, "Oh, but I have to somehow implement this new technology." And it has real human cost. And whenever you're making changes with your workforce, if they're laying people off or not hiring, it takes time, takes energy, takes emotion. And I think that's what people are really wrestling with. And I do think that is what's going to define this year. It's clearly a year of AI application. I think now that anyone who started to play with Claude, especially the Opus 4.5 model, they're seeing the future very vividly, how good it is now, and they're now, I think, seeing what Silicon Valley's seen for the last year. And so that obsession and that energy is only intensifying.
Yeah, I think there's a couple layers to the conversation about AI. I think what you're talking about is the people who are, you know, maybe see the future themselves. They can envision it. I think a lot of us are here talking about bubbles, this and that. But I think what you're pointing to is that the real decision makers, a lot of them are one or two layers beyond the basic conversations that some of us might be having about the implications of AI.
I've never in my life, I've been doing this 30 years, seen such a disconnect between something that's huge and something that like people that are running companies are obsessed about and where the general population is. It's just a massive, massive gap. And what they're seeing is just this like this technology that can do things that we never thought a technology could do. And when you have that, you just start to think about, oh my god, we're going to have massive business change, massive social change, massive political change. And so it's just a conversation that I think the rest of the country is not having. And I will say a lot of people here are trying to figure out how do we have that conversation? How do we bring people along? Because they understand even if they profit off of it, if you're a company and you're making more money, but everyone's scared of it and there's a big political and social reaction to it and you have more anxiety and maybe even social turmoil, that doesn't benefit anybody. So it's just like the level of just like mystery and thought and wonderment and fear. I just can't recall a period like this in 30 years.
You say there's one thing everybody wants to talk about, AI. My experience so far is that there's two things that everybody wants to talk about. There's AI, and there's the guy who's about to arrive in town as we're sitting here, President Trump. To me, I've been to a couple of these, and I think part of what makes this week feel genuinely interesting is that you've got a president who is fighting with a bunch of the people he's about to meet with before he shows up at Davos. This is usually an arena for a kind of groupthink to some degree. The companies, the European leaders, a lot of them are singing the same tune when they get on stage. We have President Trump coming. He's going to come trash the whole Davos set when he gets here. But also, he's going to get behind the scenes and have some pretty consequential meetings on Greenland, Ukraine, Gaza. What do you think that the Trump factor brings to the table here this week?
Yeah, it's funny now that you're saying that. Like in the past, Davos is interesting, but it's kind of sleepy there. And I think the energy comes from the AI stuff we just talked about, but it's also knowing like the unpredictability of Donald Trump is blowing into town, meeting with the world leaders, meeting with CEOs, doing a speech to everybody. Everyone knows it's going to be provocative. He's going to challenge the people that are inside of the room. What's interesting though is last year when we were here, everybody wanted you to demystify Trump. Everybody wanted us to explain him. Everyone wanted to like basically wanted you as their therapist to reassure them that everything's going to be okay. Now, collectively, business kind of reacts like a shrug. Think about it. If you had said a year ago that the president of the United States is going to declare de facto war on Greenland, threaten to break up NATO, to put tariffs on the most lucrative market outside of the United States, all of Europe, and that there'd be almost no market reaction — unthinkable. Well, why do you have no market reaction? You have no market reaction because it's all kind of the chaos is factored in. People realize that even if he does something that seems wild and absurd and history-shattering and economically breaking, that so far that hasn't happened. They become almost numb to it. And so we'll see. But I think he's going to put on a show when he comes in. He wants to put on a show. I think he wants to be provocative. I think he wants to be seen as the president of the world. I think his ambitions — you've written a lot about this, you've yourself written with Barack, you've written about it — like there's just his ambitions are so global in nature. And there is like a conquest mentality brewing inside even MAGA, which we've written about, this idea that even though they wanted to be America First, they kind of like the idea that if we're owning our hemisphere, that there's a certain logic to it, even for MAGA. Even there's an illogic to it for a bunch of reasons, but for his base and for him, they kind of see hemispherical dominance as like something they should do.
Jim, we're running out of time, so one last question about you. You've come here a couple times, I think, but if you know, maybe two, three years ago, I would have pegged you as a Davos skeptic, maybe a little bit. Has this place won you over? Do you think the utility for you in coming here is what you needed it to be?
Well, I'm an introvert. They make you meet with like 20 people per day. So that would always be the obstacle. But it's not like skepticism, pessimism. It's like, is something happening? Like there's something real happening. And I think with AI being such a live and kind of mysterious topic, it's much more illuminating this time around and there's just like there's a seriousness. There's an urgency that wasn't here. And so listen, whenever you convene smart people, you can have really good conversations that are good for your business, good for in our case for readers. So from, but if that's the measuring stick, it's been an extremely effective trip for us and hopefully a trip for our readers because then we end up with I think a better, broader, more panoramic view of what's happening across business, media, technology, politics, so that we can then translate that for readers.
All right, Jim, I think that's a good place to leave it. Thank you so much for your time. Next up, Axios publisher Nick Johnston.
