unDavos Summit

Before colonization, sub-Saharan Africa had no prisons. In 2022, the continent sequestered over 40 billion tons of CO2 — worth 3.6 trillion euros at EU carbon prices — yet none of that value is reflected in any GDP. This panel of diaspora entrepreneurs building biofuels in Ghana, investment platforms in West Africa, and electric fleets in Kenya explores what it means to build Africa from seven generations back and seven generations forward.

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• Why Africa produces 500 million tons of unconstrained agricultural residue every year — and how Afresurf is positioning the continent to convert it into sustainable aviation fuel
• How the African diaspora sends €54 billion home annually but 90% is not strategically invested — and why blockchain investment platforms are changing that
• How a Swiss lawyer left the boardrooms of Swiss Re after her asthmatic child asked why African cities don’t use e-bikes — and built an electrified fleet company in Kenya
• Why a 45-minute flight between Accra and Lagos costs $500 compared to $30-40 for a similar EU flight, and how energy costs drive 40% of that gap
• The seven-generation framework: indigenous wisdom applied to infrastructure, mobility, and investment decisions

PANELISTS

• Christopher Mbanefo — Moderator
• Kwame Biko — CEO & Co-Founder, Afresurf
• Julien — Founder, Mina (Investment Platform)
• Celeste Chetgen-Fogo — Founder, Brutus (E-Mobility, Kenya)

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

🌐 undavos.com

Tags: Africa, diaspora, sustainable aviation fuel, biofuels, e-mobility, electric vehicles, Kenya, Ghana, West Africa, carbon sequestration, investment, blockchain, remittances, agriculture, energy transition, infrastructure, indigenous wisdom, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF

The average lifetime of a corporate venture capital unit is 3.7 years. If you survive three CEO changes, you have a shot at longevity. This panel brings together CVC leaders from Swiss Post, Jung Heinrich, and Worley to debate why corporate venture capital is more strategic than pure VC — and why Europe urgently needs multi-corporate funds that pool risk across sectors.

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• Why 42% of corporate VCs already prefer to co-invest with other CVCs, and why multi-corporate topic-based funds could transform European deep tech investment
• How Swiss Post’s CVC maintains independence from corporate strategy to invest in technologies that may not generate returns for three to four years
• Why Worley builds startup partnerships across three continents by embedding portfolio companies with regional engineering teams in APAC, EMEA, and the Americas
• The CFO death valley: why most CVCs get shut down at year three for financial underperformance or year six for lack of strategic value
• Why universities are the best deal-flow source for energy and deep-tech CVCs — because that is where R&D actually begins

PANELISTS

• Tobias — Moderator, CVC & Open Innovation Summit
• Jeppe — CVC Leader (Shipping & Jung Heinrich)
• Ivo — Head of CVC, Swiss Post
• Marta — Head of Partnerships & Corporations, Worley

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

🌐 undavos.com

Tags: corporate venture capital, CVC, startup investing, open innovation, deep tech, energy transition, corporate strategy, venture building, Swiss Post, Worley, private equity, startup partnerships, data centers, industrial innovation, European venture, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF

90% of AI models and algorithms inside organizations are unknown to the organization itself. When infrastructure goes down in an agentic world, you don’t just lose connectivity — you lose context, while autonomous agents may already be mid-conversation with other systems. This panel brings together cybersecurity veterans, AI governance experts, and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to debate digital infrastructure risk in 2026.

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• Why AI should be treated like an adolescent: powerful but not yet mature enough for unsupervised access — parenting, not relying
• The hidden SaaS surveillance problem: how embedded AI models inside enterprise software are reading audio files and selling functional data without corporate knowledge
• Why the European Commission’s €200 billion tech subsidy program flows to B2B companies when European values have always centered on the middle class
• The case for data sovereignty: why Will.i.am told a Stanford/MIT audience to stop giving tech companies their data, and why even the biggest extractors don’t know you well enough for precision action
• How hybrid and private cloud architectures are resurging as companies realize that diversification — not consolidation — is the path to resilience

PANELISTS

• Mike Butcher — Technology Journalist & Founder, PathFounders (Moderator)
• Sebastian — Founder, AI and Partners
• Tammy Shuring — CEO & Co-Founder, Polymathic
• Additional panelists on AI infrastructure and cybersecurity

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

🌐 undavos.com

Tags: digital infrastructure, AI governance, cybersecurity, cloud computing, data sovereignty, agentic AI, operational stability, data privacy, enterprise security, cloud concentration, hybrid cloud, SaaS, AI safety, tech regulation, European tech, data centers, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF

The average age of board members at the top 500 companies is 64. Only 30% feel confident bringing ESG and sustainability into strategy. And an AI proposal that boosts margins by 20% while eliminating 40% of jobs just landed on the boardroom table. This panel of active board directors debates what it actually takes to govern in 2026.

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• Why boards should spend 50% of their time on long-term strategy while executives focus 50% on short-term — the inverse allocation that separates governance from management
• How one board member stopped reading 300-page pre-meeting documents and started using AI to surface what actually matters, freeing time for deep-dive sessions
• Why courage — specifically the willingness to lose your board position — is the single most important quality boards need in 2026
• The BCG 10-20-70 framework: 10% technology adoption, 20% infrastructure readiness, 70% organizational change management
• Why boards that bring in competitors, customers, activists, and next-generation committees outperform those that stay insular

PANELISTS

• Liz — Moderator
• Sanda Tritin — Board Member (Finance & ESG), Switzerland & Europe
• Dr. Rodrigo Crema — Board Member & Advisor (Healthcare, Genetics)
• Isabel Gromet — Founder, WomenCorporateDirectors (WCD)
• Milan Kumar — CIO, Automotive; Board Member, Manufacturing
• Christopher Williams — Governance Expert (Private & Nonprofit)
• Frederica Hoffman — VC & Board Director (Tech & Life Science)

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

🌐 undavos.com

Tags: board governance, corporate governance, boardroom, AI strategy, ESG, sustainability, board diversity, leadership, fiduciary duty, corporate boards, board effectiveness, change management, digital transformation, CEO oversight, risk management, courage, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF

82% of the next generation entering the workforce said they would prefer an AI boss — because it would be fairer, less political, and let them work from home. Meanwhile, LLMs are trained on only 15% of the world’s information because only 15% is digitized. This panel brings together board members, startup founders, and a neuroscientist to wrestle with what leadership actually means when geopolitics is now the number-one driver of AI adoption.

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• Why 56% of companies are accelerating AI adoption specifically because of tariff uncertainty and geopolitical volatility
• The three traits every successful AI project shares: trusted data, business-first framing, and serious change management
• A mood-jacket case study where nine months were spent training machine learning models but only one week on employee communication — and it failed
• Why context — not intelligence — determines whether leaders extend grace or hunt down the person who cut them off in traffic
• The case for vulnerability from the top: why leaders who admit what they don’t know create environments where the best people do their best work

PANELISTS

• Dr. Catherine Carlton — Former Mayor of Menlo Park; Trust Researcher (Moderator)
• Sandy Carter — Chief Business Officer; Chair, Applied AI Group, Digital Economist
• Dr. Friedrich — Physician, Scientist, Harvard Faculty
• Laura Ann Edwards — Founder, Geospace Resources
• Marlene — Dispute Resolution Lawyer & International Mediator
• Kevan Pimani — Chairman, Animoca Brands (NASDAQ)
• Philipp van Caneghem — Entrepreneur, Investor & Former Salesforce Innovation Lead

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

🌐 undavos.com

Tags: leadership, board governance, geopolitics, AI adoption, trust, change management, corporate leadership, board members, technology strategy, CEO, remote work, Gen Z, organizational culture, decision making, resilience, Silicon Valley, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF

Professional services firms are billing clients for hours while privately using AI to slash those same hours — and nobody is talking about it. This panel pulls back the curtain on how consulting and legal firms are actually adopting AI, why junior consultants are bypassing corporate systems to use ChatGPT on their phones, and what that means for confidentiality, talent development, and the future of the billable hour.

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• Why the legal industry’s billable-hour model “rewards the slow and the stupid” and how value-based pricing is replacing it for commoditized legal products
• How consulting firms are shifting from 100-page PowerPoint deliverables to real-time digital database integrations with private equity clients
• Why confidentiality is the unspoken crisis: smaller firms are routing client data through public LLMs, and junior staff are bypassing corporate AI systems entirely
• The future consulting org chart: from pyramid to diamond shape, with fewer juniors, more seasoned industry experts, and AI handling repetitive analysis
• Why the hiring pipeline is broken — university grades no longer signal competence when theses can be AI-generated, pushing firms toward internship-based evaluation

PANELISTS

• Robin — Moderator
• Roland Scherer — Partner, Kearney
• Michael Engel — Partner, White & Case
• Beata Rosenthal — Partner, Roland Berger
• Marina March — Founder, IKAI

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

🌐 undavos.com

Tags: AI professional services, consulting, legal tech, billable hours, management consulting, law firm AI, Kearney, White & Case, Roland Berger, confidentiality, AI governance, enterprise AI, talent management, future of work, value-based billing, digital transformation, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF

99% of all AI today is black-boxed — you don’t know how results are generated. Meanwhile, a startup called Cognifiber is turning optical fibers into processors that could accelerate AI inference by 1,000x while cutting power consumption by 8,000x. This panel brings together an AI prediction company, a photonic computing startup, a data interoperability firm, and Microsoft to debate how AI is rewiring financial services from risk assessment to fraud detection.

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• How AxonJ uses hybrid reinforcement learning and real-time signals — like website changes or stopped TikTok campaigns — to predict company risk 40% more accurately than balance-sheet models alone
• Why Cognifiber’s fiber-optic processors could shrink city-sized data centers to a single building while democratizing AI access
• How MMC Convert helps banks find “invisible creditworthy” people through utility bill patterns and psychometric AI models
• Microsoft’s perspective on multi-agent orchestration, low-code platforms, and why the dollar-per-token cost is actually falling
• The centralized vs. decentralized debate: why on-premises AI uses up to 80% less electricity and drives democratization

PANELISTS

• Robin — Moderator
• Jean-Philippe (JP) — Founder & CEO, AxonJ
• Eyal — Founder, Cognifiber
• Shanu — Founder, MMC Convert
• Ujjwal Kumar — Principal Architect, Office of the CTO, Microsoft

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

🌐 undavos.com

Tags: AI financial services, fintech, agentic AI, photonic computing, data interoperability, risk prediction, fraud detection, Microsoft, decentralized AI, energy consumption, machine learning, reinforcement learning, banking, insurance, data centers, AI governance, enterprise AI, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF

More than 50% of global GDP depends on nature, yet it is still treated as an externality. A new generation of AI-powered earth observation tools can now answer the question “how many tin roofs are in California?” in seconds — and it costs almost nothing to query the same data again. This panel explores how satellite imagery, ground-truth sensors, and Islamic endowment finance are converging to make nature a viable asset class.

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• How large earth observation models convert satellite images into queryable “embeddings” that slash the cost of monitoring forests, fire risk, and land use
• Why Safi manages 4.1 million hectares in the Amazon using eDNA, bioacoustics, and camera traps alongside satellite data
• How illegal gold mining — not logging — is the single biggest threat to Amazon deforestation, and why AI can predict criminality spikes from commodity price movements
• Why perpetual Islamic endowment finance (waqf) solves the “permanence problem” that undermines short-term biodiversity interventions
• The case for nature as the “parent company” where 50% of GDP is a wholly-owned subsidiary

PANELISTS

• Moderator — GP, Cerulean Ventures
• Bruno Sanchez-Andrade Nuño — Co-Founder & CEO, Clay (earth observation AI)
• Maxime Haroun — Co-Founder, Safi

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

🌐 undavos.com

Tags: natural capital, earth observation, satellite imagery, AI, biodiversity, Amazon rainforest, deforestation, conservation finance, waqf, Islamic finance, carbon credits, biodiversity credits, nature-based solutions, sustainable investing, family office, climate tech, remote sensing, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF

Sun King went from scraping by for a decade to powering 50 million people with off-grid solar across 11 countries — backed by the largest local-currency securitization in Sub-Saharan African history. Rwanda scaled from 20 donor-funded clinics to over 350 self-sustaining, nurse-operated healthcare posts in under five years. This panel asks: how do you build the ecosystem that makes that kind of scale possible?

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• How Sun King built a financing ecosystem from social venture capital through to commercial securitization over 15 years to deliver 340,000 solar kits per month
• Why Doctors Without Borders took its Nobel Prize money to create a new drug development model that brought 20 molecules to market for six neglected diseases
• How the World Food Program’s blockchain identity platform saved $270 million in duplicate aid across 55 agencies in Ukraine
• Why the TransCap Initiative argues that capital orchestration — not just blended finance — is needed to transform entire agricultural systems
• The tension between investing in ecosystem building versus direct investment, and why philanthropy needs to be bolder

PANELISTS

• Terence La — Head of Investments, Pensions for Purpose (Moderator)
• Patrick Walsh — Co-Founder & CEO, Sun King
• Stephen Cornish — General Director, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Geneva
• Bernhard Kowatsch — Director, Global Accelerator & Ventures, UN World Food Programme
• Dominic Hofstetter — Space Building Lead, TransCap Initiative
• Monica Sanders — Board Member, Society for Family Health Rwanda

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

🌐 undavos.com

Tags: impact investing, ecosystem building, blended finance, off-grid solar, Sun King, MSF, World Food Programme, blockchain, capital orchestration, systemic investing, philanthropy, development finance, Africa, healthcare, energy access, social enterprise, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF

The traditional funding models for global health are gone. USAID shutdowns, WHO funding exits, tariff pressures, and development agency withdrawals have reshaped the landscape in a single year. Yet the next pandemic is coming — we just do not know when. From malaria bed nets in Nigeria to surgical AI in 4,000 operating rooms, the question is no longer whether to invest in health, but how to do it sustainably.

WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS

• Why health investment generates compounding returns through productivity gains, reduced sick leave, and longer healthier working lives
• How public-private partnerships are shifting from pilot programs to sustainable co-financed platforms that serve both governments and pharmaceutical companies
• Why technology is the key to making healthcare less labor-intensive and more cost-effective — the sector's fundamental structural challenge
• How data sovereignty laws and geopolitical fragmentation are forcing health tech companies to build configurable, locally compliant platforms
• Why prevention, early detection, and primary care intervention must replace the current model of late-stage hospital-centric treatment

PANELISTS

• Moderators and panelists from the Health at Davos program, representing Dalberg Advisors, WHO, Deloitte, and leading health innovators

unDavos is a community-driven summit running during WEF week in Davos, democratizing the conversation around global challenges.

🌐 undavos.com

Tags: global health, health financing, pandemic preparedness, public-private partnerships, health innovation, WHO, USAID, health tech, digital health, prevention, primary care, health equity, health systems resilience, data sovereignty, health investment ROI, universal health coverage, unDavos, Davos 2026, WEF