The elbow-rubbing tactics on display in the Swiss Alps this week can apply to any business gathering or cocktail party, regardless of your VIP status
4 min
For a master class in power networking, it’s tough to beat the one taking place in the Swiss Alps this week.
The annual World Economic Forum brings the planet’s power brokers together for morning-to-past-midnight meetings over coffee, cocktails and fondue. For the thousands of CEOs, billionaires, intellectuals and world leaders descending on Davos, the setting is unrivalled in its potential to spark relationships, dealmaking and big ideas for the year ahead. After all, there are few other places where you can run into Al Gore at the hotel bar and wait next to Bill Gates to pass through the metal detectors.
Maximising all that powerful proximity and turning it into actual connections takes skill, chutzpah and the ability to think on your feet. What to do if you spot Sting in the elevator? How to know whether a tête-à-tête merits more than a minute of your time? And how do you divine someone’s importance without peering at the badge dangling at their midsection?
The tricks of Davos movers and shakers can apply to any business gathering or cocktail party, regardless of your VIP status. Here’s how they do it.
For Salesforce Chief Executive Marc Benioff, getting the most out of the high-powered gathering often comes down to location—in this case, the top of a staircase in the Davos Congress Center, the main hub of the event.
The Davos regular said he plans to spend an hour each day of the forum perched there or in an adjacent hallway. Why? In a single hour—amid a packed calendar of meetings, lunches, dinners and other engagements—he might see 100 people he would otherwise not encounter all year.
“The amount of serendipity that happens is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” said Benioff, who has attended the forum for two decades and hosts parties and gatherings that people vie all week to get into. “It’s an incredible thing.”
Benioff has a hack for dealing with a common conundrum in Davos and beyond—forgetting your conversation partner’s name. The Salesforce chief said he sometimes takes photos of their badges if he isn’t able to take notes. If he exchanges contact information with someone, he gives his cellphone number or email and recommends they text, email or tweet at him.
“I’m generous with my contact information,” he said. (At least one reporter can attest to that.)
Or, simply ask the person to repeat their name, said Alisa Cohn, an executive coach and author attending her third Davos. She phrases the question with a touch of humour, asking: “‘Listen, this has been a great conversation, and I’ve already forgotten your name. Can you remind me?’”
Few people respond poorly, she said. “The truth is, they will ask you the same question because they forgot your name, too.”
Seated next to an unfamiliar guest at a dinner or lunch, several CEOs said they weren’t above stealth under-the-table googling, surreptitiously reading up on their Davos dining companions to make better conversation or to understand what, exactly, it is that they do.
When introducing herself to someone new, Cohn gives people conversational “hooks” to latch on to. For her, that means explaining she is also an angel investor, based in New York, and a fitness fanatic with a love of kettlebells. The icebreaker often spurs people to detail their own fitness routines.
True Davos experts know how to escape a long, dull or—horrors!—low-status conversation partner. Nick Studer, head of consulting firm Oliver Wyman Group and a longtime Davos attendee, believes there is value in all sorts of conversations. But he has perfected the art of extraction with a favourite line: “Anyways, it’s obviously fantastic [chatting]. I mustn’t keep you from your guests.”
Most people follow his lead, he said, “as long as you wrap it up appropriately and politely.”
One big Davos no-no is what the finance executive Anthony Scaramucci has come to describe as “Windexing.”
Say you are chatting with someone interesting, but notice out of the corner of your eye that the British prime minister or a well-known billionaire-entrepreneur walks into a room. You might suddenly feel the urge to move on, and look past the person you are talking to “like he’s a sheet of glass,” Scaramucci said. “Don’t be that person.”
Instead, apologise for needing to end the conversation, he said, and offer to circle back if there is time.
Scaramucci, founder of the hedge-fund investment firm SkyBridge Capital and, very briefly, communications director for the Trump administration, started jetting to Davos in 2007.
He hosts a popular and well-attended wine night there each year. Over time, he has learned a tactic for getting into a must-attend party—even when he isn’t invited.
“I crash every single party that I can possibly crash,” Scaramucci said.
Several years ago, at a party held by a Russian oligarch, a security guard stopped Scaramucci because he wasn’t on the list. Scaramucci says he didn’t blink. Instead, he disarmed.
“I said, ‘I know I’m not on the list. I’m Vince Vaughn from ‘Wedding Crashers,’” he recalled. “Five minutes later, I was eating the caviar and drinking the vodka.”
When Scaramucci spots a mega luminary he is dying to meet, he tries to be authentic. He said he developed a friendship with David Rubenstein, co-founder of the private-equity giant Carlyle Group, by introducing himself in Davos years ago.
“I just walked over to him. I said, ‘Hey, listen, I watched you on TV, I’ve seen your interviews and I’m a great admirer of yours,’” Scaramucci said. “People are incredibly nice. Don’t make the mistake of thinking they don’t want to meet you.”
At major conclaves like Davos, Scaramucci and others said it is important to realise you can’t do it all. Prioritisation is key.
Denelle Dixon, who runs the nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation, said her organisation sets a theme for the conference so executives can take meetings with government officials and others around that sharp topic. This year, it is blockchain’s role in expanding access to the financial system. (Davos loves a buzzword.) “It allows us to really focus,” she said.
Saying no is essential. Salesforce’s Benioff and his team usually meet with roughly half of the 600 CEOs attending Davos. But a request for five or 15 minutes of his time is likely to fail if the person isn’t a critical customer or somebody he already knows well.
“It’s not going to get part of my time,” he said. “Maybe it’ll get part of somebody else’s time.”
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AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.
4 min
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.
Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.
By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.
In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.
Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.
Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”
Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.
AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.
