At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, where the theme was the “Spirit of Dialogue”, a clear consensus took shape: the organisations succeeding with AI are fundamentally reimagining what leadership means as the technology moves from tool to colleague.
The shift is already underway, and it’s moving at a rapid pace. When TCS ran the world's largest AI hackathon last year, 278,000 employees submitted ideas. Within four weeks, 174,000 solutions were built. In scenarios like this, cultural change is fostered alongside technological experimentation, as leaders collaborate directly with AI-native colleagues to create solutions hands-on.
This is just one example of the new reality of leadership in the age of AI, and how it requires conviction and humility.
At Davos, one theme emerged across every conversation about AI leadership: trust. Organisations building trust are allowing people to experiment, take risks, and adapt when things go wrong.
“With AI doubling in compute every three months or so, the risks of technology-enabled sophisticated cybercrimes have never been greater in human history", says K. Krithivasan, TCS CEO and Managing Director, in the World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2026.
“No matter how high your walls, every business faces an elevated risk of being breached”, he says. The businesses that thrive “will not be those that have never been hit by cyber hacks or crimes, but those which have built the strongest capability to recover from them”.
This resilience mindset, accepting disruption and building the capability to adapt, applies directly to AI transformation. When roles are evolving and humans are learning to work alongside AI, trust becomes the foundation that makes experimentation possible.
That means leaders must actively foster trust, building confidence through transparency, ethical deployment, and resilience.
At TCS' Future Leaders session in Davos, executives from across industries identified a surprising barrier to AI adoption: not a lack of technology, but an inability to let go of old patterns.
Leaders, including TCS executives, said it is often important to “unlearn” what you think you know before you can build AI solutions.
This means participating in initiatives and experimentation, and experiencing firsthand what works and what doesn't.
With AI compressing timelines, turning weeks of work into hours, the pace of change demands continuous, embedded learning rather than periodic training events.
TCS has trained more than 576,000 employees in AI fluency and started “AI Fridays” in some regions to bring colleagues together to solve real customer problems.
Traditional decision-making follows a linear path: gather data, analyse, and decide. AI changes that. In research with the MIT Sloan Management Review, TCS introduced the concept of Intelligent Choice Architectures (ICAs).
These are AI-powered systems involving a multitude of internal and external partners that provide contextual elements and generate better options for humans to decide between, rather than simply generating answers.
“The next leap in AI isn't just about optimisation and automation”, the report says. “It’s about smarter decision making”.
At Davos, a senior insurance executive described how this plays out in practice. His team deployed AI that extracts data from brokers, structures it, checks against risk appetite, and queries global data lakes automatically. “The human doesn't need to do these tasks anymore”, he said. “You can really focus on looking at the risk”.
This is a clear example of where the machine handles complexity and the human applies their judgement. For leaders, embracing this way of working requires redesigning the entire workflow.
“Leadership becomes less about control and more about designing systems where humans and machines can make informed choices together”, K. Krithivasan recently wrote in an article for the World Economic Forum.
When a technology leader from a major insurance company spoke at Davos, he emphasised that 2026 isn't about more AI tools, it's about implementation.
“The tools are all there”, he said. “This year will be about turning ideas into reality”.
That shift requires a workforce equipped to work confidently alongside AI. TCS is addressing this through five strategic pillars: internal transformation to build an AI-first culture where employees experience AI as peers; redesigning every service line for an AI-native world; talent evolution, moving employees from AI awareness to AI fluency and expertise; customer value, enabling rapid builds and scaled deployments; and ecosystem partnerships, forming strategic alliances that accelerate capability and reach.
As the pace of capability-building compresses, and as AI’s “speed compression” collapses timelines across industries, “what you learned 12-18 months ago may already be outdated”, one HR leader observed at Davos. Therefore, organisations that treat reskilling and upskilling as a one-off exercise risk falling behind.
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of AI leadership is preparing for what can't be predicted.
These challenges were referred to as “unknown unknowns”, scenarios we can't imagine today.
Leaders must balance operational demands with scenario planning that looks to the next decade. They must also cultivate diverse perspectives, build flexible teams, and create cultures that embrace ambiguity without losing ethical grounding.
At a C-Level roundtable hosted by TCS in Davos, executives embodied the Forum’s 2026 theme of dialogue as they discussed how the world is being reinvented now, not in some distant future. The geopolitical landscape is shifting. Technology innovation is accelerating exponentially. Climate and demographic pressures are mounting.
That’s why organisations need to become Perpetually Adaptive Enterprises and embrace operating models where adaptability is embedded into every process, every day.
The Davos conversations revealed concrete actions that leaders can take immediately:
AI represents a fundamental shift in how value gets created.
Leaders who embrace this and combine courage with humility, design decision ecosystems rather than just making decisions and invest in their people, will define the next era of business.
At Davos, executives from industries as diverse as healthcare, insurance, beverages, and technology shared remarkably similar insights. AI is no longer about pilots. It's about implementation. It's about trust. It's about fundamentally reimagining work.
The transformation is happening now. The only question is who's leading it.