My strange, sleep-deprived week hobnobbing with the global elite

It started with a mysterious slack from our editor-in-chief, Jamie Heller: Can you talk now? It was the kind of urgent message you never want to get from your boss' boss. What did I do? Am I in trouble? Is she laying me off? I scoured my brain for all the ways I'd probably disappointed her and the correspondingly appropriate ways I could apologize for those offenses. Then she called me to give me the news: She wanted to send me to Davos in January.

I've known about Davos, the World Economic Forum's annual conference that gathers the global elite, for my entire 16-year career as a business journalist. As a young reporter at Bloomberg, I remember watching our TV anchors banter so effortlessly with CEOs, all in their puffy jackets against the backdrop of the snowy Swiss mountains. I wondered if one day I would get to join their ranks.

On our call, Jamie tried to warn me about the whole ordeal. I would be expected to take 30 meetings over the course of four days and mingle and write dispatches, and I would need to buy a very warm pair of snow boots. "It's a lot of work," she kept saying, but it went right over my head. I was already imagining all the executives I would run into, charming them so thoroughly that they would tell me their secrets for the rest of my career. I would never have to worry about my job security again. Yes, I told her. It was an honor. I was in.

That high lasted for the next several weeks. I browsed what must have been over 100 different blazers and blouses and pants and heels (I was going for chic-intellectual), and shelled out for a brand new check-in suitcase to replace my old battered one. But as December rolled around, reality sank in. My colleague Dan DeFrancesco, our lead newsletter writer who attended last year, told me about the long, icy walks home. And those walks would take place after back-to-back meetings with executives from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., after which I'd attend a few happy hours, a dinner, and then a nightcap that would mercifully end at 11:30, although there were still after-parties that would run later if I got in with the right crowds. Our internal meetings made it all seem very mandatory, the imperative for us to squeeze out every possible minute we were there to get inside the minds of the world's most powerful business leaders. Dan showed me his Fitbit data from the previous year, when he averaged 4.5 hours of sleep a night.

Most business reporters would have been thrilled to get the assignment. But in the weeks before my flight, a terrible realization dawned on me: I, an introverted writer who likes warm weather and sleeping, had signed up for my own personal hell.

The official conference wouldn't start until Monday morning, January 19. But by the time I arrived on Sunday via two flights and a train, Davos was already humming with titans-of-industry energy. Once a poor, remote village hidden in the Swiss Alps, Davos first became famous as a destination for tuberculosis patients in the mid-19th century. These days, it's a ski resort. On this sunny afternoon, men in suits and snow boots were walking by the train station with purpose. I dragged my heavy suitcase up a steep hill in the snow, and then, once I got to my apartment, up three flights of stairs. A little sweaty, I entered my humble studio for the week.

Every year for this one week during the conference, most of the locals clear out. They leave on their own vacations and make a fortune renting out their places. I unpacked my suitcase, steamed all my clothes, charged my devices, and then got ready for my first Davos engagement: a fancy dinner co-hosted by a CEO and a well-known founder.

It was all the way on the other end of Davos, so I decided to pick up my credentials at the World Economic Forum's registration center along the way. The badge I put around my neck would be my ticket for the week, determining which buildings, rooms, and even streets I could and couldn't access. Mine was orange, signifying my status as a journalist, which in Davos' pecking order meant I was below the white badges issued to heads of state and CEOs, and the gray badges issued to other top executives. And yet even with my lower status, having a forum badge at all still meant I was inside an exclusive club of about 3,000 attendees this year. An estimated 20,000 more people descend on Davos during World Economic Forum week without an official invite. They're here for the side panels and the parties and the vibes.

Because I knew I'd need every last bit of mental clarity I could muster, I had resolved not to drink for the week. But ahead of the dinner, the wife of one of its hosts held a soft launch of her own brand of a tequila-like spirit. She offered me a shot as soon as I walked in. An hour later, with my second drink in hand, I walked over to a man standing alone, and introduced myself as a workplace reporter. He happened to sit on the boards of multiple organizations and offered to clue me in on what he believed was the most underreported workplace story right now: that the employers he knew were avoiding hiring 23- to 30-year-olds because this generation of young adults was unhirable. Don't name me, he warned. I felt like I was already in the inner circle.

At dinner, I sat between two nonprofit executives, both of whom were repeat Davosians with mixed feelings about being there. One confessed Davos wasn't a great venue for fundraising, despite all the billionaires — something that made the $100,000 she and her colleague were paying for their three-bedroom suite difficult to justify. The other executive felt morally compromised. He came every year in the hopes of influencing the minds of business leaders, but he worried he was actually perpetuating a broken system by schmoozing with them. He was losing hope that they could be convinced to care about anything other than their shareholders. Next year, he said, he might return as a protester.

We were so deep in conversation that by the time I looked up, I realized all my colleagues had already left. A giddy thought occurred to me: Had Davos turned me into an extrovert? I slept well that night.

Why do the global elite spend such exorbitant sums for the privilege of spending a week in the frigid Alps during the coldest time of the year, in peak flu season, in a ski town that refuses to salt its icy streets? It would have saved everyone a lot of trouble if the forum had picked, say, Hawaii instead. It all began with Klaus Schwab, a German economist who started hosting the conference here in 1971. His goal was to get businesses to think a little more about generating long-term value for society and a little less about wringing out short-term profits to shareholders, an idea known as stakeholder capitalism. "We can't continue with an economic system driven by selfish values," Schwab later wrote. "We need a society, economy, and international community that is designed to care for all people and the entire planet."

On Monday morning, as I walked down the main street that connects Davos, people looked a little cold but otherwise happy to be there. The vibe was less summit and more Disneyland — if you swapped all the kids for middle-aged powerbrokers and the rides for branded "houses" that line the Promenade. Normally, these storefronts are luxury watch retailers and souvenir shops and outdoor gear providers, but just for this week, they put everything in storage to make room for multinational conglomerates to set up shop. These corporate houses serve a few functions: to host panels and parties; to provide meeting rooms for executives; to scream in neon lettering to passersby that their companies are all in on AI; and to give out free things that have absolutely nothing to do with their business. Pinterest House served miso ramen. Uber House stocked giant bars of premium chocolate. Meta House offered orange-flavored hot chocolate — but only after its patrons scanned a QR code that led them into a conversation with a bot on WhatsApp.

I didn't have time to stop for a warm beverage because I had packed my calendar to the brim that day with meetings with four senior corporate advisors and five C-suite executives. All of these meetings were quite far from each other, and the icy streets forced me to walk like a constipated duck, and there were TSA-level security checks backed up by TSA-level lines to get to a lot of these places. Whenever I could, I shoved bites of protein bars into my mouth — but I kept having to empty my thermos at security, which meant I never had water on me.

With every meeting, I became more depleted — physically, mentally, emotionally, and, towards the end, existentially — until I arrived at my last one-on-one of the day. It was with a CFO who also happened to be a fellow Davos newbie. We chatted about his company for a while, and then traded notes on how bizarre this whole thing was. Throughout his career, he told me, he had never understood the point of Davos. "I would read the headlines and think about it as big leaders from all over the world solving big problems like global hunger," he said.

But now that he was here, he got it. Because everyone of importance had gathered here, they could entertain their existing customers and woo new ones in one tiny town, instead of on 30 trips to cities around the world. The genius of Davos, therefore, was entirely accidental: The forum's conference had become a hyper-efficient vehicle for the stewards of global capitalism to do business with each other. "Companies," the CFO said, "come here to sell." For this access, businesses are charged a hefty membership fee, as well as a per-person entrance fee. All in all, companies that send a large delegation of executives pay more than $1 million a year to the forum.

Too tired to change, I ate my grocery-store dinner of grilled chicken and a box of olives in my underwear.

After the CFO left, I typed out my first blog post of the day, and then forced myself to trek 15 minutes across town to attend a women's leadership reception. The room was so packed it looked as though every woman who had ever received a promotion in the history of corporations had shown up. I squeezed my way to the bar, took one sip of sparkling water, and made my way back to the entrance. "Back so soon?" the guy at the coat check said.

It was 7:20 p.m. I had a dinner at 8 that was a 45-minute walk away, with an attendee list of 150. There was nothing in the world that could have convinced me to talk to one more person that night, so I walked back to my apartment. Too tired to change, I ate my grocery-store dinner of grilled chicken and a box of olives in my underwear. Then I tried and failed to fall asleep a hundred different times. I lay awake, my mind still racing from the day, my calves aching from the 21,000 steps I'd taken. Clearly, I had neither the mental fortitude nor the physical stamina to hang with the global elite.

The next morning should have been a train wreck — a 7:30 a.m. roundtable I was hosting for Business Insider on exactly zero hours of sleep. This event was what I was most nervous about ahead of Davos, and I spent weeks preparing for it. I was moderating a conversation with 15 chief people officers and other senior executives from some of the largest companies in the world.

If companies were willing to cut workers today, what would stop them from cutting far more once they figured out how to truly harness AI?

Like my other meetings in Davos, the roundtable also revolved around AI. A central theme was beginning to emerge: Companies just weren't seeing the big gains in employee productivity that AI had promised, and they were figuring out what came next. The HR executives around the table were now deep in the weeds of that investigation inside their organizations. What drove adoption and what backfired? Did employees have the skills to use these new tools? And how do you overhaul the way work gets done inside teams to fully capitalize on AI?

As the executives recounted what worked and what didn't, I saw several of them avidly taking notes. They nodded and laughed and groaned at one another's observations, like a group therapy session, comforted by the shared reality that they were all wrestling with the same questions.

At the end of the roundtable, Francine Katsoudas, the chief people, policy, and purpose officer at Cisco, shared that she had been at a dinner the previous night. Half the group believed their workforces were going to get smaller because of AI, and the other half believed they would get bigger. "It's just a reminder that it will be what we design it to be," she said. "When I think about Davos and the conversations we're having, we are at a moment where we have the opportunity to change just about everything that we do."

By Wednesday, I'd found my Davos groove. I discovered the free lunch buffet at the forum's media center, which meant I was eating real food. I learned to chug all my water before they made me pour it out at security. I was even getting used to the back-to-back meetings. If Davos were a verb — definition: to power through a barrage of engagements as if it were totally normal because everyone else is doing it — I was getting better at Davosing.

One of the stranger perks of Davosing is running into the random celebrities who show up. This year, that list included Katy Perry, David Beckham, Jon Batiste, and Billy Idol. Matt Damon is a Davos regular, and I would have canceled pretty much any of my meetings to go see him speak. But it clashed with the roundtable I was moderating.

Robbed of my Jason Bourne sighting, my biggest celebrity encounter was with the organizational psychologist and author Adam Grant. Which, yes, not quite a movie star — though to the Davos crowd, something akin to royalty. It was his 10th time there, and throughout our conversation at a hotel bar, people kept interrupting us to say hi. His tone turned somber when I asked him what he thought companies were getting wrong as they deploy AI. "I'm discouraged and disturbed by how few leaders are thinking about the long-term implications of AI for jobs, and what this means for employment and social unrest," he said. "If a lot of knowledge work is disruptable by AI, if a growing amount of service work is disruptable by AI, and if manufacturing work is going to be increasingly done by robots, what are we going to do to make sure that people are employable?

Throughout the week, executives kept saying that AI hadn't yet proven to be as labor-saving as they'd hoped. Most of the changes they were discussing would take years. It was also clear that they were committed to bringing about this AI transformation; displacement was coming. What would happen once they succeed? I found it hard to get many of them to engage on that question. Perhaps they just didn't know. But I was skeptical of their pledge to use AI to empower rather than replace their employees, given how common layoffs had become in recent years. If they were willing to cut workers today, what would stop them from cutting far more once they figured out how to truly harness the potential of AI?

"I'm shocked that there's not more conversation about that," Grant told me.

That afternoon, Trump gave his keynote speech, where he promised not to use force in his quest to acquire Greenland. By that evening, the mood had shifted. At a couple of the cocktail parties I attended, people seemed more relaxed — perhaps because we'd just averted World War III. One CFO told me he worries about his three Gen Z sons' dating lives, now that young people aren't meeting at work as much. I also spoke to a CRO who beamed as he talked about the conversation he just had with his pre-teen daughter on FaceTime. They both seemed like good dads.

Our team dinner at 8 p.m. got pushed to 9, and by the time we all arrived from our various functions, it was past 10. Over fondue and wine, we reveled in the realization that we had survived. It had been an exhausting, nerve-racking, and ultimately exhilarating week — one of the most productive weeks I've had in a long time. My notebook was full of leads. A few of us writers shared the train home with our CEO, and to my surprise, I blurted out that I wanted to come back next year. Would she put in a good word for us with our editor-in-chief? Yes, she said, laughing. We hugged goodbye.

As I walked back to my apartment, I started thinking about how I'd do Davos differently next time. Then, a different thought crept in: Would I even have this job in the future? If I lost this job, would I be able to find another one as a reporter? Being a journalist has been the one constant of my adult life stretching across two continents, four cities, and 11 apartments. In the darkest months of that time, when my marriage was falling apart, and in the difficult years I've spent rebuilding my life since, I've still had this — this job that not only puts a roof over my head but makes me feel competent and useful, like I belong in this world.

AI is leaving more and more of us wondering where our place is. A few weeks after Davos, Block eliminated nearly half its 10,000-plus workforce. "Within the next year," its CEO told investors, "I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes." Other CEOs may prove him wrong, but the markets sent a clear message: Block's shares jumped 22%. It's not a good sign for the stakeholder capitalism that the World Economic Forum was founded to promote.

As Davos wound down, I finished up the rest of my meetings, attended a few parties, and packed my things. I then began the long journey back to California, and 21 hours later, I was home. I still had a story to file, a thousand texts and emails to reply to, a dog to pick up. But for the moment, I was back in my own bed. I slept for 10 hours straight.

Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.

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