Seven Hard Truths About Ethics, Technology, and Leadership │Davos Day One

R. Kat Morse, Acting Head of Solutions Hub, 26 January 2026.

From Davos Day One: seven hard truths on AI ethics, governance, leadership, and trust—and why ethical readiness must catch up with technological speed.

Davos is always intense. Big rooms, big ideas, big claims. But beneath the noise, patterns start to emerge. After a full first day of sessions and conversations, seven ethical truths kept resurfacing across AI, governance, business, and frontier technologies. Different speakers, different sectors, same underlying message: we are moving fast, and our ethical readiness is not keeping up.

Here are the seven themes that kept showing up, whether we were talking about AI, organisational transformation, or even quantum computing.

1. Governance is lagging behind in speed

Technology is moving faster than our institutions, our policies, and our ethical decision-making frameworks. This is no longer a problem for the future. Delay and inaction are becoming ethical failures in themselves. Leaders are being forced to make decisions under time pressure, without the comfort of long deliberation. Ethics and leaders must adapt to this reality.

2. Ethics must move from principles to execution

There is no shortage of principles, frameworks, or declarations. What is missing is execution. Across sessions, one message was clear: ethics only matters if it shapes real decisions, investments, and organisational design. Good intentions without follow-through no longer carry credibility.

3. Leadership accountability cannot be delegated

A recurring theme was that ethical responsibility cannot be outsourced to technical teams, innovation labs, or compliance functions. Whether we are talking about AI at scale or deep infrastructure technologies, accountability sits with senior leadership. Ethics is a leadership practice, not a side function.

4. Infrastructure is an ethical issue

Who owns the infrastructure? Where is it located? Who controls it? These questions came up repeatedly, from AI to quantum computing. Infrastructure choices shape power, dependency, sovereignty, and access. Treating infrastructure as a neutral technical layer is no longer defensible.

5. Trust is declining

Several conversations referenced the same uncomfortable reality: public trust in technology is going down, not up. Trust cannot be assumed, and it cannot be repaired with communication alone. It is built through transparency, accountability, and demonstrable public value.

6. Skills and access are justice questions

The ethics of technology is not only about systems, but about people. Who has the skills to participate? Who has access to infrastructure and opportunity? Global and organisational inequalities are widening, not narrowing. Ethics, in this context, is inseparable from questions of inclusion and capability.

7. Culture determines outcomes

This may be the least technical and most important insight. Again and again, speakers returned to culture. Without cultural change, technical transformation fails or causes harm. Ethics lives in everyday decisions, incentives, and behaviours. Culture eats strategy, and it eats ethics too.

Day one in Davos made one thing very clear to me: ethics is about helping leaders move forward responsibly, at speed, and with clarity. The real work now is not adding more words to the conversation but translating these insights into action.