Leading Beyond Boundaries was born at the 2024 World Economic Forum to convene forward-thinking researchers, business leaders, and policymakers around future-oriented questions in AI, justice, healthcare, and other domains of societal importance.
In 2026, Leading Beyond Boundaries will once again bring together visionaries to explore humanity's technological future in Davos.
The goal of these discussions is to surface the key questions that should guide academic, corporate, and regulatory agendas in the year ahead. In addition to invite-only roundtables, we host public sessions and informal gatherings designed for deep, cross-disciplinary conversation.
As AI agents become embedded in organizations and public life, this session explores what it means for them to be durably “loyal” to people and institutions, not just obedient to prompts. We will examine technical architectures and governance mechanisms that can make agentic systems auditable, accountable, and aligned with evolving human interests.
AI is collapsing the transaction costs of globalization, rewiring supply chains, finance, and trade. This roundtable asks how intelligent systems can broaden participation in the digital economy—especially for smaller firms and emerging markets—while avoiding new forms of concentration, data colonialism, and systemic fragility.
Legal AI is moving from document automation to genuine reasoning support. We will discuss how law firms and in-house teams can treat AI as a source of strategic differentiation, how business models and client expectations shift when analysis becomes data-driven, and what new forms of trust, liability, and professional responsibility emerge.
When intelligence is abundant, what remains distinctively “university”? This session examines how research, teaching, and institutional missions change in a world of AI tutors, automated hypothesis generation, and synthetic data, and how we can preserve curiosity, integrity, and meaningful credit for human scholars.
In an era where intelligence becomes cheap, fast, and scalable, the central risk is a more unequal, polarized, and disposable humanity—as gains concentrate while transition costs diffuse unevenly. Looking toward 2050, this dialogue reframes the debate to civilizational design: who gets access to what types of intelligence (frontier, edge, domain-specific), who governs it, who benefits—and who bears its externalities. We explore a "no human left behind" constraint as the guardrail for progress. Hosted by Dr. Andrei Villarroel, President of MIT Alumni Club of Switzerland.
Decentralized agentic AI distributes intelligence across networks of autonomous agents that plan, coordinate, and act without centralized control. By keeping data at the edge, these systems promise greater privacy and resilience, while raising new challenges around security, trust, and incentives. This session examines how decentralized agents could enable new forms of coordination and economic activity—and what design choices will determine their stability and societal impact.
Advances in AI and multi-modal data promise not only longer lives, but more years in good health. This roundtable explores how individualized models of risk and resilience can support anticipatory care, what infrastructures are needed for equitable and privacy-preserving health data, and how incentives must evolve so healthspan is extended for many, not just a few.
Advances in lab-grown diamonds and AI-enabled materials science are reshaping how mineral resources are produced, valued, and governed. This session will examine how computational technologies affect extraction and provenance, how regulators and courts may define and label diamonds, how environmental and social impacts can be compared, and how concepts of scarcity and authenticity evolve as materials become increasingly engineered.
Leading Beyond Boundaries is partnering with Wisdom House to make this event possible.
All events are taking place at the historic St. Johann Church, which dates to the 13th century when it was built by Walser settlers as the spiritual and communal center of the valley. The church features a 71.2-meter tower from 1481 and Antonio Augusto Giacometti’s remarkable “Paradise”-themed stained glass windows.
Leading Beyond Boundaries is made possible by partners and sponsors who share a commitment to rigorous, impact-oriented dialogue at the intersection of science, technology, and society.
Through our academic network across leading universities and research labs, we curate closed-door and public roundtables that bring together scholars, industry leaders, and policymakers around concrete strategic questions. In addition to our Davos program, we work with sponsors to design custom events throughout the year.
If your organization is interested in sponsoring the 2026 series or commissioning a bespoke roundtable, please contact robert@mahari.ch.
Leading Beyond Boundaries is a collaboration across world-leading academic institutions and organizations, and is made possible by the support of our partners.
For partnership and sponsorship inquiries, please contact robert@mahari.ch.