Corporate courage after Davos

There are years when Davos feels like theater. The speeches are polished. The themes are familiar. People leave with a sense that history is moving forward, even if it is moving unevenly.

This year did not feel like that.

In the conversations I had around the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting this year, I heard something closer to candor than performance. It was not always comfortable. It was not always optimistic. But it was recognizably human: leaders trying to name what they can feel in their organizations, in markets, and in communities. The past does not feel like a reliable reference point. The future does not feel like a continuation. And the present, in many places, feels like friction.

One leader described the anxiety as rooted in a collapse of assumptions. Todd Khozein, co-founder and CEO of SecondMuse, put it this way: “When you go to the big conversations, there was this, this extraordinary anxiety that there is no chance that the future is going to be like the past.’”

Another insisted that courage is not the absence of fear. It is the decision to act despite it, especially when human rights defenders take risks that most executives will never face. Kerry Kennedy, President of the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, described that persistence plainly: “They keep doing it. They get out of jail, and they go straight back to work because they understand the stakes.” 

Kerry Kennedy, Robert and Ethel Kennedy Center For Human Rights

A third pulled the conversation down to the physical realities that glossy future-talk often avoids: water is becoming the rate-limiting factor for the economy we keep promising to build. Kevin Gast, chairman and CEO of VVater, framed it in operational terms: “I think the water shortages and the sort of temporary emergencies are sort of something over the past now, now. The message is changing, and I think the drive of infrastructure is changing.” He also noted the shift in tone that many leaders now feel.

I left these conversations thinking less about Davos as a place, and more about Davos as a diagnostic. The meeting surfaced a question that sustainability and human-rights-minded CEOs cannot avoid. If the intelligent age is accelerating capability, and the polycrisis is accelerating constraint, what does it mean to design responsibly for the future?

The old answer was a program. The new answer is a system.

Human rights cannot live only in a report. Sustainability cannot live only in a target. In an environment defined by political volatility, resource stress, and technological power, CEOs have to build structures that hold. They have to decide what will remain true inside their organizations even when the outside world becomes less predictable.

The human rights frame is the most clarifying place to start, precisely because it is older than most corporate sustainability language. It was built in response to catastrophic abuses, and it begins with the recognition that some obligations are non-negotiable. Governments carry the first duty to protect rights. But when governments fail, corporate actors do not become neutral. Their operations still touch land, labor, security, and data. Their choices still create winners and losers.

Kennedy emphasized the sequencing of responsibility and the non-neutrality of operations when state protections fall short: “Now, when a country fails to protect, fails in its duty to protect, either because of a lack of political will or power or capacity or whatever reason, then it's up to the corporations that are operating in that country to comply with those international norms. But the first duty goes to the government. If the failure of the government, the corporations have an obligation themselves.”

The intelligent age raises the stakes. AI governance is often described as a technical challenge, but in practice, it is a power challenge. Kennedy pointed to how bias and discrimination can surface across domains, but AI is particularly troubling because of its growing use in financial, housing, and law enforcement decisions. AI reshapes decisions that determine whether people work, whether they can access housing, whether they qualify for credit, whether they get flagged as suspicious, and whether they can contest a decision that harms them.

When those systems operate without transparency or remedy, the harm is not theoretical. It becomes structural. As Kennedy warned, accountability and effective remedy do not happen automatically: “There's a lack of human accountability. So there's no right to an effective remedy or fair trial guarantees. And this is also a problem of concentration of power, because the decision-making power shifts away from democratic oversight, especially across the global south, where most of these minerals are being mined.”

At Davos, the AI conversation also carried an undercurrent that companies rarely discuss in public: AI is not only software. It is infrastructure. It is compute and cooling. It is energy demand and water demand. It is a minerals supply chain. Insert citation placeholder. In places with weak governance, that chain can become a conflict chain, where communities lose land and water while others extract value.

This is where sustainability and human rights stop being separate conversations. They merge in the same places, affecting the same people, under the same conditions. A CEO who wants a defensible future strategy has to treat that merger as real.

Water is a useful lens because it does not bend to messaging. Water is not persuaded by narrative. It is either available or it is not. The idea that water was historically treated as an afterthought now looks like a luxury belief.

Kevin Gast, Chairman and CEO, V Vater

Gast described how water has shifted from a compliance concern to a deal breaker in transaction-level decision-making: “Whereas now, I think it's a deal breaker. A lot of your CEOs right now have come to light, say, hold up. Before I do anything, I have to secure the water rights. I got to secure the water treatment process.” Water and energy are coupled so closely that solving one without respecting the other creates failure that arrives later, usually after capital is already sunk.

In the United States, these realities show up as community backlash, permit fights, and widening concern about aging treatment systems and emerging contaminants. Gast laid out the public health dimension as a systems problem, not a talking point: “There's a high probability that the water contains endocrine disruptors, hormone disruptors in the water. You've got PFAS forever chemicals in that order. You've got micro and nanoplastics in that water. And that's all affecting, you know, your entire body in ways that we can't even explain. And the reason why is because a lot of these infrastructure components that are managing these things are ailing, failing, and deteriorating.”

They also show up as inequality, where wealthy communities attempt to purchase resilience while others absorb the risk. Gast argued that the economics of on-site reuse are moving quickly, with an adoption curve that could resemble the trajectory of distributed energy: “On-site reuse… is the future… [and] becomes a lot more cost efficient… like solar panels did for electricity.”

And then there is trust, the least quantified and most necessary input. One leader described how often trust came up in Davos rooms, not as a moral aspiration but as a practical tool. Trust creates flexibility when systems do not. It creates “wiggle room” when formal institutions cannot deliver certainty. Khozein described how pervasive this theme became across convenings, “Human relationship is central to our thesis of healthy economies and resilient economies. And there are real practical reasons, right? If I, if I come in and I have a trusting relationship with you, chances are the things that you're really good at are different than the things that I'm really good at.” From there, Khozein posited that the path to progress can be entrepreneurial and human-centered, a theme he was surprised to find in many spaces at Davos.

Trust also reveals the limits of contemporary corporate behavior. Civil society has learned that collective action is protective. It is harder to isolate and punish a sector that moves together. Kennedy’s message on that point was direct: “So the key is to band together.” Yet corporate actors often behave as if they are alone, even when they share risks and benefit from shared norms. That gap is not a branding problem. It is a governance choice.

So what does “designing for the future” look like beyond the current crisis?

It looks like accountability that is legible. AI systems with human responsibility and appeal channels. Insert citation placeholder. It looks like supply chains that are treated as rights and resource systems, not only cost systems. Insert citation placeholder. It looks like physical constraints elevated to strategy, including water, energy, and the infrastructure and workforce that keep them functional. Insert citation placeholder. It looks like coalitions that defend baseline norms even when political conditions change.

It also looks like a different posture toward change. The leaders I spoke with did not deny the darkness of the moment, but none of them argued for resignation. One framed hope as something that has to be structured, not merely felt. Kennedy described that impulse as an engineering task, not a mood: “So, I feel like we need to harness that goodwill and build the structures around it. We're going to be okay in the end.”

Khozein offered a complementary view, grounded in incremental progress and field-level experimentation: “There's some fundamental rethinking of how we organize ourselves as humanity and what are the fundamental principles around which we organize ourselves?” Each day or step can improve upon the next. Khozein reminds us that incremental steps with design are acceptable if they are moving in the right direction.

Todd Khozen, Co-Founder and CEO, SecondMuse

Gast insisted that we already know the practical direction: recycle the water we have better, decentralize where it makes sense, and modernize the systems that were built for another era. In his words: “If you wash your clothes, why can't you just wash your water? Why not?”

If Davos 2026 is remembered for anything beyond the headlines, it may be this shift. The conversation is moving from promises to constraints, from slogans to systems, and from individual leadership narratives to the harder question of whether leaders will act together.

The intelligent age will reward capability. But it will also punish cowardice that hides inside ambiguity. The future is going to be designed, one way or another. CEOs who care about sustainability and human rights should insist on being the ones who design it with accountability, with realism about constraints, and with enough courage to build what they are willing to defend.

Some final words from Kerry Kennedy and Todd Khozein.

“So, I feel like we need to harness that goodwill and build the structures around it. We’re going to be okay in the end.” Kerry Kennedy, Robert And Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center 

“And guess what? You can, we can weave a different society. That's our opportunity.” Todd Khozein, SecondMuse

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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