Davos 2026: What the World Economic Forum Means for India’s CIO & CTO Community
By Aman Mehra, Head – Strategy & Transformation, Sify Technologies
Every January, Davos becomes a kind of global “control room”, not because decisions are made there, but because signals are. The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 is one of those moments when geopolitics, economics, climate, and technology converge in the same hallway conversations.
This year, I returned with a sharper sense of what the world is about to ask of enterprises. The message is clear: the next decade will be defined by how well we build, govern, and scale digital infrastructure for a more fragmented, more intelligent, and more fragile world.
I have spent over 25 years at Sify. I have seen the company evolve from an internet pioneer to an enterprise network leader, from ICT to cloud, from digital infrastructure to now, AI. Through each chapter, one truth has held: relevance is not a destination - it is a discipline. Every five to seven years, the world changes its expectations. And those who survive are the ones willing to reinvent themselves before they are forced to.
Y2K reshaped India’s destiny. AI, in my view, is even more profound. The difference this time is that the world is not waiting for us. We are in a compressed, competitive race. If India is to become a $10–20 trillion economy, it will not be through incremental efficiency. It will be through digital infrastructure at scale.
For India’s CIOs and CTOs, Davos 2026 is not “far away.” It is a preview of the operating environment you are being asked to design for: accelerated AI adoption, tighter regulation, higher cyber risk, and rising expectations that technology leaders will deliver growth and trust - at national scale.
A contested world becomes an architecture problem
One of the strongest undercurrents at Davos this year is fragmentation. Geopolitics is reshaping supply chains, data flows, and alliances. Nations are rethinking dependency, autonomy, and resilience.
For CIOs and CTOs, this is not abstract. It shows up as architectural questions:
- Where does data live, and under which jurisdiction?
- How do we design for continuity when cloud regions, chip supply, and cross-border services are uncertain?
- What does “sovereign-by-design” look like without sacrificing agility?
In India, across BFSI, healthcare, telecom, and public-sector adjacencies, digital sovereignty is no longer a policy conversation. It is becoming an enterprise blueprint.
This is where infrastructure matters. AI requires compute, networks, data centers, and secure platforms. The ability to design hybrid and sovereign architectures, blending global innovation with local control will increasingly differentiate Indian enterprises. The CIO’s role expands from “technology leader” to “national-scale systems architect.”
What we are witnessing is not disruption; it is evolution. Enterprises are not abandoning their core, they are adding new building blocks as customer expectations and technologies evolve. At Sify, we have lived this repeatedly. Each phase of reinvention was driven not by fashion, but by foresight. Today, CIOs sit at the heart of that evolutionary arc.
AI is not a single layer. It is an ecosystem: high-density data centers, GPU infrastructure, low-latency networks, cloud platforms, data pipelines, security frameworks, and governance controls. The ability to orchestrate this end-to-end stack is what separates experimentation from enterprise-grade deployment. The CIO’s challenge is not just to adopt AI, but to industrialize it.
From pilots to responsible scale
If the last two years were about experimentation, 2026 is about deployment at scale, responsibly. Business teams want speed. Regulators want safeguards. Customers want personalization. Boards want risk control. The CIO sits at the center of this tension.
What Davos makes clear is that governance can no longer be episodic. It must become operational: AI governance as a platform, data readiness as a differentiator, and shadow AI as an enterprise risk.
A theme repeated across conversations: AI will not fail because models are weak; it will fail where data, security, and infrastructure are brittle.
Another unmistakable signal from Davos is the evolution of cyber risk. AI is amplifying both attack capability and potential impact, while geopolitical fragmentation widens the threat surface.
For CIOs and CTOs, this shifts the conversation from prevention to resilience, from perimeter defense to ecosystem security, and from IT risk to enterprise risk tied to reputation and continuity. Security is no longer a cost center. It is a growth enabler.
The technology leader becomes a workforce architect
Davos also reflects a deep global anxiety around jobs and skills. AI will transform work at scale. For India, this is both an opportunity and a responsibility.
CIOs and CTOs will be asked to lead role redesign, AI fluency across functions, and new productivity contracts in a world of copilots. Technology cannot be introduced as a threat. It must be framed as a multiplier for human potential. The CIO becomes a steward not just of systems, but of futures.
Infrastructure as strategy
As enterprises move from pilots to production, the question will shift from “Which model should we use?” to “Where and how do we run it?” Performance, cost, latency, sovereignty, compliance, and carbon footprint will matter as much as accuracy.
India has long been a consumer of global technology. AI gives us a chance to change that equation. We have the talent and entrepreneurial energy. What we need is the foundation. Models are portable; infrastructure is not. Nations that own their digital foundations will shape the future. Those that do not will rent it.
India must move from being an AI user to an AI builder, not only through startups and software, but through compute, networks, data platforms, and sovereign digital systems. This is not just a technology imperative; it is an economic one.
At Sify, our role is to help enterprises move from ambition to execution: providing AI-ready infrastructure, sovereign cloud environments, high-performance networks, and secure digital foundations - an integrated system designed for scale, trust, and longevity.
After 25 years of watching this industry evolve, one thing is clear: relevance belongs to those who build for what comes next. Davos 2026 is not a forecast. It is a call to design.
