Davos 2026: Global ambition is easy. Global execution is hard.

Every year, Davos swells with leaders searching for the right language to describe a world that’s more unpredictable – and moving faster than companies can adapt. 

In 2026, cross-border operations are more complex: cooperation is more strained, money systems are more scattered, and market-to-market routes are less reliable than they were a decade ago. 

That said, globalization is here to stay. 

As AI raises expectations for speed, it’s no longer just large corporations expanding overseas; fast-growing mid-sized businesses are hiring internationally, paying suppliers across regions, and operating across multiple currencies. This often happens long before they have the teams or systems in place to do so.

But as soon as a company crosses borders, complexity multiplies: payment systems, currencies, entities, regulatory requirements, reconciliation, and more – with each market adding its own version of friction. 

The result is a widening gap between global ambition and global execution.

Financial friction comes at a cost 

“Global cooperation” hasn’t disappeared. The World Economic Forum’s Global Cooperation Barometer 2026 suggests that overall collaboration is holding steady, even as traditional multilateralism comes under pressure and countries rewrite the terms of engagement. Increasingly, cooperation happens through smaller, interest-based coalitions rather than broad, rules-based agreements.

A 2025 World Economic Forum survey reported by Reuters found that 85% of respondents felt global cooperation had declined year over year, and 43% said that this slide was already making it harder to do business, with partnership deteriorating across trade, climate, technology, and security.

Without shared frameworks to rely on, global companies end up managing operational details on their own – often through a patchwork of processes, policies, and providers. Finance teams feel it most, as disconnected systems create operational friction – more exceptions, more manual work, and slower closes across markets. It’s a drag on speed and decision-making, and a reminder that finance infrastructure matters as much as strategy.

Borderless is the new baseline

Global expansion rarely waits for the right systems. More often, it happens the other way around: businesses cross borders first, then discover their finance infrastructure wasn’t built for what they’ve become.

Our report, The state of borderless finance, captures the shift. By Series B, companies typically enter new markets. Since early 2023, North American businesses on Airwallex’s global platform have increased payouts to LATAM by roughly 39x, and to EMEA by 25x – a sign that growth corridors are diversifying even amid geopolitical friction.

Companies that don’t think of themselves as “international” operate that way: hiring across time zones, paying vendors in different currencies, and running on software subscriptions billed from halfway across the world.

Airwallex data shows that among North American businesses, moving from one region to two is associated with an average 14x jump in quarterly volume. Expanding from two regions to five corresponds with a 64x increase. And companies operating across five regions process roughly 883x more volume than single-region peers.

But scale doesn’t just multiply volume, it multiplies variables: payment methods, institutions, currencies, and entities. Treasury strategies evolve as companies manage FX exposure and global cash flow in real time, exposing the limits of the legacy systems most finance teams inherited.

Legacy systems weren’t built for cross-border complexity

For years, regulators have pushed for faster, cheaper, and more transparent cross-border payments, yet progress has been slow. A 2025 Financial Stability Board update suggested the G20 is likely to miss its 2027 targets, largely because improvements require dozens of countries and private-sector players to upgrade legacy systems and adopt new technical and compliance standards.

Inside companies, complexity compounds with each new market: new currencies, entities, payment rails, and compliance checks that have to line up. Modern Treasury’s State of Payment Operations 2025 found that 9 in 10 companies struggle with payment operations. McKinsey points to why: limited real-time visibility, manual reconciliation, and non-standardized processes that become harder to manage as global volume grows.

Global businesses don’t have the luxury of pausing. Instead, they do what they’ve always done when the ground shifts: they adapt – reaching for new tools, and increasingly AI, to absorb the strain.

AI helps, but it alone won’t fix fragmentation

AI is having its dot-com moment, and finance teams are under pressure to do more with less. Deloitte’s CFO Signals survey found that 87% of CFOs expect AI to be “extremely” or “very” important to finance operations in 2026. PwC reports 79% of executives are already adopting AI agents, and 88% plan to increase AI budgets.

Still, the path from ambition to impact isn’t guaranteed. Gartner predicts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, as costs rise, business value stays murky, and risk controls lag behind deployment.

In finance, hype is tempered by caution, by necessity. When AI misfires in marketing, a headline gets rewritten. When it misfires in finance, payroll doesn’t land, vendors don’t ship, customers churn – and the questions that follow don’t accept “the model got confused” as an answer.

AI can speed up finance execution – from payment validation to reconciliation and close – by shrinking the lag between what happens and what teams can act on. But without connected systems across payments, FX, approvals, and accounting, AI can’t carry the end-to-end workload.

Autonomous finance becomes a competitive advantage

Automation delivered real gains over the last decade: fewer manual steps, fewer spreadsheets, fewer hours lost to busywork. Valuable, yes, but incomplete. It sped up individual tasks while leaving teams to stitch together context, resolve exceptions, and match intent to execution.

Autonomy is the next leap. It’s shifting finance from simply executing instructions to continuously steering outcomes, determining where payments route, assessing risk, deciding how approvals advance, and reconciliating in near real time, all with clear controls.

AI can automate an estimated 60-70% of repetitive finance work – from payment optimization and fraud detection to reconciliation and close. But the next step isn’t simply doing the same work faster. It’s making finance more continuous: less reactive, less batched, and less dependent on month-end fire drills.

In an autonomous finance model, payments route more intelligently and retries happen automatically; reconciliation runs continuously so that close becomes confirmation, not reconstruction; and treasury shifts toward real-time exposure and liquidity decisions. Workflows such as policy checks, invoicing, and procurement approvals move forward under clear rules and controls. 

All of this depends on connected infrastructure. And it’s the piece that traditional finance systems still struggle to deliver. 

Translating global ambition into practical action

Davos is built for the big questions: how to cooperate in a contested world, deploy innovation at scale, and unlock new growth. But the advantage goes to the companies that can translate those themes into operational capability. 

Inside companies, the questions are more practical:

• How do we keep money moving with less friction? 

• How do we put AI to work in finance – safely, with visibility and control? 

• How do we expand into new markets without rebuilding the finance stack every time?

Execution is the dividing line now. The winners won’t be the ones running the most AI experiments. They’ll be the ones running finance on connected global infrastructure – routing money intelligently, closing continuously, managing exposure in real time, and entering new markets cost-effectively.

For more on how global money movement is shifting, and what it signals about operational advantage and growth, download our report:The state of borderless finance.

Sources

1. https://www.weforum.org/press/2026/01/global-cooperation-is-showing-resilience-in-the-face-of-geopolitical-headwinds/

2. https://www.reuters.com/business/davos/world-economic-forum-survey-shows-doing-business-got-tougher-2025-2026-01-08/

3. https://www.airwallex.com/us/the-state-of-borderless-finance

4. https://www.airwallex.com/us/blog/how-smarter-financial-tools-correlate-with-global-scale

5. https://www.fsb.org/2025/10/g20-roadmap-for-cross-border-payments-consolidated-progress-report-for-2025

6. https://www.moderntreasury.com/state-of-payment-operations-2025

7. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/global-payments-in-2024-simpler-interfaces-complex-reality

8. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/business-strategy-growth/4q-2025-cfo-signals-survey.html

9. https://www.pwc.com/us/en/tech-effect/ai-analytics/ai-agent-survey.html

10. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-06-25-gartner-predicts-over-40-percent-of-agentic-ai-projects-will-be-canceled-by-end-of-2027

11. https://www.airwallex.com/us/blog/ai-in-finance

12. https://www.airwallex.com/us/blog/day-zero-finance-mindset