Best of 55th St. Gallen Symposium

This year’s Voices of the Leaders of Tomorrow survey by the Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions and SGS revealed a striking divergence: while only 24% of young leaders believe organizations can currently manage AI responsibly, 55% of senior executives do. This gap reinforced the need for genuine cross-generational dialogue

Across every panel, one assumption was no longer up for discussion: disruption has stopped being episodic. The Strait of Hormuz, ransomware attacks in Windhoek, severed undersea cables in the Gulf of Finland, half a million containers being rerouted week after week. None of these are interruptions of trade anymore. They are the shape of it. Maximilian Rothkopf of Hapag-Lloyd described redirecting an entire global network within 24 hours of the Red Sea closing. Tumur Gudarzi-Pour of Lufthansa spoke of an industry that has spent decades training the muscle of crisis. Resilience is no longer something companies and countries summon when something breaks. It has to be designed in before it is needed.

The strongest signal across the panels on innovation, digital sovereignty and competitiveness was a refusal to confuse independence with isolation. Bruno Le Maire described a continent that missed the digital revolution and now has to make a radical reset of how it decides. Sabrina Soussan put one figure on the table that landed: in the United States, around two percent of pension fund capital flows into start-ups; in Europe, 0.02 percent. Nicolas Peter argued that BMW’s competitors, Xiaomi included, are not threats to wall off but signals to learn from. The implication ran the same way through every conversation. Europe does not need to do everything itself. It needs to decide where it can win, and direct its capital and policy to make that decision real.

“Sovereignty doesn’t mean we need to do everything ourselves. It means we need to have the choice.” — Jan Goetz, CEO and Co-Founder, IQM Quantum Computers

The Day Two opening panel on the world economy reminded us that solidity is a competitive position. Switzerland’s Federal Councillor Karin Keller-Sutter put it simply: countries have to do their homework. She described the Swiss debt brake as a blessing the country should hold on to. From Singapore, Minister Masagos Zulkifli described sixty years of fiscal discipline with surpluses locked into reserves at the end of each government’s term. The argument both ministers pressed was not defensive but strategic. Discipline creates capacity. Economies that build buffers in calmer times keep their options open when conditions tighten. So do the companies operating within them.

“Being responsive is one thing that we do. But more importantly, always be prepared, and always be prepared for the longer term.” — Masagos Zulkifli, Minister for Social and Family Development, Republic of Singapore