10 Break-Out Sessions
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Disrupted Age
We live in a time of major disruptions — yet three stand out for their pace, transformative impact, and global reach. In recent years, the world has changed more profoundly than many expected — leaving businesses, institutions and individuals struggling to keep up, often unclear on how to respond. These disruptions offer both opportunities and challenges – not only in their nature, but also in how societies experience and address them.
Technology
AI and automation are reshaping politics, medicine, media, and work—stirring ethical unease while unlocking ways to steward resources, optimize energy, and hasten a greener, more productive economy.
Geopolitics
Shifting alliances amid a retreat from free trade are recasting the global order as the U.S. recalibrates, Europe rearms, BRICS and Africa gain sway, and conflicts and defense inflation return.
Demography
Rapid ageing in the Global North and youth surges in the Global South are shifting productivity centers, straining welfare systems, reshaping politics, raising migration, and opening uneven development opportunities.
Deep dive into the major disruptions of our time
This section examines how the three intertwined forces — AI-driven transformation, shifting geopolitics, and seismic demographic change — are disrupting economies, institutions, and societies, and what their convergence means for the decade ahead.
Technology
AI and automation are transforming every aspect of life — from politics to medicine, from media to production processes. Business models, public discourse, and the world of work are being redefined at record speed, often outpacing social adaptation and regulation. While this wave of technological progress raises countless ethical dilemmas and fuels societal anxiety and uncertainty, it also unlocks enormous potential. Breakthroughs in AI, robotics, and smart digital infrastructure will be essential to addressing the great global challenges of our time — critically including the green transition — by better managing scarce resources, optimizing energy systems, and accelerating the deployment of clean technologies.
Geopolitics
The global operating model is reshaping as alliances shift and economic uncertainty grows, driven by a retreat from free trade. As the U.S. recalibrates its global role, traditional security guarantees and the global trade order are being challenged. Europe is rearming under pressure and seeking a joint way forward in the meantime. The BRICS bloc is gaining geopolitical weight, and Africa is claiming greater agency in global resource politics. India is asserting its rise, while China seeks to regain momentum. Defense budgets are surging — adding to already high global inflationary pressures — deterrence doctrines are being tested, and interstate conflicts, once thought to be fading, are now reappearing.
Demography
The pace of population ageing is accelerating across much of the Global North, while fertility rate driven youth surges are reshaping the Global South, predictably shifting the centers of global productivity and economic potential in the coming years. In most advanced economies, retirees outnumber the active workforce already by more than two to one, putting pensions, healthcare systems, and fiscal stability under immense pressure. Aging voter demographics will continue to shift political priorities. Demographic imbalances will further drive migration — projected to rise by 11% by 2030. While these developments demand critical reforms in some countries, they present significant development opportunities for others — albeit with rising emissions as a side effect of population growth.
These disruptive forces do not act in isolation — they reinforce and accelerate each other and are here to last.
The slowdown of global free trade is forcing regions to rethink their economic models. To remain competitive, they increasingly depend on technological innovation and international talent. Migration shifts can help meet labour shortages — but also strains cohesion where integration falters.
The race for technological leadership is intensifying. Nations compete for chips, critical resources, and digital capabilities — not only to secure a geoeconomical advantage, but to address demographic realities such as shrinking workforces and rising healthcare costs.
Yet while geopolitical, technological, and demographical shifts unfold in months, democratic processes — election cycles, legislation, judicial review — move in years. The result is a widening gap between the speed of disruption and the capacity to govern it leaving businesses in uncertainty.
Together, these converging forces define a disrupted age — one where opportunity and risk rise in tandem.
