A conversation between GIC Directors Mark Mueller-Eberstein and Josine Overdevest. (Image supplied)
For eight consecutive years, GIC Director Mark Mueller-Eberstein has been in Davos during the annual World Economic Forum (WEF). He knows how to read the room, prepare for the week and come home with a clear sense of what matters. This January was different. When we sat down shortly after his return, he had one word for how it felt. Shaken. What follows is drawn from our conversation a few weeks after Davos 2026.
Mark is an author, investor and technology strategist who has spent the last decade moving between the worlds of enterprise technology, early-stage startups and investment. He has written books on organisational agility and blockchain, spoken at events across the globe and developed a reputation for identifying where technology is heading before the mainstream catches up. When I ask whether he had fully processed his week in Davos, he paused. “This time I was shaken,” he said. “I go there to partly challenge my assumptions. And I left with more questions than answers.” That, it turns out, is exactly where the most important thinking is happening right now.
A Week that Felt Different
Davos is a cigar-shaped valley in Switzerland with one road in and one road out. For one week each January, that valley fills with heads of state, the CEOs of the world’s largest companies, researchers and the people who make it all run. Most of the real conversations happen outside the official conference program: over breakfast at 6.30am with the head of a central bank, over morning coffee with investors, over lunch listening to intelligence chiefs. It is, Mark said, the most efficient way he knows to learn widely, in one place, in one week.
This year, the atmosphere crackled with a particular kind of urgency. Over 60 heads of state were in town. The US administration arrived in force and the tone of the week was noticeably shaped by that presence. Voices from elsewhere pushed back, the Canadian Prime Minister among them, though the follow-up question was always the same: what will countries actually do, not just say? The prevailing mood, Mark said, was one of agreement that enormous change is underway, combined with a troubling absence of long-term thinking about where it leads and how to take society along
AI was not a topic on the agenda so much as the water everyone was swimming in. One head of HR from a major pharmaceutical company described designing org charts in which employees functionally report to AI systems rather than to other people. The question of universal basic (or “high”) income (UBI) surfaced repeatedly. At a Washington Post dinner for AI leaders at Davos 2025, the unanimous roundtable answer to “what will we be talking about in 2030?” was not the Middle East, not quantum computing. It was UBI. “That hasn’t changed this year,” Mark said. “It’s only getting more pressing.”
Europe, Speed and the Race Nobody Can Sit Out
I ask Mark whether the conversation at Davos included any serious discussion of Europe developing its own alternatives to American BigTech. His answer was honest rather than encouraging. The argument for replacing Microsoft Office with open source alternatives has been made for 25 years. It has not happened. On AI models, there is Mistral, perhaps, but the speed of the race between Chinese open source and American large-scale developers is staggering. Smaller languages are at a serious disadvantage, scrambling to get their content into training data before the window closes. Data sovereignty and digital identity are concerns from Germany to France to India, but concern is not the same as capability, and ultimately, he said, technology has to work.
And yet. The other side of that same coin is that change can happen with extraordinary speed, in directions nobody predicted. Mark pointed to a tool called OpenClaw, built by a single person, a company that did not exist five months ago, which is already changing how people organise their working lives and build virtual teams. It raises real questions about data and security. But it also demonstrates that the next disruption will not necessarily come from Salesforce or Microsoft. It could come from anywhere. “Within six months, the world can completely change,” he said.
Meanwhile, incorporating a company in Germany still requires a notary to read and sign every document, a process that can take weeks. In Washington State, Mark can have a corporation with a bank account up and running within 24 hours. The contrast is not a detail. It is the whole story of what Europe is up against and why the window to shape what comes next is narrower than it looks.
The Education Horizon
One of the most energising threads in our conversation was about education: not the system as it currently exists, but what it could become and what it urgently needs to be.
Mark spent time at Davos listening to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and long-time advisor to governments on technology. Asked what people should focus on learning if they want to operate at the cutting edge, Schmidt’s answer was striking in what it did not include. Not a specific programming language. Not a technical certification. His answer: critical thinking, asking hard questions, continuous learning, philosophy, theoretical physics. The disciplines that teach you how to think, not what to think. “Those are the things that leaders will need,” Mark said. “In any aspect.”
This resonates with something that has been forming for much longer than the current AI moment. The Vienna of the late 1800s, the Vienna that produced modern physics and modern psychology within a few decades, was built on exactly this kind of education. Humboldt’s model: a well-rounded formation that included languages, philosophy, natural science and mathematics. Not specialisation, but the full range of human inquiry. What that environment produced was not a collection of specialists. It was a generative intellectual community in which people with different formations thought rigorously together and created things none of them could have produced alone.
Excited by the Vienna parallel, I linked it to the OECD’s conceptual framework on Education for Human Flourishing, released in late 2025, which points in the same direction from a policy perspective. Since the 1970s, education has largely been organised around human capital theory: we educate people to do jobs. The human flourishing framework asks a different question. What does it mean to live well, in whatever world you find yourself in? That reorientation matters enormously right now, because if AI is absorbing the tasks that jobs consist of, the question of what education is truly for becomes genuinely open.
And if we are honest, education has never been able to keep pace with technological change. Perhaps the more productive question is not how to close the skills gap, but what we are really trying to cultivate in a human being.
What strikes me is that Schmidt, Vienna and the OECD are all pointing at the same thing. That is not a coincidence. It is a signal worth paying attention to.
The Crossroads
Mark’s message for information professionals is direct. For those who are not actively learning and embracing AI tools, effective retirement may already be underway, whether they know it or not. Those who are already embracing the tools and seeing themselves as 10x more productive will be able to shape their organisations and build their own businesses. They will be much, much more effective than they could ever have hoped for.
The counterargument, that the tools are not yet good enough, he dismissed. “Don’t believe anybody who’s telling you the tools are not good enough. If you use them, you should be 10x as productive. If you’re not, then you’re not using the tools right.” A heating repair technician consulting an AI assistant mid-job to diagnose an error code, rather than searching a paper manual, is already doing it. The industrial revolution is the reference point for the scale of what is coming and Charles Dickens is the recommended reading for what that kind of transformation does to societies in the transition.
The ICT skills gap we have spent years trying to close is not closing because supply is catching up. It is narrowing because demand is dropping off a cliff. Large organisations are no longer building talent pipelines the way they once did. A company that took a decade to adopt cloud computing will take another decade to absorb AI, which means there are still paycheques for another eight or nine years in slower-moving sectors. But at the cutting edge, the maths has changed: one person, well-equipped, can appear to the outside world like a team of thirty.
What happens to the people who are displaced? And what does a world with UBI and without compulsory employment look like? Mark is unexpectedly optimistic here. Humans were hunters and gatherers for most of our existence. The idea that a person needs a job to have a meaningful life is, in historical terms, a recent invention. When I raise the question of what people do with their time when freed from employment, whether they find purpose or drift towards the sofa, his answer was honest: probably some of both. But the things that need doing and that are chronically undervalued today are enormous in scope. Soccer coaches. People who look after children. Carers for the elderly. Mentors. Artists. Community builders. The work that holds societies together, much of it done for free and much of it by women, is not going anywhere. It simply needs to be recognised and resourced differently.
And for the people who are genuinely curious, who embrace continuous learning, who use the tools and ask the hard questions? Their role is, if anything, more important than before. Mark observed that in every organisation, a small number of people drive most of the outcomes. AI does not change that dynamic. It amplifies it. The high performers who scale their own productivity tenfold become the people who shape what their organisations become, who build new things, who help navigate a transition that most of their colleagues are not yet ready to face. That is not a comfortable observation. But it is, he said, the honest one.
Looking in the Mirror
So what does this mean for IFIP? As an organisation for IT professionals, IFIP needs to look seriously into the mirror, said Mark. Questions of AI ethics, leadership, community and what are often dismissed as soft skills have long been afterthoughts in professional organisations. That has to change. They belong at the centre of a full education and career.
He pointed to the website Human Progress as a data-rich reminder of how much technology has contributed to human flourishing over the last century and a useful counterweight to doom narratives.
But we are now at a point of genuine transformation and those who understand the impact and the future realities are called to guide their communities through it. In a world that brings both centralised power structures and decentralised opportunities, what matters is having knowledgeable, wise and trustworthy leaders at every level, rather than loud and simplifying influencers. That, Mark said, will be one of the factors that determines how well our societies navigate what is coming.
Bloom, Not Doom
By the end of our conversation, we arrived from opposite directions at the same destination. Mark, the investor and tech insider, framed it as moving from a scarcity mindset to an abundance mindset. I, coming from bridging the digital divide in basic education, framed it as human flourishing. The language is different; the orientation is the same.
A world in which enough people have enough of what they need to live well is, in Mark’s view, technically achievable. The Star Trek future of abundance is not fantasy, but even in that universe the transition was turbulent. What shortens the turbulence and reduces the cost is exactly what information professionals, educators and institutions like IFIP are positioned to provide: the thinking infrastructure that helps societies navigate change without losing their humanity in the process.
The change is here. It is moving faster than most people have accepted. And the question Mark came home from Davos with, “What do I do today to prepare for the next 20 years?”, is the right one for all of us to be asking right now.
Further Listening
Mark’s TedX talk “Lead and be the change” on the psychological model of navigating transitions he referenced in our conversation.
Mark’s Davos 2026 fireside chat with Alvin Wang Graylin Post Artificial General Intelligence: Doom or Bloom?
Mark’s Davos 2026 chat with SandboxAQ’s Yuval Dvir: AI Ecosystems, Education, and the Future of Society | Mark Mueller-Eberstein at Davos 2026
Mark Mueller-Eberstein is GIC Director at IFIP IP3, an author, investor and technology strategist who grew up in Germany and is based in Seattle. He has been in Davos during the last eight World Economic Forums and is in advisory roles and on boards of companies, funds, non-for-profits and government organisations. His career started in traditional industries (automotive and chemical) and grew into global leadership roles at Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft before founding and exiting companies and even a successful investment fund. His books include “The Trust Technology: How Blockchain is Changing Your World”, “Agility : Competing and Winning in a Tech-Savvy Marketplace”, “No Fear: Business Leadership in the Age of Digital Cowboys” and “Migrating to the Cloud”.
Josine Overdevest is GIC Director at IFIP IP3 and founder of Flying Cows of Jozi, where she developed the concept of human infrastructure as the critical foundation for digital education. With over 30 years of experience spanning telecommunications and education across Europe and Africa, she works at the intersection of digital equity, human flourishing and the future of learning. She writes the Substack “City of Wings” on what it means to be human in a digital age.
The IFIP IP3 Global Industry Council (GIC) serves as the principal forum for employers and educators to engage with IP3 and shape the global ICT profession. Each month, they feature relevant and insightful ideas in IFIP Insights.