Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan attends a special address during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting, on January 23, 2019 in Davos, eastern Switzerland. Fabrice Coffrini | AFP | Getty Images

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND – The star who stole the stage at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, which just ended here yesterday, wasn't the stuff of flesh and blood but of data-driven algorithms. US President Donald Trump, China's Xi Jinping, India's Narendra Modi, France's Emmanuel Macron and Great Britain's Theresa May were no shows at this gathering of global movers and shakers, occupied with more pressing matters at home. That left hundreds of global business executives with less distraction as they turned their attention to Artificial Intelligence (AI), a term few of them knew even a couple of years ago and a technology they still don't fully comprehend. Yet in one session after another, they shared what they were (or weren't) doing about it and learned how AI would transform their industries, their societies and international relations, perhaps as no technology before it. Not even news late in the week from Venezuela shifted the conversation all that much. It may take weeks to determine whether Nicolas Maduro can hang on to power in Caracas with Russian, Chinese and Cuban backing — and against US and widespread Latin American opposition.

Yet even that big of a geopolitical story, in a pivotal Latin American country that holds the world's largest oil reserves, couldn't compete with a matter that was already hitting so many Davos delegates so directly, as an all-consuming bottom-line issue for companies. Most troubling for the American business leaders in Davos, who had grown accustomed to being atop the global technological heap, was that they heard time and again how quickly they were falling behind their Chinese peers. Though it is a tech race most Western executives feel is only on its first laps, they heard how President Xi had declared a sort of space race or Manhattan Project around AI that is already delivering measurable results. As a sign of the times, PwC used its annual survey of some 1,400 global CEOs – released every year here at Davos – to ask business executives whether they thought AI or the Internet would have the greater long-term impact. Some 84 percent of Chinese executives laid their bets on AI, while only 38 percent of their US colleagues agreed. That was reflected as well in how those polled by PwC said they had already deployed AI in their companies. A full 25 percent of Chinese executives reported they had utilized AI broadly compared to just 5 percent of American executives. "It's rare you get that big of a difference between two superpowers," Tim Ryan, US chair of PwC told The Washington Post. "It tells us we (Americans) probably need to make sure we're thinking about it in the right way."

China's commanding position

He said that although most US companies now have pilot projects using AI, their Chinese comrades are already scaling their initiatives. In my own Davos presentation, "The Geopolitics of the Fourth Industrial Revolution," I stated bluntly that China was on track to take the commanding heights of AI and that the consequences could be historic in nature. Countries that are most innovative and technologically advanced tend to dominate international relations. During the first industrial revolution in 18th and 19th centuries, the steam engine powered the British empire and the shift from agrarian economies. During the second industrial revolution, in the decades before World War I, the United States rose on the back of electricity, mass production and the internal combustion engine. The third industrial revolution, driven digitally by the United States, was one of computers, the Internet, and information technology. President Xi Jinping has told recent, high-level visitors that China suffered the historic consequence of being an also-ran in those three non-Maoist revolutions (my wording, not his). Having learned from history what it takes to be the global leader, he is determined to dominate the Fourth Industrial Revolution, marked by breakthroughs in technologies that include artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, robotics, nanotechnology, bioengineering and quantum computing. To achieve that, he has thrown all his country's energy behind AI research and development, thus also focusing the work of the country's growing ranks of hungry, intensively competitive entrepreneurs and start-ups. By the end of 2017, Chinese venture capital investors had poured enough into AI startups that they made up 48 percent of all AI venture funding globally, surpassing the US for the first time. "When I go to China," said Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman on a panel here, "there's almost an endless stream of people who are showing up developing new companies. The venture business there in AI-oriented companies is really exploding with growth."

Consequences and oversight