2022
WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
Read Time: 8 Minutes
About This Talk:
In 2026, I was invited by the House of Kurdistan to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos on the role of creativity, entertainment, and artificial intelligence in shaping economic and geopolitical influence.
I joined a panel alongside my good friend Danar Worya (The Last of Us Part II, Horizon Forbiden West) for a conversation with leaders from around the world.
The conversation centered on a belief I care deeply about: creativity is not a cultural luxury. It is one of the most powerful ways a people, a region, or a country can build trust, recognition, and long-term influence in the world. When the world connects with your stories, art, music, games, and films, they begin to connect with your culture. And when they connect with your culture, they build empathy and trust with you.
In this Q&A, I shared my perspective on why leaders should take creativity seriously, how AI is changing the value of creative work, and what companies, governments, and investors should do now to prepare for the future of entertainment.
Why should governments, investors, and business leaders take creativity and entertainment seriously as an economic and geopolitical lever?
Investing in creativity and the entertainment economy is not a cultural luxury. It is one of the most effective ways to build long-term economic and political leverage for a company, a city, or a country.
Creativity and storytelling are fundamentally about emotional connection. Art, music, film, and games communicate meaning beyond reason. They shape how we see the world, how we see ourselves, and how we relate to others. These forces are deeply human and often difficult to quantify, which is why they are frequently underestimated in economic and geopolitical frameworks.
The world’s most enduring brands are shaped less by products than by the stories and cultural moments that formed an emotional bond with us. Storytelling creates association, meaning, and memory. It is how brands come to live with us, not just sell to us.
Brand Equity functions as a multiplier applied across an entire system. When it exists, products command higher value, markets open more easily, and loyalty forms faster. When it does not, even strong products struggle to travel or endure.
This same dynamic applies at the level of cultures and nations. When a region produces strong, recognizable creative signals, products become more valuable, exports travel farther, talent and capital flow inward, and political and economic narratives soften.
Cultural familiarity builds trust. And creativity and entertainment is how we build cultural familiarity. This is why investing in creativity matters economically. For companies, cities, and countries alike, it is one of the most durable sources of long-term economic and political advantage.
There’s a lot of anxiety that AI will devalue creators by making creation accessible to everyone. From your perspective, how does AI actually change the value of creativity?
The central question surrounding AI and creativity is simple and unsettling: When everyone can create, what happens to creators?
The fear is that if AI makes anyone capable of writing, composing, designing, and producing, then professional creators lose their scarcity and, with it, their value.
History suggests the opposite outcome. Each time creative tools have been democratized, creation becomes accessible to many, volume explodes, and demand expands alongside it. Value does not disappear, it moves.
Instagram is a clear example. It did not eliminate photographers. It made everyone capable of taking photos, destroyed scarcity at the low end, and dramatically expanded both the supply of content and the appetite for it. More people created and consumed content than ever before, and the strongest creators emerged as global brands built on taste, identity, and distribution.
Generative AI accelerates that dynamic considerably. It dramatically increases the volume of images, writing, music, video, and other creative material produced. In a world where content itself becomes abundant, I believe authorship, intention, taste, craft, provenance, and meaning become more important, not less.
This is why mass culture does not disappear in an AI-driven world. Social media did not eliminate shared cultural moments. It made virality the gate. Millions post every day, but only a handful break through. When they do, the impact is outsized. Tentpole films still exist. Global stars still emerge. Live events still stop the world. The noise did not destroy signal. It made signal harder to create, and therefore more valuable.
AI may help create a world of effectively infinite content. As a result, shared cultural moments, distinctive artistic voices, and work with clear human authorship may become rarer relative to everything surrounding them, and therefore more valuable.
If AI is clearly reshaping creativity and entertainment, what should leaders actually do now? What are the concrete decisions that matter at this moment?
From my position as a CEO, talking about the future is only useful if it changes what we do today. AI is already affecting many parts of business, and I think the opportunity right now is to move quickly enough to understand where it can actually help. There are real applications for this technology, but there are also plenty of false promises. In some cases, AI can make teams faster and more effective. In others, it can add friction, create more work, or actually hurt productivity.
So the goal should not be to implement AI everywhere. It should be to experiment quickly, learn where it is genuinely useful, and be intentional about where you adopt it. Give teams room to test new workflows, but measure whether those workflows are actually making the work better.
At KitBash, we wired AI into the nervous system of the company. Slack, GitHub, project management, internal docs, finance, all connected. Engineers are working hand in hand with AI for coding. Customer support agents work directly with AI coding agents to diagnose and fix product issues, and marketing uses AI to analyze performance data and optimize channels in real time. These are some of the areas of our business where we have found these tools genuinely useful.
Second, be intentional about where you want to create value.
As the volume of content increases, I believe there will be enormous opportunity at both ends of the market. There will be systems capable of producing extraordinary quantities of inexpensive content. But there will also be increasing demand for exceptional work created by distinctive artists, directors, designers, and storytellers whose names and points of view matter.
At KitBash, we’ve chosen to focus on the latter. Our focus is on helping high-end creators do exceptional work, build meaningful careers, reach audiences, and create things with lasting cultural impact. That choice isn’t ideological. It’s strategic. It’s based on our strengths and where we believe long-term value will concentrate.
So my advice to leaders is to stay curious, learn quickly, experiment responsibly, decide where these technologies actually belong in your organization. In the age of AI, speed creates advantage, clarity creates leverage, and the middle is where most companies fail.
Update 8/13/2026: After the original conversation, I received thoughtful feedback that some of these ideas were not coming through as clearly as I intended. I’ve refined a few passages to better express my views and the distinctions I was trying to make.