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.
AI follows this same pattern, but at unprecedented speed and scale. It collapses the cost of creation and makes execution abundant. In that environment, content is no longer scarce. Meaning is. Anyone can generate output. Very few can create coherence, resonance, or cultural gravity.
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 will create a world of infinite, personalized content. As a result, shared cultural moments will become rarer and more valuable. The creators who can shape stories the world experiences together will command outsized influence and outsized returns.
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. And right now, we’re in a rare window where everyone in this room agrees on the same thing: AI is the future. The debate is over. The only question left is when, not if.
That clarity creates a real opportunity for anyone willing to act on it. Here are the actions I’m taking based on this position.
First, accept that AI is going to touch every corner of business and creation, and implement it immediately. In everything. Don’t spend months debating whether you should connect Slack, internal docs, financial systems, or whether it’s “appropriate” to use generative tools. All of those things will be connected eventually. You gain advantage by doing it now. You lose it by waiting while other companies learn, iterate, and compound new workflows.
At KitBash, we wired AI into the nervous system of the company. Slack, GitHub, project management, internal docs, finance, all connected. Engineers don’t write the first line of code anymore. AI does. 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. That’s what AI transformation looks like when you stop debating and start operating.
Second, be intentional about where you want to play. In entertainment, AI is already pulling the industry toward two distinct value paths. One is mass, personalized content at unprecedented scale. The other is high-impact creation, where a small number of creators produce shared cultural moments with unprecedented value.
At KitBash, we’ve chosen to focus on the latter. We’re deeply invested in AI, but we apply it to help high-end creators move faster, think bigger, and create work 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 for anyone who wants to take action now is this: move early, wire everything up, and choose your side of the field deliberately. In the age of AI, speed creates advantage, clarity creates leverage, and the middle is where most companies fail.
