Even just a quick browse through WEF’s website reveals a tremendous emphasis on data-driven insights, as should be expected from any modern, professional organisation. Virtually every published report or article presents statistical or otherwise numerical evidence supporting the WEF’s various initiatives. Also, the WEF website has a dedicated section devoted to intelligence where key issues and research findings are displayed in intuitive dashboards. Here is an example of how the WEF visualises the topical ecosystem of financial and monetary systems:

Much of the most recently published material – for example, this video recap of economic predictions for 2025, which summarizes key survey results – include at least a few data points. Almost all of the key arguments made in the summary of the WEF’s latest Global Risks Report are backed up with visualised data.

The WEF and family offices serve different – albeit sometimes overlapping –  purposes. Even so, the WEF’s demonstrated success in operationalising data should lead family officers to:

• Conclude that their family clients and the WEF community as a whole take similar analytical approaches to achieving their respective goals. Influential and time-constrained decision-makers require understandable and actionable data to inform their strategies.

• Ask how the WEF operationally excels at leveraging data to drive high-stakes discussions and negotiations at Davos. Answers can help family officers serve their own stakeholders better.

To answer this operational question, we can map out how the WEF approaches data based on publicly available information. Their strategy includes:

01 Partnerships to ensure access to high-quality data

The WEF is actively advancing data quality and trustworthiness through several initiatives such as the Data for Common Purpose Initiative (DCPI). Launched in December 2020, this initiative aims to create a foundational governance framework that allows for the ethical sharing of data across various sectors. Key priorities include unlocking data from silos while protecting privacy rights and promoting a responsible approach to data exchange. The WEF has stated that three critical principles to uphold in the data economy are data integrity, interoperability, and inclusivity in the sense of ensuring that the right data is accessible to the right people.

02 Partnerships to integrate data from multiple sources

One of the WEF’s notable technology partners is with Salesforce, which has helped the Forum create a single source of truth based on both internal data regarding attendees as well as the external data (for example on sustainability and economics) the attendees discuss.

03 Partnerships to transform raw data into easily understandable visuals

An example of such a partnership is the one the WEF has with Accurat, a design agency focused on data storytelling that has helped the Forum clearly present important facts and figures in a number of high-profile reports since 2016. According to the agency’s founder, before the partnership began “the team at the WEF was used (as everyone else in 2016) to doing things the traditional way: manual graphic processes and hundreds of hand-crafted country profiles for each published report.”