Dennis Woodside: The mid-market is the real test for productivity and growth
At the World Economic Forum, Freshworks CEO focused on how mid-market companies drive the economy—and AI adoption
Every year in January, the world’s leaders in politics, business, and technology gather in the mountains of Switzerland to hammer through some of the thorniest issues gripping society and business at the World Economic Forum.
It’s no surprise that AI has been chief among them.
For Freshworks CEO and president, Dennis Woodside, many of the conversations centered on how to move from AI experimentation to AI scale. Across Davos panels and closed-door CEO conversations, a consistent theme emerged: the biggest barrier to scaling AI isn’t the technology itself, but the organizational complexity around data, decision-making, and change management. The secret? Double down on mid-market companies, which account for approximately one-third of private-sector GDP.
“If we want AI to deliver meaningful and durable economic impact, my 30 years of experience across cloud, mobile, and now AI have taught me that we need to focus on the mid-market,” says the former CEO of Motorola Mobile and COO of Dropbox.
That reality makes the mid-market the most important test case for AI’s economic promise. These companies don’t have the luxury of long, complex transformations, so AI must deliver real value quickly, or it simply won’t stick.
Hear and read more from Woodside at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland:
How Freshworks helps customers adapt to the way work is changing with easy-to-use products that deliver fast time to value
"Mid-market companies typically are under a lot of pressure, cost pressure. They have to compete with much larger organizations, but they don't necessarily have the resources of a very large organization. So they have to get a lot of value out of their software fast."
Watch the full CNBC India video on YouTube
Why the mid-market will determine AI’s impact
"Mid-market companies around the world constitute about 40% of all employment. So it's a really important sector and the big enterprise companies typically haven't focused there. They're focused on much bigger organizations. But a midsize company needs AI, too. They need to be able to scale and compete with bigger companies."
Watch the full interview on CBSNews.com, YouTube, or Spotify
The importance of AI for companies powering our economy
"A topic that I'm starting to hear more about is how the mid-market companies—companies of around a billion of revenue, not 10 billion, not 100 billion, but companies that are powering our economy—are using AI to get more out of their teams, grow their business faster, grow more efficiently."
Watch the full video on LinkedIn
