Who’s Who In AI: A curated directory of influential builders, researchers, founders, engineers, investors, writers, and public figures shaping the future of artificial intelligence.
About This Directory
Artificial intelligence is evolving rapidly, driven by a relatively small group of individuals whose ideas, research, products, and companies influence the direction of the industry.
This directory serves as a practical reference guide for anyone seeking to understand the people behind today’s most important AI breakthroughs, businesses, platforms, and conversations.
Whether you’re researching industry leaders, discovering influential voices, following emerging startups, or simply learning who’s shaping the future of AI, this directory provides a structured place to begin.
Who’s Who in AI
There are currently 10 names in this directory beginning with the letter A.
Adam Evans
Former EVP and General Manager, Salesforce AI
A note for the directory: Evans departed Salesforce in early 2026, announcing via LinkedIn that he was moving on to pursue a new phase focused on building startups. His listing should be updated accordingly — but his impact on enterprise AI warrants inclusion regardless.
A serial founder and Palantir alumnus, Evans brought two of his companies into Salesforce: sales-intelligence startup RelateIQ in 2014, and then Airkit.ai — which he founded to help companies build customer-service AI agents — acquired in 2023.
At Salesforce, Evans led the creation and rapid scaling of Agentforce, a platform that allows companies to build, deploy, and monitor their own AI agents using natural language — requiring little to no coding. Use cases ranged from answering HR questions to scheduling city street sweepers to advising luxury shoppers on delivery timelines.
His mandate was to deliver on CEO Marc Benioff's promise that Agentforce would power one billion AI agents by the end of 2025, automating more than $6 trillion worth of tasks by 2030. By Q1 fiscal 2026, Salesforce's data cloud and AI annual recurring revenue surpassed $1 billion, up 120% year over year.
TIME named Evans to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list. His successor at Salesforce is Madhav Thattai, previously COO of Agentforce.
Submitted by: AdminA note for the directory: Evans departed Salesforce in early 2026, announcing via LinkedIn that he was moving on to pursue a new phase focused on building startups. His listing should be updated accordingly — but his impact on enterprise AI warrants inclusion regardless.
A serial founder and Palantir alumnus, Evans brought two of his companies into Salesforce: sales-intelligence startup RelateIQ in 2014, and then Airkit.ai — which he founded to help companies build customer-service AI agents — acquired in 2023.
At Salesforce, Evans led the creation and rapid scaling of Agentforce, a platform that allows companies to build, deploy, and monitor their own AI agents using natural language — requiring little to no coding. Use cases ranged from answering HR questions to scheduling city street sweepers to advising luxury shoppers on delivery timelines.
His mandate was to deliver on CEO Marc Benioff's promise that Agentforce would power one billion AI agents by the end of 2025, automating more than $6 trillion worth of tasks by 2030. By Q1 fiscal 2026, Salesforce's data cloud and AI annual recurring revenue surpassed $1 billion, up 120% year over year.
TIME named Evans to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list. His successor at Salesforce is Madhav Thattai, previously COO of Agentforce.
Alan Descoins
CEO, Tryolabs
A self-taught coder from age 12, Alan Descoins was among Tryolabs' first employees nearly 15 years ago, when machine-learning solutions were still a hard sell. He rose from Chief Technology Officer and Partner to CEO of the Uruguay-based AI consultancy, which helps organizations across e-commerce, manufacturing, and telecommunications create business value through applied AI and machine learning.
What distinguishes Tryolabs in a crowded field is its deliberate commitment to mission-driven work alongside its commercial portfolio. While the company works with corporate clients including Nvidia, Hyundai, and Ulta Beauty, it also makes nonprofit work a core component of its business. Projects include an AI tool built with UNICEF to track children's exposure to extreme heat during heatwaves, an AI monitoring system developed with The Nature Conservancy to analyze catch data on industrial fishing vessels, tools that help forecast solar energy output, track lions in the wild, and identify rural schools from satellite imagery so aid workers can connect them to the internet.
Descoins is direct about the philosophy behind the work: "You have to think of AI as one piece in a system — you don't have to think about AI as the end goal. You have to make sure that the implementation of your AI component will actually make the entire system better."
TIME named Descoins to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list.
Submitted by: Admin A self-taught coder from age 12, Alan Descoins was among Tryolabs' first employees nearly 15 years ago, when machine-learning solutions were still a hard sell. He rose from Chief Technology Officer and Partner to CEO of the Uruguay-based AI consultancy, which helps organizations across e-commerce, manufacturing, and telecommunications create business value through applied AI and machine learning.
What distinguishes Tryolabs in a crowded field is its deliberate commitment to mission-driven work alongside its commercial portfolio. While the company works with corporate clients including Nvidia, Hyundai, and Ulta Beauty, it also makes nonprofit work a core component of its business. Projects include an AI tool built with UNICEF to track children's exposure to extreme heat during heatwaves, an AI monitoring system developed with The Nature Conservancy to analyze catch data on industrial fishing vessels, tools that help forecast solar energy output, track lions in the wild, and identify rural schools from satellite imagery so aid workers can connect them to the internet.
Descoins is direct about the philosophy behind the work: "You have to think of AI as one piece in a system — you don't have to think about AI as the end goal. You have to make sure that the implementation of your AI component will actually make the entire system better."
TIME named Descoins to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list.
Alex Blania
Co-founder and CEO, Tools for Humanity
Alex Blania holds degrees in Industrial Engineering and Physics from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and studied physics at Caltech before co-founding Tools for Humanity with Sam Altman and Max Novendstern. The company has raised over $300 million at a valuation of approximately $3 billion, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital, and Khosla Ventures.
His core bet is that AI is making human identity online unverifiable — and that the only durable fix is hardware. Tools for Humanity has built the Orb, an iris-scanning device that issues a World ID: a private, cryptographically verifiable proof that a user is a unique human rather than a bot or AI agent. World now has 38 million users across 160 countries, with roughly 500,000 new people joining each week.
Platform integrations are accelerating. Reddit is exploring a partnership to stop forums being overrun with spam, gaming company Razer is already using World for human verification, and Tinder is trialing an anti-catfishing service powered by World ID.
Blania estimates that bot activity will explode from roughly 1% of internet content today to over 90% within 24 months — making his company's infrastructure, in his view, a race against the clock. TIME named Blania to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list.
Submitted by: Admin Alex Blania holds degrees in Industrial Engineering and Physics from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and studied physics at Caltech before co-founding Tools for Humanity with Sam Altman and Max Novendstern. The company has raised over $300 million at a valuation of approximately $3 billion, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital, and Khosla Ventures.
His core bet is that AI is making human identity online unverifiable — and that the only durable fix is hardware. Tools for Humanity has built the Orb, an iris-scanning device that issues a World ID: a private, cryptographically verifiable proof that a user is a unique human rather than a bot or AI agent. World now has 38 million users across 160 countries, with roughly 500,000 new people joining each week.
Platform integrations are accelerating. Reddit is exploring a partnership to stop forums being overrun with spam, gaming company Razer is already using World for human verification, and Tinder is trialing an anti-catfishing service powered by World ID.
Blania estimates that bot activity will explode from roughly 1% of internet content today to over 90% within 24 months — making his company's infrastructure, in his view, a race against the clock. TIME named Blania to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list.
Alex Smola
Co-founder and CEO, Boson AI
Alex Smola is a machine learning researcher with over two decades of experience across academia and industry. He holds a Master's in Physics from the Technical University of Munich and a PhD in Computer Science from Technische Universität Berlin, and has authored more than 250 academic papers and six books — including the widely used textbook Dive into Deep Learning.
Before founding Boson AI, Smola was VP and Distinguished Scientist at Amazon Web Services, where he led efforts to make AI more accessible to developers and contributed to services including Amazon Lex, Polly, and Rekognition. He also held professorships at Carnegie Mellon and conducted research with Berkeley and Google.
Smola co-founded Boson AI in 2023 with a focus on building frontier AI systems. The company's current emphasis is enterprise voice and avatar agents. Boson has built its own foundation models — including Higgs Audio and Higgs Avatar — arguing that the experience enterprises need cannot be achieved by stitching together external components, and that real-time conversational AI requires deep co-design across the full stack.
Smola is recognized as one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, and his work on scalable AI algorithms — particularly kernel methods and deep learning — has earned him over 75,000 academic citations. He remains one of the most credentialed scientist-founders active in enterprise AI today.Submitted by: Admin
Co-founder and CEO, Boson AI
Alex Smola is a machine learning researcher with over two decades of experience across academia and industry. He holds a Master's in Physics from the Technical University of Munich and a PhD in Computer Science from Technische Universität Berlin, and has authored more than 250 academic papers and six books — including the widely used textbook Dive into Deep Learning.
Before founding Boson AI, Smola was VP and Distinguished Scientist at Amazon Web Services, where he led efforts to make AI more accessible to developers and contributed to services including Amazon Lex, Polly, and Rekognition. He also held professorships at Carnegie Mellon and conducted research with Berkeley and Google.
Smola co-founded Boson AI in 2023 with a focus on building frontier AI systems. The company's current emphasis is enterprise voice and avatar agents. Boson has built its own foundation models — including Higgs Audio and Higgs Avatar — arguing that the experience enterprises need cannot be achieved by stitching together external components, and that real-time conversational AI requires deep co-design across the full stack.
Smola is recognized as one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, and his work on scalable AI algorithms — particularly kernel methods and deep learning — has earned him over 75,000 academic citations. He remains one of the most credentialed scientist-founders active in enterprise AI today.
Allie K. Miller
CEO, Open Machine
Allie K. Miller is the youngest woman ever to build an AI product at IBM and holds degrees from Dartmouth College and the Wharton School. Before founding Open Machine, she launched the first multimodal AI team at IBM and served as global head of machine learning for startups at AWS.
Open Machine advises Fortune 500 companies on AI strategy and technology adoption, with clients including Novartis, CyberArk, ServiceNow, and Warner Bros. Discovery. Miller has also worked with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, advised Melinda French Gates's Pivotal Ventures, and sits on Arianna Huffington's scientific advisory board.
In 2025, she was named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI and ADWEEK's inaugural AI Trailblazers Power 100.
Beyond enterprise advisory work, Miller has built one of the largest AI education followings anywhere. She is the number one most followed voice in AI business with over 2 million followers, and her AI-first course has reached more than 350,000 students. Her stated mission is to convert one billion people from seeing AI as a source of anxiety to a source of agency.
Submitted by: AdminAllie K. Miller is the youngest woman ever to build an AI product at IBM and holds degrees from Dartmouth College and the Wharton School. Before founding Open Machine, she launched the first multimodal AI team at IBM and served as global head of machine learning for startups at AWS.
Open Machine advises Fortune 500 companies on AI strategy and technology adoption, with clients including Novartis, CyberArk, ServiceNow, and Warner Bros. Discovery. Miller has also worked with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, advised Melinda French Gates's Pivotal Ventures, and sits on Arianna Huffington's scientific advisory board.
In 2025, she was named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI and ADWEEK's inaugural AI Trailblazers Power 100.
Beyond enterprise advisory work, Miller has built one of the largest AI education followings anywhere. She is the number one most followed voice in AI business with over 2 million followers, and her AI-first course has reached more than 350,000 students. Her stated mission is to convert one billion people from seeing AI as a source of anxiety to a source of agency.
Amnon Shashua
President and CEO, Mobileye
Prof. Amnon Shashua holds the Sachs Chair in Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has published over 160 papers in machine learning and computational vision, and holds over 200 patents. He is widely regarded as one of the foundational figures in applied computer vision.
Shashua has founded six companies across automotive, assistive technology, and fintech, including Mobileye, OrCam, AI21 Labs, Mentee Robotics, and One Zero — Israel's first digital bank. Mobileye was acquired by Intel in 2017 in what was then the largest acquisition in Israeli history, and went public again on Nasdaq in 2022.
His current ambitions are expanding well beyond the car. In early 2026, Shashua announced Mobileye's $900 million acquisition of Mentee Robotics, calling it "the beginning of Mobileye 3.0." Entering 2026, Mobileye's projected revenue pipeline stands at $24.5 billion over the next eight years — roughly 42% growth from 2023 — with its technology now deployed in more than 230 million vehicles worldwide.
Shashua was named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 and elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering Class of 2026 for his contributions to computer vision and autonomous driving. His latest venture, AAI Technologies, is focused on cracking the problem of superintelligence.
Submitted by: Admin Prof. Amnon Shashua holds the Sachs Chair in Computer Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has published over 160 papers in machine learning and computational vision, and holds over 200 patents. He is widely regarded as one of the foundational figures in applied computer vision.
Shashua has founded six companies across automotive, assistive technology, and fintech, including Mobileye, OrCam, AI21 Labs, Mentee Robotics, and One Zero — Israel's first digital bank. Mobileye was acquired by Intel in 2017 in what was then the largest acquisition in Israeli history, and went public again on Nasdaq in 2022.
His current ambitions are expanding well beyond the car. In early 2026, Shashua announced Mobileye's $900 million acquisition of Mentee Robotics, calling it "the beginning of Mobileye 3.0." Entering 2026, Mobileye's projected revenue pipeline stands at $24.5 billion over the next eight years — roughly 42% growth from 2023 — with its technology now deployed in more than 230 million vehicles worldwide.
Shashua was named to TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 and elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering Class of 2026 for his contributions to computer vision and autonomous driving. His latest venture, AAI Technologies, is focused on cracking the problem of superintelligence.
Ana Helena Ulbrich
Co-founder and Director, NoHarm
Ana Helena Ulbrich is a Brazilian pharmacist who holds a master's degree and doctorate in chemistry from UFRGS and a specialization in patient safety from Fiocruz. She spent over a decade as a clinical pharmacist at Grupo Hospitalar Conceição in Porto Alegre.
The origin of NoHarm is deeply personal. Working in the hospital, Ulbrich recognized that the volume of prescriptions was creating dangerous risks for patients. She encouraged her brother, data scientist Henrique Dias, who was pursuing his doctorate at PUCRS, to direct his research toward solving it. Together they co-founded NoHarm in 2019.
NoHarm is a nonprofit AI tool trained to review prescriptions and flag potential dangers for patients. It has roughly doubled its reach every year since its founding, extending services deep into the remote Amazon. It is now used by more than 200 Brazilian hospitals, clinics, and health centers to review 5 million prescriptions monthly. Public hospitals use the tool for free, while private hospitals pay a small fee to support ongoing development.
Ulbrich is explicit about the role of AI in the system: "It is essential that a health care professional make the final decision." Pharmacists review every flagged issue and are encouraged to override the system based on patient needs.
TIME named Ulbrich to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list. In a field dominated by well-funded Silicon Valley companies, she represents something rarer — AI built from the ground up to save lives in underserved communities, with a model designed to stay free for those who need it most.
Submitted by: AdminAna Helena Ulbrich is a Brazilian pharmacist who holds a master's degree and doctorate in chemistry from UFRGS and a specialization in patient safety from Fiocruz. She spent over a decade as a clinical pharmacist at Grupo Hospitalar Conceição in Porto Alegre.
The origin of NoHarm is deeply personal. Working in the hospital, Ulbrich recognized that the volume of prescriptions was creating dangerous risks for patients. She encouraged her brother, data scientist Henrique Dias, who was pursuing his doctorate at PUCRS, to direct his research toward solving it. Together they co-founded NoHarm in 2019.
NoHarm is a nonprofit AI tool trained to review prescriptions and flag potential dangers for patients. It has roughly doubled its reach every year since its founding, extending services deep into the remote Amazon. It is now used by more than 200 Brazilian hospitals, clinics, and health centers to review 5 million prescriptions monthly. Public hospitals use the tool for free, while private hospitals pay a small fee to support ongoing development.
Ulbrich is explicit about the role of AI in the system: "It is essential that a health care professional make the final decision." Pharmacists review every flagged issue and are encouraged to override the system based on patient needs.
TIME named Ulbrich to its 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 list. In a field dominated by well-funded Silicon Valley companies, she represents something rarer — AI built from the ground up to save lives in underserved communities, with a model designed to stay free for those who need it most.
Andrej Karpathy
Pre-training Research Lead, Anthropic (formerly Senior Director of AI, Tesla; Co-founder, OpenAI)
Andrej Karpathy was born in Bratislava, Slovakia and holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford, where he studied under Fei-Fei Li. He was a founding member of OpenAI in 2015, left to lead AI at Tesla, returned to OpenAI in 2023, then departed in early 2024 to found Eureka Labs, an AI-powered education startup.
At Tesla, he led the computer vision team behind Autopilot — building one of the most consequential real-world deployments of deep learning ever undertaken.
< br /> Two phrases have etched him into the popular AI lexicon. In February 2025, Karpathy coined "vibe coding" — describing a new kind of programming where you simply describe what you want in plain language and let the model do the work. His YouTube series "Neural Networks: Zero to Hero" surpassed one million subscribers in early 2026, making him the field's most effective technical educator by reach.
On May 19, 2026, Karpathy joined Anthropic to lead a new team using Claude to accelerate pre-training research, reporting to Nick Joseph, Anthropic's head of model development. "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative," he wrote — a post that drew nearly 3 million views within one hour.
Submitted by: AdminAndrej Karpathy was born in Bratislava, Slovakia and holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford, where he studied under Fei-Fei Li. He was a founding member of OpenAI in 2015, left to lead AI at Tesla, returned to OpenAI in 2023, then departed in early 2024 to found Eureka Labs, an AI-powered education startup.
At Tesla, he led the computer vision team behind Autopilot — building one of the most consequential real-world deployments of deep learning ever undertaken.
< br /> Two phrases have etched him into the popular AI lexicon. In February 2025, Karpathy coined "vibe coding" — describing a new kind of programming where you simply describe what you want in plain language and let the model do the work. His YouTube series "Neural Networks: Zero to Hero" surpassed one million subscribers in early 2026, making him the field's most effective technical educator by reach.
On May 19, 2026, Karpathy joined Anthropic to lead a new team using Claude to accelerate pre-training research, reporting to Nick Joseph, Anthropic's head of model development. "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative," he wrote — a post that drew nearly 3 million views within one hour.
Andrew Ng
Founder and Executive Chairman, LandingAI; Founder, DeepLearning.AI; Managing General Partner, AI Fund
A directory note: Ng stepped down as Landing AI's day-to-day CEO in 2024, transitioning to Executive Chairman while the company appointed Dan Maloney as CEO.
Andrew Ng holds a B.Sc. from Carnegie Mellon, an M.Sc. from MIT, and a PhD from UC Berkeley. He was the founding lead of the Google Brain team — helping transform Google into a modern AI company — and later served as VP and Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he led a 1,300-person AI organization responsible for the company's global AI strategy.
He is perhaps the field's most consequential educator. Over 8 million people have taken an AI class from Ng, through his work at Stanford, Coursera — which he co-founded — and DeepLearning.AI, where he continues to produce some of the most widely used AI education content in the world.
LandingAI focuses on applying AI to the enterprise, with a particular emphasis on agentic document extraction and visual AI for manufacturing and industrial applications. His venture fund, AI Fund, operates as a startup studio model — building and launching AI companies from the ground up rather than simply investing in them.
His defining thesis has not changed in years: "AI is the new electricity." The analogy — that AI will transform every industry the way electricity did — has proven more prescient with each passing year, and remains the organizing principle behind everything Ng builds.
Submitted by: AdminA directory note: Ng stepped down as Landing AI's day-to-day CEO in 2024, transitioning to Executive Chairman while the company appointed Dan Maloney as CEO.
Andrew Ng holds a B.Sc. from Carnegie Mellon, an M.Sc. from MIT, and a PhD from UC Berkeley. He was the founding lead of the Google Brain team — helping transform Google into a modern AI company — and later served as VP and Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he led a 1,300-person AI organization responsible for the company's global AI strategy.
He is perhaps the field's most consequential educator. Over 8 million people have taken an AI class from Ng, through his work at Stanford, Coursera — which he co-founded — and DeepLearning.AI, where he continues to produce some of the most widely used AI education content in the world.
LandingAI focuses on applying AI to the enterprise, with a particular emphasis on agentic document extraction and visual AI for manufacturing and industrial applications. His venture fund, AI Fund, operates as a startup studio model — building and launching AI companies from the ground up rather than simply investing in them.
His defining thesis has not changed in years: "AI is the new electricity." The analogy — that AI will transform every industry the way electricity did — has proven more prescient with each passing year, and remains the organizing principle behind everything Ng builds.
Andy Jassy
President and CEO, Amazon
Andy Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 and spent over two decades building AWS from a internal concept into the world's dominant cloud platform before replacing Jeff Bezos as companywide CEO in 2021.
AI is now the central axis of his leadership. Amazon has committed approximately $200 billion in capital expenditure — predominantly in AWS — with Jassy stating the company is "investing aggressively" to meet AI demand and monetizing capacity as fast as it can be installed.
The results back the conviction. After three years of this AI cycle, AWS's AI revenue run rate has hit $15 billion — 260 times what AWS generated in its own first three years. AWS reported 24% year-over-year growth with a $142 billion revenue run rate in Q4 2025, with demand still outpacing supply.
Amazon is also building its own AI silicon to reduce dependence on Nvidia. Its custom Trainium2 chip delivered roughly 30% better price-performance than comparable GPUs and largely sold out, while Trainium3 — shipping since early 2026 — is already nearly fully subscribed.
Internally, Jassy has been direct about AI's workforce implications. He has stated that AI will reduce Amazon's corporate headcount — a striking admission from one of the world's largest employers, and a signal of how seriously he is treating the technology's transformative potential.
Submitted by: AdminAndy Jassy joined Amazon in 1997 and spent over two decades building AWS from a internal concept into the world's dominant cloud platform before replacing Jeff Bezos as companywide CEO in 2021.
AI is now the central axis of his leadership. Amazon has committed approximately $200 billion in capital expenditure — predominantly in AWS — with Jassy stating the company is "investing aggressively" to meet AI demand and monetizing capacity as fast as it can be installed.
The results back the conviction. After three years of this AI cycle, AWS's AI revenue run rate has hit $15 billion — 260 times what AWS generated in its own first three years. AWS reported 24% year-over-year growth with a $142 billion revenue run rate in Q4 2025, with demand still outpacing supply.
Amazon is also building its own AI silicon to reduce dependence on Nvidia. Its custom Trainium2 chip delivered roughly 30% better price-performance than comparable GPUs and largely sold out, while Trainium3 — shipping since early 2026 — is already nearly fully subscribed.
Internally, Jassy has been direct about AI's workforce implications. He has stated that AI will reduce Amazon's corporate headcount — a striking admission from one of the world's largest employers, and a signal of how seriously he is treating the technology's transformative potential.
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