Chief in AI 100 Knowledge Graph Ontology
Local terms for modeling the Chief in AI 100 honoree directory: honoree categories, recognition tiers, and category membership.
Chief in AI 100 Ontology
Base class for the seven honoree categories, subclasses per category, and properties for tier and category membership.
Honoree Category
One of the seven top-level categories the Chief in AI 100 list is organized into.
AI Governance Policy & Responsible AI
AI Investors
AI Research & Academic Leaders
AI Startup Founders & CEOs
Big Tech AI Leadership
Enterprise Chief AI Officers
Frontier & Foundation Models
honoree count
Number of honorees listed under a given honoree category.
in category
Links an honoree (schema:Person) to the honoree category they are listed under.
category has honoree
Inverse of :inCategory - links a honoree category to a member honoree.
honoree tier
Links an honoree to their Chief in AI 100 recognition tier (Icon, Anchor, or Builder).
Recognition Tier
One of the three Chief in AI 100 recognition tiers: Icon, Anchor, Builder.
Icon
The highest recognition tier for a Chief in AI 100 honoree, denoting a defining, field-shaping figure.
Anchor
A recognition tier for a Chief in AI 100 honoree denoting an established, high-influence leader.
Builder
A recognition tier for a Chief in AI 100 honoree denoting a hands-on operator or technical leader driving execution.
AI Builders Network
Chief in AI
AMD
Abridge
Accenture
Adaption Labs
Air Street Capital
Amazon Web Services
American Express
Andreessen Horowitz
Anthropic
Anysphere
Apple
BMO Financial Group
California Institute of Technology
Carnegie Mellon University
Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Georgetown University
Cognition
Cohere
Colgate-Palmolive
Conviction
Cowboy Ventures
Credo AI
Databricks
Decagon
DeepLearning.AI
Dell Technologies
Digital Rights Foundation
Dulo Technologies
ELLIS Alicante
ElevenLabs
EliseAI
Expedia Group
FPV Ventures
Fireworks
French Ministry for Foreign Affairs
General Catalyst
Glasswing Ventures
Glean
Goldman Sachs
Google DeepMind
Harvey
Humane Intelligence PBC
Institute for Advanced Study
International Telecommunication Union
JPMorganChase
Khosla Ventures
Lelapa AI
Luminance
MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Mass General Brigham
Mastercard
McMillanAI
Mercedes-Benz Group
Meta Platforms
Microsoft
Mila
Mistral AI
Monte Carlo
NVIDIA
OpenAI
Paramount
PepsiCo
Perplexity
Pigment
Pika
Runway
S&P Global
SAP
Safe Superintelligence
Salesforce
Schneider Electric
Scribe
Sequoia Capital
Sierra
Stanford University
Thinking Machines Lab
Together AI
UK AI Security Institute
United States Department of Energy
University of California, Berkeley
University of Toronto
Walmart
World Labs
Writer
eBay
Executives and public-interest leaders shaping AI governance, safety policy and responsible-AI practice.
Venture investors whose capital and theses shape which AI companies scale.
University and lab researchers advancing the scientific foundations of AI.
Founders and CEOs building category-defining AI-native startups.
Executives leading AI strategy and engineering inside the largest technology companies.
Chief AI Officers and equivalent enterprise leaders deploying AI at scale inside large, often regulated, companies.
Founders and scientists building the frontier foundation-model labs.
Alondra Nelson
Harold F. Linder Professor, Institute for Advanced Study
Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and architect of the White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights (as deputy assistant to the President and acting director of OSTP). A premier US science-policy leader and TIME100 AI honoree.
Clara Chappaz
Ambassador for Digital Affairs & AI, French Ministry for Foreign Affairs
France's Ambassador for Digital Affairs and Artificial Intelligence since December 2025, and previously the country's first AI minister - Minister Delegate for AI and Digital Affairs until October 2025. A TIME100 AI honoree who came to government from leading La French Tech; in office she launched INESIA, France's AI evaluation and safety institute, and the Dare AI plan. A central figure on the European AI-summit circuit.
Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Secretary-General, ITU (UN)
Secretary-General of the ITU (the UN's digital agency) - the first woman to lead it - and a driving force behind the UN's push to put AI capacity and governance on the global agenda. Hosts and keynotes the AI for Good Global Summit.
Helen Toner
Executive Director, CSET (Georgetown)
Executive director of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), one of the most influential US AI-policy analysts and a former OpenAI board member. A frequent Congressional witness on frontier AI.
Jade Leung
CTO / PM AI adviser, UK AI Security Institute
CTO of the UK AI Security Institute and an AI adviser to the Prime Minister, designing frontier-model evaluations for the UK government. Previously led governance at OpenAI; a RSAC 2026 speaker.
Nighat Dad
Founder & Executive Director, Digital Rights Foundation
Founder and executive director of the Digital Rights Foundation and a former member of the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Body on AI - a leading Global-South voice on digital rights and AI governance, and a member of Meta's Oversight Board. A HumanX 2026 speaker.
Rumman Chowdhury
CEO & Founder, Humane Intelligence PBC
Founder of Humane Intelligence - now Distinguished Advisor to the nonprofit and CEO of its spinoff Humane Intelligence PBC - and a former US Science Envoy for AI. A pioneer of algorithmic auditing and AI red-teaming (ex-Twitter META lead); one of the most-booked responsible-AI keynote speakers, headlining AI for Good 2026.
Yoshua Bengio
Founder & Scientific Advisor, LawZero & Mila
Turing Award laureate and chair of the international AI Safety Report, the flagship 30-nation scientific assessment. Founder and scientific advisor of Mila and founder of the nonprofit safe-AI lab LawZero; among the most influential scientists in AI.
Zico Kolter
Professor & Director, ML Dept, CMU; OpenAI board; Chief Scientist, Gray Swan AI
Chief Scientist of Gray Swan AI, a member of OpenAI's board, and a Carnegie Mellon professor - a leading AI-safety researcher-executive bridging red-teaming research and governance. A World Summit AI 2026 speaker.
Aileen Lee
Founder & Managing Partner, Cowboy Ventures
Founder and Managing Partner of Cowboy Ventures, who coined the term 'unicorn' and co-founded All Raise to advance women in venture. A leading seed investor with decades of experience, a deep rolodex and a prolific public speaker.
Hemant Taneja
CEO & Managing Director, General Catalyst
CEO and Managing Director of General Catalyst, which he built into a top global fund investing on a 'responsible innovation' thesis with a strong health and enterprise-AI focus. Author of 'Intended Consequences'; a CES 2026 speaker.
Jennifer Li
General Partner, a16z
General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she leads AI-infrastructure investing and sits on the boards of ElevenLabs, fal and Mux. One of the most active infra investors and a HumanX 2026 speaker.
Martin Casado
General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and one of the most influential - and outspoken - infrastructure/AI investors. Previously founded Nicira (a networking pioneer); a prolific, opinionated stage and social presence.
Nathan Benaich
Founder & GP, Air Street Capital
Founder and General Partner of Air Street Capital and author of the industry-standard annual 'State of AI Report'. Runs Europe's largest solo-GP fund; hosts and keynotes the Research and Applied AI Summit.
Pegah Ebrahimi
Co-founder & Managing Partner, FPV Ventures
Co-founder and Managing Partner of FPV Ventures, backing mission-driven AI founders. Previously COO of Morgan Stanley's technology investment banking and a Cisco executive; a HumanX 2026 speaker.
Rudina Seseri
Founder & Managing Partner, Glasswing Ventures
Founder and Managing Partner of Glasswing Ventures, a first-capital-in investor in AI-native and Frontier Tech startups transforming B2B and cybersecurity markets. A frequent AI-strategy speaker and a 100 Women in AI honoree.
Sarah Guo
Founder & General Partner, Conviction
Founder and General Partner of Conviction, a top AI-native venture firm. Previously a Greylock GP; made her Midas List debut in 2026. A HumanX and RSAC 2026 speaker.
Sonya Huang
Partner, Sequoia Capital
Partner at Sequoia Capital and author of its canonical generative-AI essays ('Generative AI's Act Two', the AI-agent thesis); led investments in OpenAI, Hugging Face and LangChain. Keynoted Sequoia's AI Ascent 2026.
Vinod Khosla
Founder, Khosla Ventures
Founder of Khosla Ventures and the earliest institutional backer of OpenAI. A Sun Microsystems co-founder turned prolific, provocative AI-future investor and essayist; a keynote at the India AI Impact Summit and Cerebral Valley 2026.
Anca Dragan
VP, AI Safety, Alignment & Collaboration, Google DeepMind
VP of AI Safety, Alignment and Collaboration at Google DeepMind and an associate professor at UC Berkeley (currently on leave), a leading authority on human-AI interaction and alignment - bringing the safety-research perspective from inside a frontier lab.
Andrew Ng
Founder, DeepLearning.AI; Managing General Partner, AI Fund
Founder of DeepLearning.AI and managing general partner of AI Fund; co-founder of Coursera and Google Brain. The field's foremost builder-educator, whose courses trained millions; a HumanX and Ai4 2026 speaker and a top outreach target.
Anima Anandkumar
Bren Professor, Caltech
Bren Professor at Caltech (previously a senior director of ML research at NVIDIA), a leader in AI-for-science and tensor methods and a TIME100 AI Impact honoree. Also a prominent advocate for women in AI (she led the NIPS→NeurIPS renaming).
Chelsea Finn
Assistant Professor, Stanford; Co-Founder, Physical Intelligence
Assistant Professor at Stanford and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, a leader in robot learning and meta-learning and one of the field's rising marquee researchers building robotics foundation models.
Daniela Rus
Director, MIT CSAIL
Director of MIT CSAIL, the largest research lab at MIT, and a world-leading roboticist advancing 'physical AI' and liquid neural networks. A frequent keynote at MIT's Imagination in Action and beyond.
Geoffrey Hinton
Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto
The 'godfather of AI', Turing Award laureate and Nobel laureate (Physics, 2024) whose work on backpropagation and deep learning underpins the field. A University of Toronto professor emeritus and prominent voice on AI risk; an Ai4 2026 keynote.
Nuria Oliver
Scientific Director & Co-Founder, ELLIS Alicante; VP, ELLIS
Co-founder and director of ELLIS Alicante, Europe's human-centric AI lab, and a vice-president of the ELLIS network; winner of Spain's 2025 National Research Award and a member of the international AI-safety panel. An AI for Good 2026 speaker.
Percy Liang
Professor of Computer Science & Director, CRFM, Stanford
Professor at Stanford (promoted from Associate Professor in 2026) and director of the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM), leading foundation-model transparency and evaluation (the HELM benchmark) and open science - a clean, safety-and-transparency-positive research leader.
Pieter Abbeel
Professor, UC Berkeley; leads Frontier AI & Robotics, Amazon
Professor at UC Berkeley, host of 'The Robot Brains' podcast, and a leader of frontier robotics and reinforcement learning who now leads Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics organization. A gifted explainer of physical AI.
Regina Barzilay
School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI & Health; AI Faculty Lead, MIT Jameel Clinic
AI Faculty Lead at MIT's Jameel Clinic and a MacArthur Fellow, a pioneer of AI for drug discovery and early cancer detection. A TIME100 AI honoree delivering the 2026 Leiter Lecture.
Sebastian Thrun
CEO, Dulo Technologies; Adjunct Professor, Stanford
CEO of Dulo Technologies and an adjunct professor at Stanford. Founder of Waymo (Google's self-driving project), Google X and Udacity - a pioneer of self-driving cars and AI education. An Ai4 2026 keynote speaker.
Yejin Choi
Professor, Stanford (MacArthur Fellow); Distinguished Scientist, NVIDIA
Professor at Stanford and a Distinguished Scientist at NVIDIA, a MacArthur Fellow and leader in commonsense reasoning and natural-language processing - one of the most cited researchers bridging language models and reasoning.
Arvind Jain
Founder & CEO, Glean
Founder and CEO of Glean, the enterprise AI platform valued at $7.2B. Previously co-founded Rubrik; a frequent enterprise-AI keynote speaker.
Barr Moses
Co-founder & CEO, Monte Carlo AI
Co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo, the agent trust platform, whose customers accelerate their AI transformation from piloting human-guided agents to deploying fully autonomous operations at enterprise scale. Backed by Accel, GGV Capital, ICONIQ Growth and Redpoint Ventures. A Databricks Data+AI Summit 2026 speaker.
Bret Taylor
Co-founder & CEO, Sierra
Co-founder and CEO of Sierra, the conversational-AI agent platform for customer experience, and chair of OpenAI's board. Previously co-CEO of Salesforce, CEO of Quip and CTO of Facebook - an elite operator-founder. A HumanX and Cerebral Valley 2026 speaker.
Cristóbal Valenzuela
Co-founder & co-CEO, Runway
Co-founder and co-CEO of Runway, the generative-AI video and world-model pioneer used across film and creative work, valued in the billions. One of the most prolific voices in creative AI.
Demi Guo
Co-founder & CEO, Pika
Co-founder and CEO of Pika, the fast-scaling generative-AI video platform for creators; a Forbes AI 50 company. A HumanX 2026 speaker and a prominent young woman founder in creative AI.
Eleanor Lightbody
CEO, Luminance
CEO of Luminance, the 'legal-grade' AI platform automating contract review, negotiation and analysis, which raised a major 2026 round. A Cerebral Valley London 2026 speaker and one of the most prominent women CEOs in enterprise AI.
Eléonore Crespo
Co-founder & co-CEO, Pigment
Co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment, the AI-native enterprise business-planning and forecasting platform (a European unicorn). A HumanX 2026 speaker.
Jennifer Smith
Co-founder & CEO, Scribe
Co-founder and CEO of Scribe, the Specialized Intelligence platform trusted by over 7 million people and 94% of the Fortune 500 - capturing how work gets done and turning it into the firm's own compounding IP. Previously at McKinsey and Greylock; a HumanX 2026 speaker.
Jesse Zhang
Co-founder & CEO, Decagon
Co-founder and CEO of Decagon, the AI customer-service 'concierge' agent platform whose ARR tripled into a multibillion-dollar valuation. A Cerebral Valley 2026 speaker and a leading name in enterprise agents.
Lin Qiao
Co-founder & CEO, Fireworks
Co-founder and CEO of Fireworks, the platform for specialized intelligence enabling companies like Uber and Shopify to train and serve custom models. Before founding Fireworks, she was the co-creator and head of Meta's PyTorch.
Mati Staniszewski
Co-founder & CEO, ElevenLabs
Co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, the category-leading AI voice and voice-agent platform, valued in the billions. A Web Summit Doha 2026 keynote speaker who also runs the ElevenLabs summit series.
May Habib
Co-founder & CEO, Writer
Co-founder and CEO of Writer, the full-stack enterprise generative-AI platform (models plus agents) used by large enterprises. A repeat founder and one of the most prominent women building enterprise AI; a HumanX 2026 speaker.
Michael Truell
Co-founder & CEO, Anysphere (Cursor)
Co-founder and CEO of Anysphere, maker of Cursor - the AI-native code editor that became one of the fastest-growing developer tools in the category and a landmark revenue story. A defining figure of the agentic-coding wave.
Minna Song
Founder & CEO, EliseAI
Founder and CEO of EliseAI, the conversational-AI platform automating leasing and resident operations in housing and now expanding into healthcare, with ~$100M ARR and a $2.2B+ valuation. A 2026 CNBC Changemaker.
Navrina Singh
Founder & CEO, Credo AI
Founder and CEO of Credo AI, the enterprise AI-governance platform. A WEF Young Global Leader; a HumanX 2026 and WEF Davos 2026 speaker on AI trust and guardrails.
Pelonomi Moiloa
Co-founder & CEO, Lelapa AI
Co-founder and CEO of Lelapa AI, building Africa's multilingual LLMs (InkubaLM) for low-resource languages - a TIME100 AI honoree and a leading voice for inclusive, Global-South AI. Speaks at MWC Kigali, TED AI and AI for Good.
Scott Wu
Co-founder & CEO, Cognition (Devin)
Co-founder and CEO of Cognition, maker of Devin, the autonomous AI software engineer that defined the agentic-coding category, and now steward of Windsurf. A competitive-programming prodigy; among the most-watched founders of 2026.
Shiv Rao
Co-founder & CEO, Abridge
Co-founder and CEO of Abridge, the ambient clinical-AI leader that drafts medical documentation from patient conversations, deployed across major health systems. A physician-founder; a Cerebral Valley Voice 2026 keynote speaker.
Vipul Ved Prakash
Co-founder & CEO, Together AI
Co-founder and CEO of Together AI, the GPU and inference cloud for building and running generative AI, valued in the billions. A serial founder; a HumanX 2026 and Milken 2026 speaker.
Winston Weinberg
Co-founder & CEO, Harvey
Co-founder and CEO of Harvey, the domain-specific AI for legal and professional services that scaled into 75% of the Am Law 100, reached a multibillion-dollar valuation, and emerged as the breakout vertical-AI company.
Ali Ghodsi
Co-founder & CEO, Databricks
Co-founder and CEO of Databricks, the data-and-AI platform (Mosaic AI, Agent Bricks) used across the enterprise. A former UC Berkeley adjunct professor and co-creator of Apache Spark; a HumanX 2026 and Data+AI Summit keynote voice.
Amar Subramanya
Vice President of AI, Apple
Vice President of AI at Apple, leading its AI organization after the 2026 leadership reorg under Craig Federighi. Joined from Microsoft after 16 years at Google, where he led engineering for Gemini and previously Google Assistant; brings Apple's on-device, privacy-first AI perspective to the list.
Clara Shih
Founder & Exec. Director, New Work Foundation; Senior Advisor, Meta
Senior Advisor at Meta, where she previously served as VP and Head of Business AI building AI agents for the 200M+ businesses across Meta's platforms. Founder of Hearsay Systems, former CEO of Salesforce AI, and now Founder and Executive Director of the New Work Foundation, focused on preparing workers for an AI-driven economy. A HumanX 2026 speaker.
Fidji Simo
CEO, AGI Deployment, OpenAI
CEO of AGI Deployment at OpenAI, having previously served as CEO of Applications, where she ran product, consumer and business operations including ChatGPT. Earlier CEO of Instacart, which she took public, and a Meta executive. One of the most powerful women operators in AI.
Jensen Huang
Founder & CEO, NVIDIA
Founder and CEO of NVIDIA and the compute kingmaker of the AI era: NVIDIA's GPUs and CUDA stack underpin essentially all frontier training. His GTC keynotes function as industry state-of-the-unions; among the most consequential executives in technology.
Jonathan Ross
Chief Software Architect, NVIDIA
Chief Software Architect at NVIDIA. Previously founded and led Groq, where he pioneered LPU-based AI inference hardware, and earlier invented Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) - one of the AI industry's most influential infrastructure architects, shaping next-generation AI compute and inference.
Kari Briski
VP Generative AI Software for Enterprise, NVIDIA
VP of Generative AI Software at NVIDIA, shipping the enterprise agentic-AI developer stack (NIM microservices, NeMo). A hands-on platform leader who hosts frontier-model sessions at GTC; named to Fast Company's AI 20.
Kevin Scott
CTO & EVP of AI, Microsoft
CTO and EVP of AI at Microsoft, architect of the Microsoft - OpenAI partnership and owner of Microsoft's company-wide AI platform strategy. Author and podcast host focused on inclusive, opportunity-widening AI; a regular Microsoft Build voice.
Koray Kavukcuoglu
Chief AI Architect Google / CTO GDM, Google / DeepMind
Chief AI Architect at Google and CTO of Google DeepMind, the technical architect behind Gemini. Promoted to a Google-wide AI-architecture role; a core builder of the systems powering Google's models.
Lila Ibrahim
Chief AI Readiness Officer, Google DeepMind
Chief AI Readiness Officer of Google DeepMind - a newly created role she moved into full-time in January 2026 after nearly eight years as COO - and the lab's public bridge on preparing society for frontier AI. TIME100 AI honoree; a frequent speaker at London Tech Week, Aspen and the WEF.
Lisa Su
Chair & CEO, AMD
Chair and CEO of AMD, which she rebuilt into a genuine challenger in AI accelerators; TIME's CEO of the Year. An electrical engineer by training and one of the most admired operators in semiconductors, headlining CES 2026.
Matt Garman
CEO, Amazon Web Services
CEO of Amazon Web Services, the cloud backbone of enterprise AI through Bedrock, SageMaker and the Trainium/Inferentia chips. A long-time AWS leader who ran its compute business before taking the top job; a HumanX 2026 speaker.
Sarah Bird
Chief Product Officer Responsible AI, Microsoft
Chief Product Officer of Responsible AI at Microsoft, owning responsible-AI product across Copilot and Azure. Founded Microsoft's FATE (fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics) research group; one of the most credible practitioner voices bridging safety and shipping product.
Silvio Savarese
EVP & Chief Scientist, Salesforce AI
EVP and Chief Scientist of Salesforce AI, leading the research behind Agentforce. A Stanford professor known for foundational computer-vision work; also serves on the UN's Independent Scientific Panel on AI.
Swami Sivasubramanian
VP Agentic AI, AWS
VP of Agentic AI at AWS, leading the agent portfolio around Amazon Bedrock. A long-time AWS machine-learning leader (ex-head of AI/ML services) and a fixture on the re:Invent keynote stage; named to Fast Company's AI 20.
Athina Kanioura
CEO, Latin America Foods & EVP, Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer, PepsiCo
EVP and Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer of PepsiCo (and CEO of its Latin America Foods unit), driving the company's AI-augmented operating model. Previously Accenture's Chief Analytics Officer; a Davos 2026 speaker.
Barak Turovsky
EVP & Head of Consumer AI, Paramount
EVP and Head of Consumer AI at Paramount, leading AI across the media company's consumer products and experiences. Previously Chief AI Officer at General Motors and a Google product leader (Google Translate); a bridge between consumer-AI craft and large-scale enterprise deployment.
Berta Rodriguez-Hervas
Senior Vice President, Enterprise AI Platforms, American Express
Senior Vice President, Enterprise AI Platforms at American Express. Previously Chief AI & Analytics Officer at Pfizer, where she led enterprise AI and analytics and co-chaired the company's AI Council. Recognized for driving AI adoption at scale across highly regulated industries, from healthcare to financial services.
Bhavesh Dayalji
CEO, Kensho Technologies; Chief AI Officer, S&P Global
CEO of Kensho Technologies and Chief AI Officer of S&P Global, driving AI and machine learning across the company's market-data and intelligence business. A HumanX 2026 speaker in both San Francisco and Amsterdam.
Daniel Danker
EVP AI Acceleration Product & Design, Walmart
EVP of AI Acceleration, Product and Design for Walmart. In this role, Daniel accelerates the company's AI transformation and leads all product management and design across the enterprise.
Diana Schildhouse
Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Colgate-Palmolive
Chief Data and Analytics Officer of Colgate-Palmolive, deploying AI across a global consumer-goods portfolio - R&D, supply chain and marketing. A World Summit AI 2026 speaker.
Greg Ulrich
Chief AI & Data Officer, Mastercard
Chief AI and Data Officer of Mastercard, leading AI across the payments network - fraud defense, Decision Intelligence and the Shopping Muse agent. A veteran Mastercard data leader and frequent payments-AI speaker.
Helena Fu
Director, Office of Critical & Emerging Technologies; Deputy Chief AI Officer, US Dept of Energy
Director of the US Department of Energy's Office of Critical and Emerging Technologies and its Deputy Chief AI Officer, coordinating AI across the DOE's 17 national laboratories - one of the most consequential public-sector AI mandates in the US.
Jane Moran
Chief Information & Digital Officer, Mass General Brigham
Chief Information and Digital Officer of Mass General Brigham, embedding AI safely across the clinical and operational core of a leading academic health system. A HIMSS 2026 AI-forum speaker.
Jeff McMillan
Founder & AI Advisor, McMillanAI
Founder of McMillanAI and former Head of Firmwide AI at Morgan Stanley, where he built one of the financial industry's pioneering OpenAI-powered assistants for wealth management. He now advises boards, CEOs, investors and enterprises on AI strategy, governance and executive AI adoption.
John Roese
Global CTO & Chief AI Officer, Dell Technologies
Global CTO and Chief AI Officer of Dell Technologies, steering both Dell's AI-infrastructure strategy and its internal AI adoption. A widely quoted enterprise-AI voice and Dell Technologies World keynote regular.
Katrin Lehmann
Chief Information Officer, Mercedes-Benz
Chief Information Officer of Mercedes-Benz, leading enterprise AI across a global automaker - from engineering to manufacturing to the in-car experience. A HumanX 2026 speaker.
Kristin Milchanowski
Chief AI & Quantum Officer, BMO Financial Group
Chief AI and Quantum Officer of BMO Financial Group, running AI, data and quantum for one of North America's largest banks and founding director of its applied-AI institute. Author of 'Return on Intelligence'; a 2026 fintech-conference speaker.
Lan Guan
Chief AI & Data Officer, Accenture
Chief AI and Data Officer of Accenture, leading roughly 80,000 AI and data professionals and steering a multibillion-dollar AI investment. Accenture's public face on enterprise AI and part of its WEF Davos 2026 delegation.
Marco Argenti
CIO, Goldman Sachs
Chief Information Officer of Goldman Sachs and its firm-wide AI lead, behind the GS AI Assistant and the bank's generative-AI rollout. A former Amazon and Uber technology executive; a frequent enterprise-AI keynote voice.
Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov
Chief AI Officer, eBay
Chief AI Officer of eBay, leading marketplace-scale AI across discovery, trust and seller tools. A World Summit AI 2026 and Chief AI Officer Summit NY speaker.
Philipp Herzig
CTO & Chief Product Officer, Business AI, SAP
Chief Technology Officer of SAP - promoted from Chief AI Officer, a role he held through 2025 - continuing to embed AI (the Joule copilot and 400+ embedded use cases) across the ERP backbone that runs much of the global economy. A frequent SAP Sapphire and enterprise-AI keynote voice.
Philippe Rambach
Chief AI Officer, Schneider Electric
Chief AI Officer of Schneider Electric, deploying AI across energy management and industrial operations with a sustainability-forward focus - the rare enterprise CAIO whose mandate ties AI directly to decarbonization. A World Summit AI 2026 speaker.
Teresa Heitsenrether
Chief Data & Analytics Officer, JPMorganChase
Chief Data and Analytics Officer of JPMorgan Chase, where she rolled out the firm-wide LLM Suite to 200,000+ employees and sits on the Operating Committee - the gold-standard 'AI inside a regulated bank' story.
Xavier Amatriain
Chief AI & Data Officer, Expedia Group
Chief AI and Data Officer of Expedia Group, leading consumer-scale applied AI across travel. A prolific writer and speaker on recommender systems and applied ML; a World Summit AI 2026 speaker.
Aidan Gomez
Co-founder & CEO, Cohere
Co-founder and CEO of Cohere, the enterprise-focused LLM company, and a co-author of the original 'Attention Is All You Need' transformer paper as a Google Brain intern. Pairs foundational research credibility with an enterprise, data-privacy-first product focus.
Aravind Srinivas
Co-founder & CEO, Perplexity
Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, the AI 'answer engine' that reframed search around cited, conversational responses and scaled to a multibillion-dollar valuation. Ex-OpenAI/DeepMind researcher and one of the most prolific founder-communicators in AI.
Arthur Mensch
Co-founder & CEO, Mistral AI
Co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, Europe's flagship frontier lab, which he built into the continent's answer to the US labs with a strong open-weight and sovereign-AI stance. Ex-DeepMind researcher; a fixture at VivaTech, HumanX and Davos and a leading European voice on AI policy.
Daniela Amodei
President & co-founder, Anthropic
President and co-founder of Anthropic, running the company's operations, strategy and scaling alongside CEO Dario Amodei. Ex-Stripe and OpenAI (former VP of Safety and Policy); one of the most influential women operators in frontier AI and a keynote voice on responsible scaling.
Dario Amodei
CEO & co-founder, Anthropic
Co-founded Anthropic in 2021 after leading GPT-2/GPT-3 work as OpenAI's VP of Research, and built it into a top-three frontier lab behind the Claude models. The most credible public voice arguing that safety and capability must scale together; his essays and Davos appearances shape the policy conversation.
Demis Hassabis
CEO & co-founder, Google DeepMind
Nobel laureate (Chemistry, 2024, for AlphaFold) and co-founder/CEO of Google DeepMind, which he now runs as Google's unified AI engine behind Gemini. A chess prodigy turned neuroscientist turned lab director overseeing several thousand researchers; the field's most decorated scientific leader.
Fei-Fei Li
Co-founder & CEO, World Labs
The 'godmother of AI': created ImageNet, which catalyzed the deep-learning revolution, and founded AI4ALL to widen the field. Now co-founder/CEO of World Labs, building 'spatial intelligence' world models, and Special Advisor on AI to the Stanford president following the May 2026 restructuring of Stanford HAI, which she previously co-directed. A marquee keynote at HumanX, Ai4 and CES.
Greg Brockman
President & co-founder, OpenAI
President and co-founder of OpenAI, the company's technical and infrastructure anchor from the earliest days. A relentless builder who demos flagship launches himself; central to OpenAI's scaling, compute strategy and developer platform.
Ilya Sutskever
CEO & co-founder, Safe Superintelligence (SSI)
Co-founder and CEO of Safe Superintelligence (SSI). As OpenAI's co-founder and chief scientist he was behind many of its core breakthroughs; a co-inventor of AlexNet, one of deep learning's founding results. Rarely speaks publicly, which makes his appearances high-signal.
Jakub Pachocki
Chief Scientist, OpenAI
Chief Scientist of OpenAI, leading its reasoning-model research after succeeding Ilya Sutskever. A quieter, deeply technical leader increasingly stepping into public view as OpenAI's scientific direction becomes a story in itself.
Joelle Pineau
Chief AI Officer, Cohere
Chief AI Officer of Cohere and one of the most respected research leaders in the field. Previously ran Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab; a McGill professor and Mila member known for championing reproducibility. Now leads Cohere's research and Cohere Labs.
Mira Murati
Founder & CEO, Thinking Machines Lab
Founder and CEO of Thinking Machines Lab, the frontier lab she launched in 2025 after serving as OpenAI's CTO, where she led ChatGPT, GPT-4, DALL·E and Sora. One of the most closely watched founders in AI; a rare and selective public speaker whose lab drew one of the largest seed rounds on record.
Sam Altman
CEO & co-founder, OpenAI
The defining public face of the generative-AI era. Co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and, as CEO, shipped ChatGPT and the GPT model line that moved AI into the mainstream. Former President of Y Combinator; a prolific fundraiser who continues to lead OpenAI's commercial evolution. Sets the industry's agenda from Davos to Congress.
Sara Hooker
Co-founder & CEO, Adaption Labs
Co-founder and CEO of Adaption Labs, building models that learn efficiently and adapt on the fly. Previously built and led Cohere For AI (Cohere Labs); a leading voice on model efficiency, the 'hardware lottery' and compute-threshold policy, and a frequent research-and-policy speaker.
Chief in AI 100 (2026)
Chief in AI 100 (2026) - the AI power list that's 50% women
The 100 executives most shaping how AI actually gets built and deployed - from frontier-lab founders to Fortune 500 Chief AI Officers. Exactly 50 women and 50 men, across seven categories and 24 countries of origin.
How the List Is Made
Every honoree clears three gates: a top-level AI leadership role, demonstrable influence on how AI gets built or deployed, and active presence on the 2026 conference circuit. The 50/50 gender balance is structural, not cosmetic - achieved by widening the aperture across geographies and functions, not by lowering the bar. The list is editorially independent: placement is not for sale and honorees are not required to speak at AI Builders Network events.
How to Qualify for the Chief in AI 100
The three editorial gates every Chief in AI 100 honoree must clear.
Hold a top-level AI leadership role
The candidate holds a top-level AI leadership role: founder, CEO, Chief AI Officer, chief scientist, head of AI, or general partner.
Demonstrate influence on how AI gets built or deployed
The candidate has demonstrable influence on how AI gets built or deployed - through deployment at scale, category leadership, foundational research work, or genuine policy authority.
Be active on the 2026 conference circuit
The candidate is active on the 2026 conference stage, from HumanX and World Summit AI to Davos and GTC.
AI Builders Global Conference 2026
Day one is the Chief in AI Summit covering AI strategy, industries, engineering and governance. Day two, the Startups & Investors Summit, turns to funding and scaling. 200 sessions across 8 tracks, 12,000 builders, tech leaders and operators from 130 countries.
What is the Chief in AI 100?
The Chief in AI 100 (2026 edition) is a power list of the 100 executives most shaping how AI actually gets built and deployed, from frontier-lab founders to Fortune 500 Chief AI Officers, produced by AI Builders Network and Chief in AI.
How many honorees are in the Chief in AI 100?
There are exactly 100 honorees on the 2026 list.
What is the gender balance of the Chief in AI 100?
The list is exactly 50 women and 50 men.
How many categories does the Chief in AI 100 span?
The list spans seven categories: AI Governance Policy & Responsible AI, AI Investors, AI Research & Academic Leaders, AI Startup Founders & CEOs, Big Tech AI Leadership, Enterprise Chief AI Officers, and Frontier & Foundation Models.
How many countries of origin are represented in the Chief in AI 100?
Honorees represent 24 countries of origin.
What are the three recognition tiers on the Chief in AI 100?
Each honoree is tagged Icon, Anchor, or Builder, denoting field-shaping figures, established high-influence leaders, and hands-on operators/technical leaders respectively.
What criteria must an honoree meet to appear on the Chief in AI 100?
Every honoree clears three gates: a top-level AI leadership role, demonstrable influence on how AI gets built or deployed, and active presence on the 2026 conference circuit.
Is placement on the Chief in AI 100 for sale?
No. The list is editorially independent - placement is not for sale, sponsors cannot buy a spot, and honorees are not required to speak at AI Builders Network events.
Why is the Chief in AI 100 exactly 50% women?
Because executive-tier AI leadership skews male, the editors widened the aperture across more geographies and gave full weight to enterprise, policy, and research leaders who actually run AI in the world, rather than lowering the bar for anyone - every woman on the list clears the same three gates as every man.
How many honorees are in the AI Startup Founders & CEOs category?
The AI Startup Founders & CEOs category has 20 honorees, the largest category on the list alongside Enterprise Chief AI Officers.
How many honorees are in the Frontier & Foundation Models category?
The Frontier & Foundation Models category has 14 honorees.
What is the AI Builders Global Conference 2026?
It is a two-day conference (October 14-15, 2026, virtual) whose day one, the Chief in AI Summit, covers the same ground as this list - AI strategy, industries, engineering and governance - while day two, the Startups & Investors Summit, covers funding and scaling.
Which Chief in AI 100 honorees are confirmed to speak at the AI Builders Global Conference 2026?
Barr Moses, Dr. Rumman Chowdhury and Sebastian Thrun are confirmed to speak, with more honorees to be announced.
How can someone nominate a Chief in AI leader for the 2027 edition?
Nominations for the 2027 edition open after the current year's list publishes; people can nominate leaders directly on the AI Builders Network site, especially leaders that usual lists overlook.
Who runs Anthropic, according to the Chief in AI 100?
Dario Amodei is CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, and Daniela Amodei is President and co-founder, both listed in the Frontier & Foundation Models category.
Chief in AI 100 FAQ
Chief in AI 100
An annual power list from AI Builders Network and Chief in AI naming the 100 executives most shaping how AI gets built and deployed, balanced 50/50 between women and men.
The top Chief in AI 100 recognition tier, denoting a defining, field-shaping figure in AI.
A Chief in AI 100 recognition tier denoting an established, high-influence AI leader.
A Chief in AI 100 recognition tier denoting a hands-on operator or technical leader driving AI execution.
A Chief in AI 100 category covering executives and public-interest leaders shaping AI governance, safety policy and responsible-AI practice.
A Chief in AI 100 category covering venture investors whose capital and theses shape which AI companies scale.
A Chief in AI 100 category covering university and lab researchers advancing the scientific foundations of AI.
A Chief in AI 100 category covering founders and CEOs building category-defining AI-native startups.
A Chief in AI 100 category covering executives leading AI strategy and engineering inside the largest technology companies.
A Chief in AI 100 category covering Chief AI Officers and equivalent enterprise leaders deploying AI at scale inside large, often regulated, companies.
A Chief in AI 100 category covering founders and scientists building the frontier foundation-model labs.
Chief AI Officer (CAIO)
An enterprise executive role, distinct from CTO/CIO, with explicit accountability for an organization's AI strategy, governance and deployment.
Chief in AI 100 Glossary
kg-generator skill
Claude Code skill that generates comprehensive RDF Knowledge Graphs from web content using curated prompt templates.