Here Are the 41 Most Disruptive Leaders in the Artificial Intelligence Industry

In the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, tech leaders have pioneered technology that was once considered science fiction. From developing large language models that power generative platforms to creating computer vision and AI agents, these visionaries are revolutionizing how we interact with technology, leading their teams to drive innovation across the industry — and beyond.

Meet the AI visionaries redefining the future. These trailblazing CTOs and tech leaders aren’t just shaping the industry today; they’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible tomorrow. 

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Top Leaders in the Artificial Intelligence Industry

Tony Stoyanov co-founded EliseAI in 2017 alongside Minna Song. Today, the company partners with some of the largest property management companies in the United States. Under Stoyanov’s leadership as CTO, the company developed an automation platform that can engage in conversations with customers about housing and healthcare via email, text or phone. According to EliseAI, the company aims to provide 24/7 customer service while also delivering bottom-line improvements to clients. EliseAI says AI will be key to achieving that goal.

 

Tim Armandpour is the CTO of Pager Duty, a tech company that embeds AI within its cloud platform for operations. At the company, Armandpour leads the long-term strategy for the Operations Cloud, which currently uses AI to help companies automate manual tasks like customer support and cloud infrastructure monitoring. Before his time at Pager Duty, Armandpour held senior engineering roles at PayPal and Yapstone.

 

Flexport is a logistics company focusing on supply chain management and the various intricate tasks of moving cargo, including customs, insurance and trade financing. In 2025, the company’s CEO, Ryan Petersen, announced a bevy of new AI products, many of which may significantly impact the logistics industry. For example, the company has released several products using OpenAI and Anthropic models that facilitate real-time visibility and shipment information. Despite these new products, Flexport also has a number of additional AI releases slated for later this year.

 

Eddie Thomas joined Metropolis in 2018 and, since then, has helped the company implement real-world AI solutions. One of its most popular technologies is its Orion platform, which uses camera systems and computer vision to provide a no-payment experience at parking garages. Using a Metropolis managed facility, users can simply drive in and after linking a payment method, will be charged for the duration of their stay. Making the platform even more impressive is its ability to adapt to new environments and scenarios using the data captured across thousands of managed locations.

 

Lowe’s Companies, Inc. is a Fortune 50 home improvement company serving approximately 16 million customer transactions a week and employing approximately 300,000 associates. Its technology development is based in Charlotte, NC, with additional associates and partners around the world. Senior Vice President, Data, Artificial Intelligence and Innovation, Chandhu Nair leads Lowe’s AI transformation and products as well as Lowe’s Innovation Labs, which focuses on emerging technologies and technology investments. Nair’s teams have established Lowe’s as a top retail technology company, with many first-to-market innovations including the recent rollout of Mylow, the home improvement industry’s first AI-powered virtual advisor. Other key innovations include the industry’s first Apple Vision Pro-powered app and first in-store Apple Vision Pro experience; and the retail industry’s first interactive store digital twin.

 

Ryan Toohil is a veteran software engineer who holds multiple patents for web-based technologies and is the current CTO of Aura. Aura is an identity protection and cybersecurity platform that uses artificial intelligence to protect users. The company uses its innovative technology to automate personal threat detection, dark-web monitoring and phishing scam detection. Additionally, it uses a generative model to provide users with personalized security alerts and recommendations.

 

Unlikely AI is a deep tech startup that aims to solve some of the most significant problems of artificial intelligence, including generative hallucination and model oversight. Before joining, CTO Tom Mason held a similar position at Stability AI, a popular generative AI model that produces images, video and audio from text inputs. At Unlikely AI, Mason is helping eliminate AI hallucinations by integrating symbolic logic into large language models, or LLMs. According to the company, this additional step converts user inputs into a structured format and ensures all information is supported with faceted and structured logic before the generation stage. 

 

Matei Zaharia is one of the most experienced CTOs currently working in tech. Although he currently leads tech development at Databricks, Zaharia launched the Apache Software Foundation and has lectured at MIT and UC Berkeley. At Databricks, he’s been integral to expanding the company’s data intelligence platform, which makes it easier for companies to build AI applications by providing interconnected and collaborative workspaces to gather and analyze data from various internal sources.

 

Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor founded Sierra in 2023 after stints at Salesforce and Google, respectively. Together, they built an enterprise conversational AI platform to handle and resolve customer issues and queries. The platform has several advanced features, which AI agents can use to deliver customer and technical support. Moreover, Sierra’s AI platform has built-in guardrails that aim to prevent hallucinations and faulty responses.

 

Landing AI works to make computer vision accessible to companies without dedicated artificial intelligence teams. Through its LandingLens software, the company helps users analyze visual data such as images, videos, text or metadata, and with specialized tools enables businesses to develop their own computer vision systems. Daniel Bibireata is Landing AI’s current VP of Engineering and has helped further advance the platform across automotive and life sciences industries by creating AI agents to automate manufacturing inspection and diagnosis detection based on X-ray images.

 

Damandeep Kochhar joined HERE Technologies in 2015 and leads the organization’s engineering operations and the development of its automated mapping systems. The company recently launched new AI products that add value for transportation companies. For example, this year, HERE rolled out an AI-powered guidance assistant that uses multiple LLMs to provide EV routing, complex travel requests and personalized routes for transport companies.

 

Gong is a popular SaaS product used by sales teams, and it recently introduced proprietary AI tools to bolster its software. With AI features, the platform collects data from phone and video calls to support revenue organizations and automate analytics tasks that can drive productivity and predictability. Eilon Reshef, Gong’s co-founder and chief product officer, leads the company’s engineering efforts. He has founded tech companies and acted as a mentor and tech investor, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

 

Shane Colley is a tech leader at Tempus AI, one of the breakout AI companies of 2024. As the company’s CTO, Colley has seen the advancement of its AI-powered precision medicine platform. According to the company, Tempus can help healthcare providers make data-informed decisions, identify care gaps and analyze real-world medical data through its various solutions.

 

Qualtrics is a popular solution for companies looking to elevate their experience management solutions. It’s created tools to survey customers and employees and gather market research. With the addition of Gurdeep Pall in 2024, the company looks to advance AI capabilities across its platform. Though the company still facilitates customer and employee feedback, its new tech now augments that information with generated summaries, automated support tickets and actionable recommendations based on feedback and data trends.

 

Waseem Alshikh is the co-founder and CTO of Writer, a generative AI platform that creates written content based on text prompts. AlShikh and cofounder May Habib are early adopters of AI, having launched their first deep tech startup in 2013. With Writer, which the pair launched in 2020, they developed the Palmyra AI model. Palmyra boasts unique features like image and video recognition as well as multilingual support. The kicker here is that Writer spent only a fraction of what their competitors — like OpenAI and Anthropic — invested in training their own models.

 

Lu Cheng is the co-founder and CTO of Zip, a procurement and payment platform that recently secured a multimillion-dollar funding round at a $2.2 billion valuation. At ZIP, Cheng has overseen the development of the company’s procurement orchestration platform and ZIP AI, a virtual assistant that can extract data from documents, analyze contracts for risk and consolidate redundant vendors. Before Zip, Cheng held engineering roles at Airbnb, Pinterest and VMWare.

 

Samir Menon founded robotics company Dexterity in 2017 and is pioneering physical AI. Its robotic systems use a computer vision system and several AI agents to carry out human-like tasks, including truck loading and unloading, package sortation and pallet organization. According to Dexityty, its unique use of AI agents enables it to train robotic systems for any skill and any application.

 

Founded in 2021, Read AI is an AI copilot that helps working professionals by generating summaries and transcripts for meetings, emails and messages. In the past couple of years, it has become one of the fastest-growing AI companies, expanding its users by 730 percent, according to Rob Williams, the company’s cofounder and CTO. With a lean workforce based in Seattle, the company built its AI using AWS’ Graviation Processors, which enabled it to create integrations for some of the most used email clients and meeting platforms.

 

Insurance agencies use Liberate’s SaaS AI platform to automate claim management and provide personalized customer experiences with generated voice interactions. Under Ryan Eldridge’s leadership as a co-founder and CTO, the platform offers customizable AI agents that can be used for real-time voice interaction with customers. According to Liberate, its AI agents are capable of understanding nuances and context, making them useful for nearly 80 percent of customer queries.

 

Lee Seung-jun is one of the top CTOs working on image and video generation. He currently holds several patents covering topics such as AI training using adaptive thresholding and keyframe detection. In 2020, Seung-jun helped launch Twelve Labs, which provides an AI video platform that helps businesses analyze video content for moderation and editing purposes. 

Prior to launching Hightouch, Josh Curl and the rest of the founding team spent years honing their engineering skills at various tech companies. In 2019, Curl created an open-source product to manage and monitor IoT devices and edge servers remotely. Hightouch uses AI to create custom customer journeys and convert browsers into shoppers by displaying actionable content based on captured data.

 

In 2020, Eliot Horowitz founded Viam, but before his latest venture, he founded MongoDB, one of the most influential database management platforms that also popularized NoSQL storage methods. Viam’s engineering platform uses AI to gather data from the physical world. Users can connect electronic devices such as security cameras, sensors and actuators to Viam’s cloud, which runs the captured data through an AI model and allows users to manage their devices and deploy new software and updates.

 

Robin AI is a London-based startup that uses machine learning to analyze legal contracts and facilitate negotiation. In early 2025, Robin AI appointed Tramale Turner as its CTO, who will oversee the development of new software products as the company pushes for an IPO. Turner has experience in several senior engineering and leadership roles at Nintendo, Stripe and most recently, ActionIQ. 

 

As AI becomes more popular, companies are increasingly looking to develop applications using the technology — and that’s where Snorkel AI comes in. Under the leadership of Alex Ratner, who holds a doctorate in computer science, the company built a platform that enables organizations leverage their data. With Snorkel AI, an organization can ingest and process data by labeling and creating synthetic data sets to fine-tune custom large language models and develop predictive models.

 

Before co-founding Sourcegraph, Beyang Liu had extensive experience in AI, having worked as a Stanford research assistant in computer vision algorithms. With his new company, Liu is helping organizations augment their engineering staff with AI. By utilizing AI agents, the Sourcegraph platform helps generate code and assists developers in optimizing their work through a chat interface that integrates with IDEs. 

 

Zachary Lipton is a professor of machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University and the CTO and Chief Scientist at Abridge. At Abridge, Lipton and the team use AI to improve doctor-patient communications. Medical providers and care networks use its platform to create transcripts and after-visit documentation following an appointment. According to Lipton, Abridge helps doctors free up their time and focus on patient treatment instead of mundane tasks.

 

Though recycling infrastructure is one of the most essential technologies in today’s world, it is also one of the most complex due to its reliance on individuals to pick and sort recyclable and non-recyclable items. To solve this issue, Matanya Horowitz and the team at AMP  developed an AI-powered recycling platform. As the company’s founder and CTO, Horowitz has helped create a smart sortation system that uses computer vision to process items quickly without human intervention.

 

Dmitriy Karpman co-founded Hive in 2017 and has since seen the company raise over $120 million from leading investors and expand its offices to 170+ employees in San Francisco and Delhi. Its platform helps companies process extensive data sets to train chatbots and other AI models to do work like content moderation, logo detection and much more.

 

Piotr Dabkowski is the co-founder and CTO of ElevenLabs, a tech unicorn that uses AI to generate audio content. Listed as one of Time Magazine’s “Most Influential People in AI” in 2024, Dabkowski and co-founder Mateusz Staniszewski built a model that creates audio in over 29 languages based on text inputs. ElevenLabs also released a model that detects whether an audio clip is AI-generated.

 

Sowmya Subramanian might be a recent addition to Quizlet, but her experience in the tech industry runs deep. Prior to becoming CTO at Quizlet, Subramanian held leadership positions at Warner Bros. Discovery and Google. Subramanian will help advance Quizlet’s AI capabilities, making learning more personalized to enable users to study in a more effective and delightful way to achieve their goals. There are also several AI/ML innovations under way that will aid creation, discovery, studying and games, to help every learner succeed.

 

Tracy Kerrins has held top technology positions at some of the world’s largest banks, and is currently the global chief information officer at Wells Fargo. Kerrin leads the generative AI team, which is using AI to help improve customer experiences.

 

Alteryx is a big data company using AI to enhance analytics and automation to help businesses make informed decisions. Its AI features can automate data processing by cleaning up duplicate and false information, and through its machine learning engines, users can create predictive models without much coding experience. DV Lamba joined Alteryx as its CTO three years ago and leads the company’s technology vision and strategy.

 

Ericsson is a Swedish telecommunications company under the tech leadership of Erik Ekudden. Ekudden helps the company stay ahead of technology trends and roll out 5G coverage and telecom AI services. The company uses reinforcement learning, a form of AI training, to analyze and optimize network performance. It also provides a generative chatbot to help clients manage their wireless networks.

 

Raj Neervannan is the CTO and co-founder of AlphaSense. For the past 16 years, Neervannan and company CEO Jack Kokko have developed a research platform for investors, but recently introduced an imaginative AI feature to elevate the platform further. With Enterprise Intelligence, customers can conduct secure searches, summaries and follow-up questions across their company’s proprietary internal data. According to AlphaSense, financial professionals at top institutions use its platform as a proven market intelligence partner.

 

ServiceNow is a Silicon Valley-based software company that offers an AI-powered platform to automate customers’ management workflows. Under Chris Bedi, the company’s former chief digital information officer and current chief customer officer, the company developed agentic AI capabilities. With the new platform, companies can unleash AI-powered agents across their applications, allowing them to create custom automations and unlock new productivity.

 

Satnam Alag has over 20 years of experience working in the machine learning space, and is part of the leadership team at GRAIL, which uses DNA sequencing and data science to analyze patients’ blood for early cancer detection.

 

Raji Arasu is the CTO of Autodesk, a large software development company known for developing computer-aided design, or CAD, tools for industries like manufacturing and entertainment. In 2023, the company released Autodesk AI and integrated AI-powered tools into various products. The tools, among other features, allow users to generate prototypes and predict construction risks.

 

General Motors has a long history of innovation when it comes to manufacturing cars and electric vehicles. Now, it’s focused on developing its AI technology. The company recently appointed Barak Turovsky, former VP of AI at Cisco, as its first Chief AI Officer. In the new role, Turovsky will lead the company’s AI roadmap and set the vision for everything from enterprise logistics to manufacturing.

 

Zeta Global’s marketing platform uses AI to turn company data into strategic insights. CTO and Head of Product Christian Monberg oversees the direction of product and technology at the company and has helped implement several AI features.

 

Antonio Nucci, who holds a doctorate in computer software engineering, is a Silicon Valley veteran with more than a dozen years spent working at major tech companies like Symantec, Boeing and Cisco. He joined RingCentral as Chief AI Officer in February, where he will use his vast experience in research and product development to implement AI capabilities into the company’s communication platform.

 

Matt Moore is the founder and CTO of Chainguard, a digital platform solving software supply chain security problems. The platform provides safe and efficient containers that safeguard the components needed when developing new software and AI applications. Additionally, with an AI model, the company can detect patterns and usual behavior that may cause security problems down the line. Moore brings over a decade of engineering experience from positions at VMware, Google and Microsoft.