Daphne Koller is CEO and Founder of insitro, a physical AI therapeutics company. Daphne is also co-founder of Engageli, was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years, the co-CEO and President of Coursera, and the Chief Computing Officer of Calico Labs. She is the author of over 300 refereed publications with an h-index of over 150. Daphne was recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2012 and 100 most influential people in AI in 2024. She received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004, the ACM Prize in Computing in 2008, the ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2019, and the AnitaB.org Technical Leadership Abie Award Winner in 2022. Daphne was inducted into the National Academy of Science in 2023, into the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 and elected a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2004, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014, and the International Society of ComputationalBiology in 2017.

Zico Kolter is a Professor and Department Head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Additionally, he serves on the Board of OpenAI, where he chairs the Safety and Security Committee, and the Board of Qualcomm. He is a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Gray Swan AI, an AI Security company, and an advisor to BNY. His work spans several topics in machine learning, including work in AI safety and robustness, LLM security, the impact of data on models, implicit models, and more. He is a recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award, a Sloan Fellowship, and best paper awards at NeurIPS, ICML (honorable mention), AISTATS (test of time), IJCAI, KDD, and PESGM.

Gary Marcus, scientist, bestselling author, and entrepreneur, was CEO and Founder of the machine-learning startup Geometric Intelligence, recently acquired by Uber, and is known for his provocative and bold claims in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Trained by Steven Pinker, he received his PhD at MIT at age 23. His professional research, published in leading journals such as Science, Nature, Cognition, and Artificial Intelligence, has focused on the foundations of cognition in humans, animals and machines, spanning fields from developmental psychology to neuroscience to genetics to artificial intelligence. A special interest has been on the challenge of endowing machines with common sense.

He is also well-known for his writing for the general public, including frequent essays and op-eds for The New Yorker and The New York Times. His books include The Algebraic Mind, The Birth of the Mind, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, The New York Times Bestseller, Guitar Zero and The Future of the Brain: Essays By The World’s Leading Neuroscientists.

In a 2012 essay for The New Yorker, he was perhaps the first person to publicly criticize deep learning, drawing on arguments he developed in his 2001 technical book The Algebraic Mind. More recently, in a 2018 arXiv article, Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal, he asked whether deep learning might be “approaching a wall.” The challenges he laid out there were covered everywhere from The
New York Times to Wired to The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.

In another provocative 2012 essay, Moral Machines, Marcus was the first to adapt “trolley problems” to driverless cars, anticipating much recent research on the ethics of AI. His next book, REBOOT: Getting to AI We Can Trust, to be published by Pantheon in Fall 2019, co-authored with Ernie Davis, calls for a fundamental rethinking of current approaches to artificial intelligence.

Prof Simon See is professor at a number of universities including Nanyang Tech Univ, Surrey Univ, SJTU and others. He is a distinguished fellow in Fudan and ASTAR CIFAR. Prof See has published 200+ papers in AI, Applied Mathematics and High Performance Computing. Simon is also the Global Head of Nvidia AI Technology Centres.

Mark Papermaster is chief technology officer and executive vice president at AMD, responsible for driving the company’s end-to-end technology vision, strategy and product roadmap. He led the redesign of engineering processes at AMD and helped drive development of the “Zen” high-performance x86 CPU family, high-performance GPUs, and AMD’s modular design approach and Infinity Architecture.

With more than 40 years of engineering leadership, Papermaster has held senior roles at Cisco, Apple and IBM, spanning products from microprocessors to mobile devices and high-performance servers. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025 and was appointed to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science Advisory Committee in 2026. Papermaster holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and an M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Vermont.

Harrison is the CEO and co-founder of LangChain, which provides the agent engineering platform and open source frameworks developers need to ship reliable agents fast. Prior to starting LangChain, he led the ML team at Robust Intelligence (an MLOps company focused on testing and validation of machine learning models), led the entity linking team at Kensho (a fintech startup), and studied stats and CS at Harvard.

Audrey Tang, the Right Livelihood Award Winner, is Taiwan’s Cyber ​​Ambassador and served as Taiwan’s 1st digital minister and the world’s 1st nonbinary cabinet minister (2016-2024).

As a child, Tang practiced Taoism to moderate all strong emotions to survive a cardiac condition. After attending 10 educational institutions in 10 years, she left formal schooling to pursue self-education at age 14. In her 20s, Tang rose to prominence as a leader in free and open-source software, revitalizing the Haskell and Perl programming languages.

During her 30s, Tang played a crucial role in shaping g0v (gov-zero), one of the most prominent civic tech movements worldwide. In 2014, she helped broadcast the demands of Sunflower Movement activists and worked to resolve conflicts during a three-week occupation of Taiwan’s Legislature. Tang became a reverse mentor to the minister in charge of digital participation, before holding the role in 2016.

Tang helped develop participatory democracy platforms such as vTaiwan and Join, bringing civic innovation into the public sector through initiatives like the Presidential Hackathon and Ideathon.

Other accomplishments for Tang include shaping Taiwan’s internationally acclaimed COVID-19 response and safeguarding the country’s 2024 presidential and legislative elections from cyber interference.

Bernardo Correia is the Portuguese Secretary of State for Digitalisation, of the XXV Government of the Portuguese Republic, in the Ministry of State Reform. With a degree in Economics from Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, he was 17 years at Google, nine of them as Country Director in Portugal, and previously, for more than a decade, held international leadership roles at Google and Unilever in the United Kingdom. He also chaired the Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity Commission of the American Chamber of Commerce in Portugal (AmCham) and was a member of the board of APDC (Portuguese Communications Association).
Since he was appointed, the Government has approved a National Digital Strategy, a National Agenda for Artificial Intelligence, a Digital Skills Pact, a National Sovereign Cloud Plan and a National Data Centre Plan, together representing a €1 billion investment in the country’s digital capacity.). Over the same period, Portugal became the first EU Member State to launch a Digital Business Wallet, and presented AMALIA, the first large-scale language model developed entirely in Portugal and in European Portuguese.

Prabhu Narasimhan is the Founder & CEO of BRAHMA AI, where he is redefining how enterprises manage, create and distribute photoreal content at scale. BRAHMA AI is built on an uncompromising foundation of ethics, security, and compliance. A disruptor with a disciplined edge, Prabhu brings together three worlds rarely found in one leader: law, investment, and technology. He began his career as a corporate attorney and law firm partner at White & Case and Baker McKenzie advising global businesses and investment firms on complex, multi-billion-dollar transactions. That legal grounding instilled in him a lifelong respect for structure, governance, and integrity, values that underpin his approach to responsible AI innovation. As the founder of Novator Capital and Nama Capital, Prabhu has invested in and supported disruptive companies across technology, media, and fintech. His background as both investor and operator gives him a unique ability to identify transformative ideas early, scale them intelligently, and balance creativity with commercial clarity. At BRAHMA AI, he channels this blend of commercial acumen, financial discipline, and technological insight to build a company that is setting the benchmark for enterprise-grade AI content management creation and distribution. Prabhu earned his M.A. in Law from the University of Cambridge as a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust scholar. Away from work, he is an avid cricketer and loves high altitude motorcycling, pursuits that reflect his belief that meaningful progress demands vision, commitment, precision, and the courage to explore beyond the familiar.

Jesper Schleimann, AI Officer for the EMEA region at SAP, brings over 20 years of experience at the crossroads of business and technology. A passionate tech optimist, Jesper is dedicated to driving AI-powered innovation that ensures sustainable growth and keeps SAP at the cutting edge. His expertise in strategy, AI, and digital leadership leads transformative solutions within the Intelligent Enterprise framework, shaping the future of business.

Claudia Nemat is an international Board Director (ABB, Deutsche Börse and Daimler Truck), Chairwoman of the Advisory Council of IQM Quantum Computers, as well as an entrepreneur with focus on technology and AI.
Between 2011 and 2025, she served for 14 years on the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom, including as CEO of its European business and as Board Member for Technology and Innovation, complemented by her NED mandate at Airbus and Airbus Defense and Space.
Prior to that, she was Senior Partner at McKinsey&Company with responsibility for the firm’s global technology practice. Her conviction is that people must remain at center of technological innovation, economic activity and political decision-making.
Claudia Nemat holds a master’s degree in theoretical physics from the University of Cologne. Since 2014, she has served on the University Council of the University of Cologne. In 2021, she was awarded the Heinrich Hertz Honorary Visiting Professorship by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). She is a member of the Presidium of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) and the senate of the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft.

Brian Solis is Head of Global Futures at ServiceNow, where he leads a global network Futurists who study emerging technologies, macro signals, and business transformation trends to help customer executives and ServiceNow’s senior leadership navigate what’s coming before it arrives. ServiceNow Futures also publishes independent research to help executives cut through the noise to navigate purposeful, innovative AI business reinvention.

Brian is a 10x bestselling author, world-renowned digital futurist, and a global keynote speaker. His newest book, Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today’s Businesses into AI-Forward Companies, co-authored with ServiceNow Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright, is the definitive blueprint for leaders ready to stop layering AI onto legacy thinking and start designing organizations where intelligence is foundational.

Forbes calls him “one of the more creative and brilliant business minds of our time.” ZDNet named him “one of the 21st century business world’s leading thinkers.” The Conference Board put it simply: “Brian is the futurist we all need now.””

Over nearly three decades, Brian has published more than 70 widely read research reports, contributed to Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, CIO, and Worth, and advised thousands of business and technology executives on innovation, digital transformation, and AI reinvention.

His personal platforms reach more than 800,000 followers globally because he helps leaders translate trends into action, ahead of disruption and the competition.

Jo Plaete is the Chief Technology Officer at BRAHMA AI, the Enterprise AI Content Platform. He drives the vision and development of the platform and its core technologies: BRAHMA AI Core, the enterprise backbone powering content workflows for global media companies, ATMAN photorealistic digital humans, and VAANI voice synthesis and localisation. His work centers on building scalable AI systems and product workflows that enable global enterprises and storytellers to create photoreal audiovisual content with control, reliability, and trust. As one of the early pioneers in neural performance technology, Jo has spent the past several years architecting and deploying AI systems built for the highest creative and technical demands. The tools and workflows he has developed with his teams have powered productions for directors such as Robert Zemeckis, George Miller, and Fede Alvarez, as well as live and broadcast work with artists including Eminem, Drake, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Usher, and Cai Guo-Qiang. These projects demonstrate the robustness, scalability, and quality standards of the technology he now leads at BRAHMA AI. Before joining BRAHMA AI’s leadership, Jo spent nearly two decades in post-production, working across innovation, engineering, and creative supervision roles at Industrial Light & Magic, MPC, Metaphysic, and several global studios. His background includes building pipelines and supervising high-end production on titles such as the ABBA Voyage Live Concert Experience, Ready Player One, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Guardians of the Galaxy, and World War Z. Jo regularly speaks on AI, systems design, and production-grade deployment at conferences including NVIDIA GTC, SIGGRAPH, FMX, VIEW, and FOCUS.

Diana Schildhouse is the Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Colgate-Palmolive, where she leads the vision, strategy and priorities for enterprise-wide data, analytics and AI, driving and embedding advanced capabilities to enable growth and innovation in how Colgate designs, markets, and sells products and how it engages with consumers. Diana joined Colgate in 2021 from Mattel where she was Senior Vice President of Global Strategy, Insights and Analytics. She built Mattel’s first team of data scientists, advanced Mattel’s data strategy, and pioneered large scale advanced analytics capabilities focused on marketing, media, new product development, customer and retail. She also led mergers & acquisitions and the development of enterprise-wide strategic planning for Mattel, with a focus on driving transformation, innovation and growth. Previously, Diana held the role of Senior Director of Strategy and Market Research for Westfield, a global shopping center developer. Diana began her career at The Walt Disney Company in corporate finance. Diana holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Southern California.

Suresh Venkatasubramanian directs the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign (CNTR) with the Data Science Institute at Brown University, and is the Dean’s Professor of Computer Science and Data Science. Suresh’s background is as a computer scientist and his current research interests lie in algorithmic fairness, and more generally the impact of automated decision-making systems in society. Suresh recently finished a stint in the Biden-Harris administration, where he served as Assistant Director for Science and Justice in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In that capacity, he helped co-author the Blueprint for an AI BIll of Rights.

Cihangir Kocak is an expert in business strategy and AI advisory, known for creating opportunities and building strong ecosystems that empower businesses to thrive. Cihangir has successfully guided numerous organizations through the challenges of digital transformation and strategic business development. He is appreciated for his ability to simplify complex concepts and inspire actionable insights. Cihangir is passionate about enabling business growth in the AI industry for HP, its customers, and partners, ranging from emerging startups to established enterprises.

Alice Xiang is the Global Head of AI Governance and Vice President at Sony Group Corporation (SGC), where she leads the team shaping AI governance policies and frameworks across Sony’s business units worldwide. She serves as the AI Governance Officer for SGC and concurrently serves as Lead Research Scientist, directing a lab of researchers and engineers advancing responsible AI for creative industries and the protection of creator rights.

Alice has been named one of Nature’s Top 10 Scientists to Watch for 2026, one of AI Magazine’s Top 100 Women in AI 2026, and one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics in 2021. Her project FHIBE was recognized as one of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas for 2026. Her research has been published in Nature, leading machine learning conferences, and top law reviews. She has published op-eds in TIME and Fortune, and delivered guest lectures at Harvard, Stanford, UT Austin, and Seoul National University, among others.

A lawyer and statistician by training, Alice combines hands-on experience as a machine learning practitioner with a background as legal counsel to technology companies. She holds a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, a Master’s in Statistics from Harvard, a Master’s in Development Economics from Oxford, and a Bachelor’s in Economics from Harvard.

Dr Daniel Eriksson is Director of the Oversight Board Administration. He most recently served as CEO of Transparency International, based in Berlin, where he showed exceptional leadership in steering the organization’s global anti-corruption movement, and standing up for basic freedoms. He brings to the Oversight Board Administration a wealth of strategic leadership experience, deep expertise in technology, and a strong commitment to transparency, integrity and freedom of expression. During his career, he has played important roles in a wide range of sectors, including governments, civil society, the private sector and international organizations including the United Nations.

As the founder of MindFriend, Sheikha Maytha Bint Maktoum is building the ethical infrastructure layer for digital mental health. Combining her background as an investor and psychologist, she is scaling an AI ecosystem backed by a growing community of 2,000+ mental health professionals, bringing credible clinical authority to consumer health tech.

Nigel is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence. He is the Chair of AI@Oxford Research and Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford. He is also Senior Distinguished Scientist at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford. He served as Principal of Jesus College, Oxford from 2015 – 2026. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He was knighted in 2013 for ‘services to science and engineering’. With over 500 publications, he has researched and published on topics from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web. In May 2024 he published ‘As If Human’, which provides a new approach to the challenges surrounding AI. In 2025 he was appointed to the Council for Science and Technology, which advises the Prime Minister and Cabinet on strategic science and technology policy issues.

At Oxford he has focused his research in human centred AI in a wide range of applications.

He is a Fellow of The Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.

Jochen Rudat leads growth, sales, and customer partnerships at Humanoid. He focuses on commercial results: shaping revenue strategy, running pilots, and building partnerships that get robots into use. He believes in testing early, learning fast, and letting results shape the next step.

Jochen brings more than a decade of experience at Tesla, where he worked directly under Elon Musk and helped scale operations across Europe from the ground up. He played a central role in launching the German market, turning a single Roadster delivery into a billion-dollar region, and later helped steer the company’s China turnaround. He also led the internal push to build the European Gigafactory, aligning stakeholders and helping get construction underway.

Since Tesla, Jochen has advised startups across tech and mobility, helping them turn complex ideas into working products and traction. He also holds a Bachelor of Engineering from Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences and an MBA.

Appointed in 2023, Una Shortt is currently the group Chief Data Officer and Senior Vice President of Data & Performance.

Una joined Schneider Electric in 2004 and has enjoyed a dynamic career in Software & Data Engineering, Data Architecture & Governance, working with talented individuals & teams globally.

Una began her Data career during an internship in 1998, writing data quality routines in manufacturing. When she graduated with a BSc in Computer Systems in 2000, development of Enterprise Application Interfaces, Business Reporting and low level coding in Capital Markets followed. From there she began her Schneider Electric career joining APC in 2004, with a mission to grow BI & Analytics Development, Data Engineering, Business Analysis and Project Management.

She defined the first Analytics Strategy for Schneider Electric in 2012, launched the first B.I. & Analytics Community and was a key member of the squad pioneering the original Enterprise Data Lake in the company in 2014. This followed with the introduction of a suite of BI & Analytics technologies that enabled scaled autonomy for internal stakeholders, with a reach of 60K users today.

Una’s hands-on experience, understanding the very building blocks to operationalize strategy, were the solid foundations to elevate to senior leadership roles in Schneider Electric’s Data Strategy execution, transitioning her career from pure tech to data governance in more recent years.

Una received an MBA from Heriot – Watt University (SCO). During her time there, she developed a passion for Portfolio (PMP, Scrum@Scale).

Una’s driver is a passion for people, enabling together a data backed execution of strategy at Schneider Electric, through Trusted Data@Scale.

About Schneider Electric

Schneider Electric is a global energy technology leader, driving efficiency and sustainability by electrifying, automating, and digitalizing industries, businesses, and homes. Its technologies enable buildings, data centers, factories, infrastructure, and grids to operate as open, interconnected ecosystems, enhancing performance, resilience, and sustainability. The portfolio includes intelligent devices, software-defined architectures, AI-powered systems, digital services, and expert advisory. With 160,000 employees and one million partners in over 100 countries, Schneider Electric is consistently ranked among the world’s most sustainable companies.

www.se.com

H.E. Sheikh Mohammad Ahmed Al Sabah is President of the Artificial Intelligence of Things Association (AAIOT) in Kuwait, where he leads initiatives in AI, IoT, digital transformation and emerging technologies. He promotes international cooperation between governments, technology companies and research institutions, accelerating the responsible adoption of AI across public and private sectors. Through AAIOT, H.E. Sheikh Mohammad works to strengthen Kuwait’s position in the global technology landscape through strategic partnerships, knowledge exchange and innovation. His work connects technology, policy and international collaboration, with particular interest in sovereign AI, AI infrastructure, smart government and emerging technologies that support national competitiveness.

Founder Cradle, NADI. Previously Uber.

I’m Bloomberg’s Amsterdam bureau chief leading coverage of the Netherlands, including chip equipment makers such as ASML, local policy and governments. Prior to that I completed a short stint as Miami bureau chief and was a consumer goods reporter in London. Before Bloomberg, I spent 10 years at Reuters covering Turkey, corporate finance and finally writing commentary.

With more than 20 years of experience building and scaling advanced AI systems at some of the world’s most innovative technology companies, Xavier joins Expedia Group from Google, where he most recently served as VP of AI and Compute Enablement. In this role, he led the teams building the core AI platforms and infrastructure that power all of Google’s products including Gemini, Cloud, Search and Ads. Prior to Google, Xavier held senior positions at LinkedIn, and Netflix, and has mentored talent who went on to found leading AI companies including Perplexity and Scale AI.

Appointed in December, in his current role, Xavier leads Expedia Group’s AI and Data organization, setting the long-term vision for AI, machine learning and data science across our global travel platform. He is focused on applying generative AI and advanced ML at scale to drive tangible business impact for travelers and partners worldwide.

Guillaume Bour leads Mistral’s Go-to-Market strategy across Europe, helping enterprises transform with AI. Focusing on delivering customer outcomes and scalable AI transformation, he partners with organizations to deploy Mistral’s full AI stack from models to enterprise-grade AI solutions.

Before Mistral, Guillaume built and scaled high-performing teams in fast-growing tech environments including Wavestone and AWS.

Sam Ramadori is Co-President and Executive Director of LawZero, as well as an entrepreneur in the field of AI.

Prior to joining LawZero, he was the CEO of BrainBox AI, where he led the innovative team that sought to apply cutting edge AI to the challenge of decarbonizing the built environment – one of the largest GHG emitting sectors on the planet. In addition to managing the day-to-day execution of the company’s growth plan, Sam was responsible for fundraising and promoting the positive impact that AI technology is having on this critical global climate issue.

Earlier in his career, Sam dedicated 15 years to private equity investing, holding leadership roles within the private equity platforms of institutional asset managers and family offices. He is a graduate of the MBA program at the Richard Ivey School of Business and completed Civil and Common Law degrees at the University of Ottawa.

Daisy Hollman is a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, where she works on Claude Code. She has led the design and implementation of plugins, agent teams, and skills in Claude Code. Before joining Anthropic, she spent a decade on the ISO C++ standards committee, where she chaired the study group on C++ ranges and contributed to the standardization of std::mdspan, std::atomic_ref, and the executors work that became std::execution. She holds a PhD in theoretical quantum chemistry. Her winding career path has been driven by a passion for inclusivity and accessibility of programming to increasingly broade

Himanshu Nautiyal is Global Field CTO at Glean, with nearly three decades of experience across AI, data, enterprise software, and financial services. His career has spanned building AI products and platforms, shaping enterprise AI strategy, and helping organizations translate emerging technology into measurable business outcomes.

Before Glean, Himanshu was Chief Product Officer at Fractal, where he shaped the company’s AI platform and product strategy, including its agentic AI platform and portfolio of functional and industry solutions deployed across Fortune 500 enterprises. Earlier in his career, he held leadership roles at eGain, Yahoo!, and Deutsche Bank.

Anu Talus has served as the Finnish Information Commissioner since autumn 2020. She is the Head of the Office of the Information Commissioner (TSV) and the Chair of the European Data Protection Board (EDPB).
Prior to her work at the IMY, Talus served as Senior Adviser at the Ministry of Justice for over ten years. At the Ministry of Justice she led the implementation of the GDPR in Finland and acted as representative of the Finnish government in the EU GDPR negotiations. Talus has also worked at the European Commission as Seconded National Expert.
Talus holds a Doctor of Laws degree and a Master of Laws degree from the University of Helsinki and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Vaasa.

Found an angel turned venture capitalist. Investing early in very technical teams who are transforming how the world works using physical AI.

Juha Pankakoski, EVP Global Functions at Siemens Energy, is leading the Functions that provide the foundation for operational excellence, governance, resilient supply chains and enterprise-wide transformation

Ken Mulvany is a pioneering AI entrepreneur who has founded multiple companies, including BenevolentAI, one of the UK’s earliest companies to apply artificial intelligence to scientific discovery, where he serves as Executive Chairman. With more than three decades of experience as an entrepreneur, investor and activist shareholder, he has advised senior policymakers through the UK Government’s AI Strategy and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Artificial Intelligence. A World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, Kenneth works across AI, life sciences and emerging applications in defence, with a focus on advancing scientific discovery, strengthening national capabilities and shaping the future of industry and society.

Niall Firth is MIT Technology Review’s executive editor, newsroom, overseeing all journalism across web, app, and newsletters.

With more than 20 years of newsroom leadership experience, Niall manages the reporters and editors that produce MIT Technology Review’s award-winning coverage, helping the team produce agenda-setting scoops, sharp analysis, deeply-reported investigations and long-form features. Niall frequently moderates and presents as a headline speaker at major tech conferences around the world, bringing his influential editorial insights to global conversations about technology’s impact on society.

Bonnie is the Managing Director of AI for Science and is based in Cambridge, UK. She leads a global team of machine learning researchers, engineers, domain experts and program managers working to advance an exciting new research frontier at the intersection of machine learning and the natural sciences. The team’s goal is to drive major research advances in the use of machine learning for scientific discovery, and to facilitate transformational real-world impact on some of the most pressing problems facing society including climate change, green energy, sustainable materials, and the discovery of new medicines.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Bonnie grew her career in Pharmaceutical Research & Development and brings deep expertise and experience in building, growing and leading global data and machine learning teams. Most recently she was the Head of R&D Data, Analytics and AI at AstraZeneca, responsible for the delivery of AI services across Biopharmaceutical and Oncology research. These services included an Augmented Drug Design platform and the Biological Insights Knowledge Graph, which are now being used to fundamentally change how scientists design small molecules, select drug targets, predict activities in silico, and then how best to synthesize compounds using machine learning and computational methods.

She has a PhD in Quantum Chemistry, where she applied density functional theory to explore the properties of metal-ligand interactions of siderophore-transition metal complexes and the properties of a unique tyrosyl-like radical of the Catalase Peroxidase (KatG) enzyme, the enzyme that provides virulence to the bacteria that causes tuberculosis.

Marina Vernetti translated Genpact’s AI strategy into measurable execution and made AI operational, scalable, and human-centered across a complex, multi-country delivery environment of 12,000 professionals across 25+ locations in 12 countries. Under her leadership, Bucharest became Genpact’s most active AI Innovation Center globally, last year hosting more than 200 client events and building more than 20 generative and agentic AI solutions now scaled worldwide. Examples include an AI solution that freed $170 million in client cash flow by identifying and resolving unbilled invoices for a global hi-tech client, plus additional solutions in finance, claims, supply chain, and customer operations for hundreds of clients, that improved cash flow, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Overall, these efforts delivered more than $15 million in measurable P&L impact in one year. Marina managed the complexity of driving technology adoption and increasing revenue per headcount while scaling the business and building new capabilities in financial crime, med tech, and HR operations. She is a strong believer that the process intelligence talent brings is crucial for successful AI adoption. Eighty-seven percent retention and forty percent internal promotion are proof of her efforts to invest in and advance her organization.

Husayn is founder and CEO of ollo, building internal AI capability through an AI-agnostic platform and hands-on training. Before ollo, he co-founded and led Onfido as CEO – zero to $100m ARR in 7 years, sold in 2024 as the largest UK AI exit. Oxford Economics & Management graduate, former President of Oxford Entrepreneurs, and career-long obsessive about the gap between AI’s promise and how it actually lands inside organisations.

After establishing and leading a department focused on digital innovation at a large consulting firm, I made the transition to the Ministry of Defence shortly after the war in Ukraine began. As Head of the DATA, I lead a team of 80 experts, including data scientists, data engineers, and DevOps engineers. Since 2021, the Data Lab has played a crucial role in executing the Data Science and AI strategy of the Ministry of Defence. I am responsible for formulating the strategic goals of both my own organizational unit and the Defence-wide Data Science Community and achieving these with our internal and external partners. Establishing (inter)national collaborations forms an important foundation.

AXA Group Chief Information Officer Giovanni D’Aniello holds over 25 years’ experience in the domain of IT Management and Strategy. Having previously worked at BNP Paribas, IBM, BelgaCom, HP and Orange, Giovanni D’Aniello joined AXA in 2010, becoming AXA Belgium’s Chief Information Officer in 2016. In 2018, Giovanni was appointed Group Chief Technology Officer before progressing to Deputy Group CIO in 2020. Giovanni has been at the helm of AXA’s IT strategy since his appointment as Group CIO in 2021. Under his remit, he has launched multiple IT transformation projects paving the way for AXA’s tech future and laying the foundations of the group’s AI landscape. Giovanni is particularly passionate about Digital Sustainability, weaving this practice into AXA’s IT strategy so that the company may deliver on its commitment to the climate by mitigating the impact of its tech choices on the planet.

Michelle Lau is Managing Director France at Alibaba.com, where she leads initiatives to empower small and medium-sized businesses to compete and grow globally. Through Alibaba.com’s AI-powered B2B platform, she focuses on enabling smarter sourcing through AI solutions, lowering barriers to business creation and scale through international trade, and leveraging a diversified global supplier network to help level the playing field for SMEs in competitive markets.

Prior to her current role, Michelle served as Co-Managing Director of Alibaba Group France from 2022 until the Group’s restructuring in 2023. She joined Alibaba Group in 2016 and has held senior roles across business development and strategic partnerships, managing key accounts and driving growth across a broad range of digital commerce solutions for markets in Europe and China.

Before joining Alibaba, Michelle held senior leadership positions at Printemps, Figaret, and the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, gaining deep experience at the intersection of retail, international trade, marketing, and business development. This cross-cultural and cross-industry background continues to shape her leadership approach, grounded in collaboration, innovation, and long-term value creation.

Hiek is a passionate all-round Data & AI practitioner with a strong business sense and ability to find the right pragmatic approach. He has built up deep expertise on how business can derive value from Data, Analytics, and AI. Hiek drives Data & AI transformations from strategy to implementation, has a track record on realizing impact while ensuring a sustainable foundation. The use cases he is involved in vary from basic analytics to AI and covers both the offensive and defensive side of data.

In his current role Hiek is responsible for ABN AMRO’s transformation to become a Data- and AI driven organization. He leads the Data & AI agenda, sets the appropriate data governance, and ensures impact across the organization. Hereby serving as the bridge between business, IT and data. Prior to joining ABN AMRO, he worked at Aegon, McKinsey, EY-VODW and TrueChoiceSolutions, and worked across the globe for various industries ranging from Insurance, Banking, Telco, Energy, Electronics to Online gaming. Hiek holds a PhD in econometrics of the University of Groningen

Katarina M.V. Galic brings over 20 years of global experience building entrepreneurial ecosystems across five continents, supporting more than 6,000 entrepreneurs and raising over $50 million. Her extensive background spans public sector leadership – including serving as Head of Business Agency, Government of Canada – as well as founding three successful businesses in Singapore, Canada, and Portugal. An advisor to numerous government bodies, Katarina holds a BBA and MBA, and is currently pursuing a PhD.

Masha Moisseyeva is Managing Director of DutchBasecamp, where she helps startups and scaleups expand internationally through market validation, go-to-market strategy, and access to customers and capital. After working closely with hundreds of startups scaling globally, she has seen how regulations can slow down market entry and stall growth. This led her to co-found Ogni, an AI-powered compliance platform that turns cybersecurity and regulatory requirements into an enabler rather than a barrier. A founder at heart and ecosystem builder, she empowers startups on their journey to scale worldwide.

Dave Horton is a software security leader with more than 20 years of experience across cybersecurity, data protection, AI, and cloud technologies. As Vice President of Solutions Engineering at Airia, he leads the global technical strategy for enterprise AI deployments. Throughout his career, Dave has driven growth and innovation at organizations including OneTrust, VMware, AirWatch, SHI International, and most recently as SVP of Solutions Engineering at Odaseva. He holds multiple industry certifications, including CISSP, CIPP/E, CIPM, and FIP, underscoring his expertise in security, privacy, and compliance.

Amma Asante is an experienced professional with extensive substantive knowledge of the social domain and experience with various roles (chair, manager, researcher and advisor). Her broad expertise in the social domain ranges from youth care to poverty, debt and social security.
She has extensive political and administrative experience. From 1998 to 2006 she was a member of the Amsterdam City Council and spoke on a wide range of topics. From 2016 to 2017 she was a member of parliament and spoke on Higher Education and Low Literacy. She also has experience as a director and supervisor at social organizations. Due to her political and administrative work, Amma has a large network at local and national level. She also regularly participates in temporary committees and juries. She also worked as an independent advisor for the government and social organizations. Before that, Amma worked as a Social Domain Advisor at BMC. She is currently chair of Commissariaat voor de Media, the Dutch Media Authority. And for the year 2026 she is the chair of the European Media Board.

Mark Lechner is CISO at Docker, where he leads security across the platform millions of developers use to build, ship, and run software – including the agentic workloads reshaping modern engineering. Before Docker, he was CISO at Otera driving enterprise AI and LLM agentic security, CISO at Bitpanda scaling security through Europe’s largest crypto platform, and Head of Cybersecurity at Solaris Bank. Before that he spent nearly a decade at Morgan Stanley in various security roles including the global leadership of security tooling. His focus today: supply chain integrity, agentic AI security, and secure-by-default developer platforms. Based in Berlin.

Frank Denneman is a Distinguished Engineer at Broadcom, where he focuses on the infrastructure architecture required to run modern AI workloads at scale. His work centers on GPU infrastructure, model serving, Kubernetes, and the design of private AI platforms, with a particular focus on how AI systems interact with compute, memory, networking, and distributed infrastructure. Frank has spent more than two decades working on virtualization and infrastructure architecture and is the author of several books on VMware vSphere, resource management, and distributed systems. He holds 14 patents and has also served as an advisor to NVIDIA on enterprise AI platform architecture.

Trena Minudri is the Vice President of Learning & Development and Chief Learning Officer at Coursera. She is focused on building a framework that places Courserians on the same career development path and outcomes as general learners;ensuring that Coursera is aligned on long-term strategy, growth objectives, and mission;and finally, growing the strength of management teams.

Trena brings many years of Learning & Development experience as a consultant and leader within IBM and PwC. After completing her MS from Cornell University in Organizational Design and Communication, Trena joined PwC’s People & Organization practice and was part of the team that built the PwC Learning Practice. After IBM acquired PwC’s consulting business, Trena focused on IBM’s Leadership Development and building skills across the Sales Organization. Recently, Trena was IBM’s Global Leader of Digital Strategy, reporting to the CLO in a role where she set strategy and initiatives and continuous learning programs for IBM employees.

Trena is a lifelong learner and has earned digital credentials in Cloud, Leading for Inclusion, and Mental Health Allyship.Originally from Montana, Trena lives in the Boston area with her husband and two daughters.

Fabrizio Del Maffeo is the CEO and co-founder of Axelera AI, the Netherlands-based company delivering the world’s most powerful and advanced solutions for AI at the edge. Before establishing Axelera AI, Fabrizio Del Maffeo served as head of AI at the Bitfury Group, a globally recognized emerging technologies company. Prior to joining Bitfury, Fabrizio was Vice President and Managing Director of AAEON Technology Europe, the AI and internet of things (IoT) computing company within the ASUS Group.

Rob Elsinga is a technology executive with a deep understanding of emerging technologies and their impact on society. As the National Technology Officer and member of the leadership team for Microsoft in the Netherlands, he is responsible for shaping the company’s strategy and vision on how to leverage these technologies to create positive impact for business and society. He leads the Dutch Technology Office and oversees the landscape of emerging technologies, cyber security, sovereignty, privacy, and compliance. Rob is at the forefront of the latest developments in generative AI and is passionate about its potential to transform industries and enhance human creativity. As a speaker and writer, he likes to share and shape his insights and perspectives on the opportunities and challenges of generative AI, and to explore how it can be harnessed to create value for businesses and society. Rob started over 20 years ago at Microsoft as Director Marketing for the Modern Workplace and worked a large part of his Microsoft career in leading consulting teams and as CTO for Public Sector.

Diane is an Academy Award-winning producer and the co-founder of Fishbowl Films. Her films have screened in festivals across the globe and she has worked with companies like Focus Features, HBO/MAX, National Geographic/Disney, Netflix, Showtime, and PBS. Fishbowl Films won a Peabody Award in 2019 for Inventing Tomorrow, and received the 2020 Sundance Institute/Amazon Producer’s Award for Whirlybird. Navalny won the U.S. Documentary Audience Award and the Festival Favorite Award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival and was awarded a BAFTA, PGA, DuPont, and the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Additional credits: The Final Year, Belushi, Stutz, Hollywoodgate, Emmy-nominated Tina and King Coal, and Emmy-winning Blink. She has produced docu-series such as Five Came Back, Equal and The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping. Her latest film, Focus Features The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptomist premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival and is currently streaming on Netflix.

Diane has a BA in photojournalism from RIT and a masters in Producing from AFI. She was a Sundance Documentary Creative Producing Fellow, a Dear Producer Award winner and is a member of the Producers Guild of America (PGA), the Documentary Producers Alliance (DPA), the Television Academy, and the Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).

A Top 100 Global Influencer in Technology (LEAP) and previously the Digital Ambassador of the Year (Computing), David is a film-maker and podcaster. An experienced conference chair and moderator, he brings sharp insight and a no-nonsense approach to dissecting technology’s biggest challenges and opportunities.

Since launching in 2015, ‘Tech Talks’ has published over 1,000 episodes and become a global hit with listeners as one of the world’s leading technology podcasts, regularly appearing on the Apple’s Technology Podcast charts. ‘Tech Flix’ evolved out of the stories discovered on the podcast, with 6 documentaries published to date being screened at tech festivals and alongside world-leading brands and institutions such as NASA, Web Summit and Columbia University (in New York).

David has been with Harvey Nash since 2007, developing a deep understanding of the technology and talent markets. He was invited to become a member of the IADAS in 2025, and is a judge for the Lovie Awards. He has spoken at major global events including Web Summit, Collision, IFA Berlin, TechBBQ, London Tech Week, Web Summit Rio, Unleash World, Unleash Paris, Unbound, Big Data World, and Viva Tech.

Emanuela Girardi is President of ADRA, the European Association for AI, Data and Robotics, private partner of the European Commission in the AI, Data and Robotics Public-Private Partnership. In this role, she works at the intersection of AI, data and robotics, focusing on physical AI and EU sovereign solutions and their integration into industrial and societal systems. She is also founder of Ainnova, focused on AI governance, founder and CEO of AI Value Srl, helping companies digitalize their value chains through AI projects balancing economic and social sustainability, and founder and President of Pop AI, a non-profit dedicated to making artificial intelligence accessible to everyone. An expert in international AI policy, Emanuela was a member of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development’s expert group on AI, contributing to Italy’s first national AI strategy. She sits on the industrial board of AIxIA and the Advisory Board of CAIRNE, the confederation of AI research laboratories in Europe. She teaches AI and sustainable development at Politecnico di Torino’s HumanAIze Master’s program, and serves on the boards of Fondazione per la Scuola (Compagnia di San Paolo) and IGF Italy, where she is Vice President. Named one of Italy’s 50 most influential women in technology.

Dmitry is a co-founder and CEO at Flo Health, the most popular healthcare app in the US and worldwide, with 80M monthly active users and USD 300M ARR. Flo is the most popular app in the health and fitness category of the App Store (6 years in a row). In Aug 2024, Flo raised $230M from General Atlantic (the biggest investment in the digital health segment in 2024) and became a Unicorn with a 1B+ valuation. Flo helps women around the globe to understand the meaning of their body signals and provides them with accurate cycle predictions and evidence-based health insights.

Jamil Shinawi is a serial deep-tech entrepreneur, investor and ecosystem builder. He is the founder and CEO of AHOY, the company building the operational layer for Physical AI: edge-first, sovereign systems that take perception to decisioning and action in under 100 milliseconds, running cities, utilities, and transport in the real world, not just on a screen. Founded in 2018, AHOY has moved from research to production with repeatable, revenue-generating deployments across the GCC, Europe, and beyond, surpassing $100M in annual recurring revenue with 330x growth over the past five years. The company is now formalizing Montreal as its North American R&D hub. Active in global investor and policy circles, Jamil engages with tier-one institutions and strategic partners while maintaining close ties to regional founders via AHOY’s founder networks.

Sabine Hauert is Professor of Swarm Engineering at the University of Bristol in the UK. Her research focusses on making swarms for people, and across scales, from nanorobots for cancer treatment, to larger robots for environmental monitoring, or logistics. Profoundly cross-disciplinary, Sabine works between Engineering Mathematics, the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, and Life Sciences. She’s PI or Co-I on more than 40M GBP in grant funding and has served on national and international committees, including the UK Robotics Growth Partnership, the Royal Society Working Group on Machine Learning and Data Community of Interest, and several IEEE RAS boards. She is currently on the Board of Directors of the Open Source Robotics Foundation. Before joining the University of Bristol, Sabine engineered swarms of nanoparticles for cancer treatment at MIT, and deployed swarms of flying robots at EPFL.

Sabine is also executive trustee of the Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence AIhub.org, a non-profit dedicated to providing free, high-quality information, direct from AI and robotics experts, through AIhub.org and Robohub.org.

As an expert in science communication with 15 years of experience, Sabine is often invited to discuss the future of robotics and AI, including in the journals Science and Nature, at the European Parliament, and at the Royal Society. Her work has been featured in mainstream media including BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The Economist, TEDx, WIRED, and New Scientist.

Dr. Shogo Akagawa is a Japanese journalist, author, lecturer, and moderator with more than three decades of international experience. He is Editor-at-Large for EMEA at Nikkei, Japan’s leading newspaper. Since 1994, he has covered political, economic, and geopolitical developments across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Indo-Pacific. He has conducted an on-stage conversation with former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and interviewed Christine Lagarde, among other prominent international leaders.

He holds a BA in Economics from Keio University, an MA in Political Science and Postwar German History from Freie Universität Berlin, and a doctorate in Political Science from the university’s Otto Suhr Institute. Having grown up in Germany and Japan, he brings a bicultural perspective to his work and promotes mutual understanding between Europe and Asia.

Dr. Akagawa regularly moderates and speaks at high-level policy dialogues, conferences, and leadership forums. His current work explores Europe’s changing political and security landscape, relations between Europe and the Indo-Pacific, and the impact of artificial intelligence on democracy, the economy, international security, and public debate. He is committed to strengthening cooperation among democratic societies, upholding the rule of law, respecting diversity, and fostering informed dialogue across cultures and generations in a fragmented world.

Dr Cristina Caffarra had a 25-year career as renowned economic expert in antitrust, leading teams of economists and testifying in major antitrust cases across the globe – with a strong focus on digital.

She co-founded the EuroStack movement in 2024 and is she is co-founder and Chair of the EuroStack Initiative Foundation e.V. EuroStack | Building Europe’s digital future<https://eurostack.eu/>, a non-profit organization to pursue European resilience and asset-building in European tech and digital.

She is recognised as a thought leader in antitrust enforcement, regulation, tech policy, the interface between tech, competition, industrial policy and trade. She is a public speaker regularly keynoting at top events on competition, regulation, digital and industrial policy. She is also a convener with the ability to gather senior agency, policy and academic speakers for the most high-profile policy events in Europe on tech and related economic policy. She hosts and produces the Eacape Forward podcast, and her Annual Escape Forward Brussels Conference is the highest-profile event on economic and regulatory policy in Europe. She has written multiple contributions to the field of competition and regulation of digital markets, lectures in competition economics. She is an Honorary Professor at UCL, she is also Associate Fellow of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in London and Deputy Chair of the CEPR Competition Research Policy Network. She is also a 2026 Fellow at DG Grow.

Issam Hijazi is the founder and CEO of UpScrolled, the independent social media platform challenging the way people connect online. A Palestinian-Jordanian-Australian entrepreneur and technologist, he founded UpScrolled with the belief that social media should serve people, not algorithms, and that freedom of expression, transparency and user trust should sit at the heart of every digital platform. Witnessing the digital erasure and suppression of Palestinian voices online became the catalyst for Issam to build an alternative. Rather than accepting a social media landscape shaped by opaque algorithms, censorship concerns and the exploitation of personal data, he created UpScrolled as a platform where communities could connect openly, share freely and remain in control of their own online experience. Today, the platform is used by millions of people around the world and continues to grow across countries, cultures and languages. As a recognised voice on the future of social media, digital trust and ethical technology, Issam regularly shares his views on platform accountability, AI, freedom of expression, misinformation and the evolving relationship between technology and society. His insights have featured in international media, including WIRED Middle East, and he has appeared on podcasts and speaking platforms such as Tech for Palestine, discussing the future of community-led innovation and the responsibility technology companies have to the people who use their platforms. Based in the Netherlands, Issam continues to lead UpScrolled’s international growth while advocating for a more transparent, human-centred internet where people, not platforms, remain in control.

Steve co-founded DN Capital in June 2000, runs DN’s US operations and co-leads DN’s AI strategy. Steve’s portfolio at DN have generated exits representing over $500 million of capital gains for his LPs. He was the DN board member and lead for Auto1, Remitly, Endeca, Robin Systems and Brigit. Current portfolio includes AI companies such as Sanas, Mext, and Verita, as well as SaaS companies Partnerize and Shiphawk and Fintech company Recargapay. Steve has an BA from Wharton, summa cum laude, and an MBA from Harvard with high distinction where he was a Baker Scholar.

An alumna of Oxford University, Meryem studied Theoretical Physics and Philosophy. She frequently speaks at leading conferences, including TEDx and QCon, sharing insights on inference technology and enterprise AI. Meryem has been recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree for her contributions to the AI field.

Philippe Rambach is the SVP, Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer of Schneider Electric. His mission is to drive AI innovation at scale, both internally and for customers, to provide greater overall efficiency and sustainability through data-based insights.

Philippe is a graduate of Ecole Polytechnique in France and joined Schneider Electric in 2010 from AREVA. He has more than 20 years of experience in strategy, innovation, and business responsibility in many industries. He held various leadership roles in Energy Management and Industrial Automation. Most recently, as SVP Industrial Automation Commercial, where he led the commercial organization.

He has an international career background and is currently based in France, reporting to the Chief Digital Officer.

About Schneider Electric

Schneider Electric is a global energy technology leader, driving efficiency and sustainability by electrifying, automating, and digitalizing industries, businesses, and homes. Its technologies enable buildings, data centers, factories, infrastructure, and grids to operate as open, interconnected ecosystems, enhancing performance, resilience, and sustainability. The portfolio includes intelligent devices, software-defined architectures, AI-powered systems, digital services, and expert advisory. With 160,000 employees and 1 million partners in over 100 countries, Schneider Electric is consistently ranked among the world’s most sustainable companies.

Isabelle C. Hau is the executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, where she leverages brain science and technology to champion innovative, effective, and inclusive learning solutions.

Previously a successful impact investor, Isabelle led the US education practice at Omidyar Network and Imaginable Futures, where she invested in mission-driven organizations that have reached millions of learners. She is the author of Love to Learn: The Transformative Power of Care and Connection in Early Education. At Stanford University, Isabelle teaches the class Design to Equip Learners in Under-Resourced Communities. She serves on the board of EDC and Design Tech High School, on the steering committee of the EdSAFE AI Alliance, the Brookings Institution Global AI Taskforce, and the World Economic Forum’s 4.0 education alliance.

Named as one of the 100 most inspiring women by Harvard Business School, 2025 World Education Medal finalist, 2026 Top 100 Influencers in EdTech, and 2026 Power of Women Award, Isabelle has also received distinctions in early childhood education and human-centered artificial intelligence. She co-starred with Grover of Sesame Street. Her lifelong professional goal is to bring the love of learning to each and every child.

Victor is the CTO and Co-Founder of Iris.ai – an agentic AI development and operation platform that scales expertlevel domain understanding of enterprise data across formats. Iris.ai is a recipient of the prestigious EIC Accelerator, a winner of the Singularity University Global Learning Award, and were Top 10 in the AI for Good XPRIZE. Victor has been speaking about AI, language models and ML tech since 2016 including at NVIDIA GTC, World Summit AI, NORA Startup (Norwegian Artificial Intelligence Research Consortium), Digitalk+AI, and he’s been an active member of AI Engineer Foundation Europe (AIE.F) and Dev.BG community. In addition to his industry work, Victor has coauthored several peer-reviewed academic publications in artificial intelligence and machine learning, giving him a rare perspective that bridges foundational research with real-world deployment of large-scale AI systems. He also regularly shares insights on AI systems, large language models, and enterprise AI adoption through podcasts, interviews, and long-form technical writing.

Alina is a data and analytics technology leader known for turning complex systems into clear, usable concepts and practical outcomes. Having lived in three countries, studied in seven schools, and graduated with honours from two universities, she brings intellectual adaptability, cross-cultural perspective, and disciplined curiosity to every environment she joins. Her academic background spans linguistics, media, and communication, complemented by advanced certifications in data science, machine learning, and AI.
With over a decade of experience in enterprise data and analytics, she leads high-impact technology teams and drives modern data platforms across cloud ecosystems including AWS and Snowflake. Her approach combines structured thinking, strong stakeholder alignment, and a practitioner’s focus on measurable value. She is recognized for asking precise questions, challenging assumptions, and promoting AI as a practical tool rather than abstract magic.
Beyond her leadership work, she is a writer, traveler, and multilingual parent. She actively promotes critical thinking, clarity, and independence in both professional and personal contexts. One of her long-term goals is to teach at a university, where she aims to connect theory with real-world practice and help students build durable analytical skills for the AI era.

Matthew Blakemore is the CEO of AI Caramba!, an AI strategy and governance consultancy named AI Solutions Provider of the Year 2025. He is a co-editor of ISO/IEC 8183, the international standard for the AI data life cycle, a contributor to the EU AI Office’s GPAI Code of Practice, and a member of Innovate UK’s BridgeAI Advisory Committee. Matthew advises boards and leadership teams across banking, energy, retail, broadcasting and development finance, and has delivered more than 250 keynotes across over 20 countries. He is also an award-winning AI filmmaker whose work has been recognised by the European Broadcasting Union.

Pierre-Yves is Chief Digital Officer of Pernod Ricard, the group that owns +200 premium spirit brands like Jameson, Chivas, Absolut or Havana Club. With an engineer degree from Ecole Polytechnique, Pierre-Yves joined Pernod Ricard group in 2003, served as CIO and as Managing Director of several subsidiaries. He has been Chief Digital Officer of the Pernod Ricard group since September 2018 and has led, over the past 5 years, the large-scale deployment of innovative data and AI solutions. He’s also serving as board member for Jumia, the innovative e-commerce platform serving millions of consumers across Africa.

Ana Lucic is an assistant professor in artificial intelligence at the University of Amsterdam working on interpretability, AI for science and AI safety. Previously, she was a researcher at Microsoft Research Amsterdam and at the Partnership on AI. She has a PhD in explainable machine learning from the University of Amsterdam, along with an MSc and BSc, both in mathematics, from McMaster University. Ana is a member of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and the Amsterdam ELLIS Unit.

Christophe founded multiple companies and invests through Atlantic in early-stage companies in AI/Data, Energy/Climate, Resilience/Defense, and Industrial Tech. Some of those companies are global category leaders today, including SoundCloud, GetYourGuide, Clue, Omio, Zenjob, Wandelbots, Mirelo, Prior Labs, Softr, Bliq, Again, Phlair and Harmattan.
FoodLabs invests in Food & Climate, backing trailblazers such as Formo, Choco, Stenon, Holy, Infinite Roots, Ahead and InPlanet. FoodLabs supports entrepreneurs who tackle some of the most pressing challenges of our time, such as climate, food security, and human health. Christophe is a tech entrepreneur; he founded and exited HERE Technologies, Plazes, Txtr and played a leading role in the emergence of the German/European venture ecosystem.

Prev. CFO at healthcare company Zava, CEO Delivery Hero Germany. Co-founded multiple companies and also worked with ABN Amro and Booz & Company. MBA from INSEAD

Jeannette Gorzala is an expert in AI governance, leadership and literacy, recognized for her influential role in shaping Europe’s artificial intelligence landscape. She is the founder and CEO of ACT AI NOW, an AI governance and leadership consultancy.​ With over 15 years of experience in international business law and investment banking, Jeannette has advised Fortune 500 companies and public institutions on AI strategies, compliance, and the implementation of trustworthy AI systems. She played a pivotal role in the legislative process of the EU AI Act, representing over 2,000 European AI companies as former Vice President of the European AI Forum. In addition to her legal and advisory work, Jeannette serves as Deputy Chair of the Austrian Federal Government’s AI Advisory Board.

Grzegorz (Greg) Ombach, PhD, is a senior deep tech executive and board chair focused on scaling technology driven businesses through complex industrial transformations. He is Senior Vice President at Airbus, where he sets direction and governance for advanced technology development and innovation strategy, and leads venture and portfolio oversight across next generation industrial platforms in civil, defence, and dual use domains. His role spans strategic direction, portfolio level decision making, and ecosystem partnerships to accelerate the transition from technology development to operational and business impact. He chairs AdvEn Industries and serves on the boards of ProLogium, Thread Innovations, and Acubed. He is also an advisor and investor at More.ai, supporting the scaling of physical AI capabilities for robotics and machine intelligence. Earlier, he held senior leadership roles at Qualcomm, Siemens, and Dräxlmaier Group. Greg holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and an INSEAD Certificate in Global Management

Wies Mensink is Vice President Data Science & Analytics at Albert Heijn, Etos and Gall & Gall, where she leads Data Science & Analytics across the full breadth of the retail business, from customer & digital and merchandising & sourcing to operations and supply chain. She drives the application of data science, machine learning and advanced analytics at scale, focused on creating better customer experiences, smarter decision-making and tangible business impact. Turning Data & AI into value. With a background spanning loyalty, digital, analytics and data science, Wies has been a driving force behind Albert Heijn’s evolution into a deeply data-driven retailer. Her work ranges from personalization, search and digital relevance to assortment, forecasting, sourcing and reducing food waste, bringing together customer understanding, advanced technology and the realities of running a complex retail business. Today, Wies is focused on the next evolution of this journey, exploring how GenAI and agentic technologies can create new value across the retail value chain, from how customers discover and shop to how retailers source, merchandise and operate. Wies is also a Board Member of Kickstart AI, where she contributes to accelerating responsible AI adoption and strengthening the Dutch AI ecosystem

Gaia is an experienced senior leader, convenor, and facilitator with a strong track record of leading and contributing to complex, high-level, multi-stakeholder discussions at the intersection of AI, governance, public policy and societal impact – recently speaking at the UN Global Dialogue of Dialogues, and serving as a member of the London AI and Jobs Taskforce.

Gaia has extensive experience of leadership roles across the UK civil service and the non-profit sector. In government she has held roles as Deputy Director (Strategy for the Integrated Data Service) at the Office for National Statistics, Head of Engagement for Civil Service Reform at the Cabinet Office, and Head of National Data Strategy at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

In the non-profit sector, Gaia specialised in data strategy and participatory approaches to research, innovation and policy. This included roles at Parkinson’s UK, Centrepoint and the Royal Society of Arts, also serving on the Samaritans’ Board of Trustees.

Gaia holds an MA in Understanding and Securing Human Rights from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London and a BA in History from University College London.

Thomas Trinelle is Chief Product Officer at Gradium, a Paris-based voice AI company building text-to-speech, speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, live translation and voice models for developers and enterprises. He joined in March 2026 from Gorgias, where as VP of Product he built the leading conversational commerce platform, trusted by 40% of Shopify brands, and shifted 50% of the company’s $100m+ ARR to AI-native products. With a background in applied math and data science, he specializes in launching products from 0 to 1, scaling teams, and turning advanced technology into real business impact.

Ida Tin leads a €40m pan European initiative by SPRIND (the German federal agency of breakthrough innovation), on biosensors for continuous hormone monitoring in women.

She co-founded, and served a decade as CEO and later as chairwoman of Clue, the most trusted female health app with over ten million users in 190+ countries, coined the term ‘Femtech’ in 2016, defining a sector projected to exceed a trillion dollars by 2040.

Ida is currently working on a book about the rise of Femtech, and the story of building Clue.

Ida, born in a Denmark grew up travelling the world on motorcycles as a child and later on her own and has published the book “Directress” about her two year motorcycle journey in the US deserts.

She lives in Berlin with her two teenage children and American husband who is an artist.

Marco Bressan is a senior data and AI leader with over 25 years of experience building and scaling high-impact organizations across finance, sustainability, technology, and retail. He has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, has authored more than 30 scientific publications, and holds over a dozen patents.
Marco is currently Chief Scientist at Santander Group, responsible for the Group’s Data & AI Science practice and AI strategy, ensuring that advanced AI capabilities translate into scalable, responsible, real-world impact.
Before joining Santander, Bressan co-founded Cambium Earth, focusing on reforestation for carbon removal, served as Chief Data Officer at UniCredit and Chief Product Officer at Satellogic, where he led the development of a planet-scale AI-powered satellite imagery platform.
Previously, as Chief Data Scientist in BBVA, he contributed to establish Europe’s first Data & Analytics Center of Excellence in finance, earning the Digital Masters Award for transformational use of data. Earlier in his career, at Xerox, he led and managed R&D programs at the intersection of AI and analytics.
He currently serves on the Digital Advisory Board of SONAE and is the author of the 2025 Venice Biennale installation The Tide, which explores the intersection of AI and participatory decision-making.

Martina Fuchs is an international TV anchor, business journalist, Guinness World Records holder, event moderator, DJ, and expert on China and the Middle East. She speaks nine languages.

She is a business correspondent for CGTN, co-founder of the Frequency School with Grammy-nominated producer Maejor, consultant to IMD business school, and advisor to the Lang Lang International Music Foundation. Based in London, Zurich, and Dubai, she is also a media ambassador and board member for Montreux Jazz Festival China and brand ambassador for WITHIN darkness retreats.

In 2025, she set a Guinness World Record for the first song featuring women from all 195 countries, using the 528 Hz frequency to promote gender equality and global unity. She also launched World Frequency Day on November 11, marked globally at 11:11 AM and PM to promote wellbeing through music.

Previously, she worked with CNNMoney Switzerland, Reuters, and CGTN in Beijing. Martina holds degrees from the University of Geneva, the American University in Cairo, and a joint MSc in Global Finance from HKUST and NYU Stern.

Matt Johnson is Field CTO, EMEA at MongoDB. He advises enterprises on secure data architectures for AI and modern applications, helping organisations design cloud and hybrid deployment models that meet regulatory, security and sovereign data requirements. His work focuses on data security for AI, hybrid and sovereign cloud architectures, and automated data platforms that enable reliable AI adoption at scale. Prior to MongoDB, he held a range of senior engineering, architecture and technology leadership roles across government and industry.

Nicoletta Wagner is Head of Future Engineering at the European Space Agency, where she drives AI, digitalisation, sustainable engineering and industrial transformation for Europe’s space sector. With leadership experience across ESA and Airbus Defence & Space, she has managed complex space programmes, engineering teams and strategic transformation initiatives spanning launchers, infrastructure, digital tools, asset management and advanced space systems. Her work focuses on translating emerging technologies — including artificial intelligence, digital twins and data-driven engineering — into operational impact, competitiveness and resilience for European space.

Designing and building service robots at Fraunhofer IPA in Stuttgart 2012-2016 and working for FANUC since 2016. At FANUC starting in automotive project management, taking different management positions in technical teams until taking over CTO for FANUC Europe in 2025. In this Position overseeing all technical divisions of FANUC Europe (Robotics, Machine Tools, CNC & Drive technologies) and driving AI adoption within FANUC and at our customers shopfloor.

Lyndsay Weir is Chief Analytics and Insight Officer at Barilla, where she leads global analytics and decision transformation. With over 15 years’ experience in consumer goods, including senior leadership roles at Nestlé and Barilla, she operates at the intersection of data, strategy and executive decision-making. Lyndsay works closely with boards and executive teams to redesign how organisations make decisions in the age of AI. Her focus is not just on capability, but on the cultural, governance and leadership shifts required to turn technology investment into sustained competitive advantage. She sits on multiple advisory boards in AI and technology and has been recognised as one of the Top 20 Women in Data and AI, as well as one of the Top 100 Data Executives for three consecutive years.

Zeynep Gabrali is a global B2B sales and business development leader with more than 15 years of experience helping startups and scaleups build predictable revenue engines, enter new markets, and convert commercial strategy into measurable growth. Throughout her career, she has worked extensively across the United States, Singapore and Southeast Asia, the MENA region, and Europe, giving her a strong understanding of how companies need to adapt their go-to-market approach across different markets, cultures, and commercial environments. She works closely with founders and leadership teams on go-to-market strategy, international expansion, enterprise sales, partnerships, market validation, and commercial execution. Her experience spans B2B SaaS, AI, DeepTech, and technology-driven businesses, with a particular focus on helping companies move from early market traction toward structured and scalable revenue generation. Zeynep currently serves as Head of Emerging Markets at DutchBasecamp, where she supports international startups with market entry and expansion while developing strategic relationships across emerging ecosystems. She also works as an independent GTM and business development advisor, helping technology companies strengthen their sales strategy, build qualified pipelines, develop partnerships, and successfully expand into international markets.

Smitha Shyam is the Senior Director of Engineering for Waymo and leads the Simulation grp. With Simulation, her teams recreate the physical world for accelerated development and evaluation of the Waymo Driver. Before Waymo, she led Uber’s AI organization, where she was responsible for delivering applied machine learning solutions and building the foundational AI/ML platform, Michelangelo.
She has over two decades of experience leading engineering teams and driving innovation and business growth at tech giants including Uber, Google, and startups. She is passionate about building diverse and inclusive teams. A long-time SF Bay Area resident, she is deeply invested in the tech community and frequently advises startups and mentors the next generation of leaders.

Max Buchan founded Valarian to give organisations true digital sovereignty. Max was named one of Forbes’ European 30 under 30 for Valarian’s emergence across Europe’s technology startup scene. Prior to founding Valarian, Max studied History and Economics at the University of London. His background in international finance has led him to focus on infrastructure where privacy, compliance, and control are not optional.

Marija Gecaite is Chief Commercial Officer at Oxylabs, a leading web data infrastructure company that powers public data pipelines for enterprises and AI teams worldwide. With a decade of experience spanning wealth management and cybersecurity, she has led international sales organizations and now focuses on scaling global growth at the intersection of data and AI. She is passionate about how reliable, ethically sourced data shapes the next generation of AI products.

Aaron Delp leads technical programs and content for Mistral globally, following roles driving Distributed AI go-to-market at Equinix and leading cloud-native and AI initiatives at Nutanix. He’s also co-host of The Enterprise AI Show (formerly The Cloudcast), a top-ranked AI and cloud computing podcast, and brings 25+ years of experience translating complex AI and infrastructure trends into clear, practical insight for enterprise audiences.

Artavazd Mehrabyan is Co-Founder and CTO of Picsart, the Sequoia-backed AI video production platform. Previously a software architect at Sourcio and Lycos Europe, he has helped scale Picsart from its early days into a global technology company, now with over 100M+ monthly users.

Yuval Dvir is Senior Advisor and Commercial Executive at SandboxAQ, the Alphabet spinout pioneering Large Quantitative Models (LQMs), a new class of AI grounded in math, physics, and chemistry that is helping solve complex challenges across drug discovery, materials science, cybersecurity, navigation, and financial risk. At SandboxAQ, he works across AI, quantitative modeling, and agentic infrastructure, helping organizations move from AI experimentation to production-scale deployment.
Prior to SandboxAQ, Yuval spent nearly two decades at Google, DeepMind, Microsoft, and Skype, leading global teams responsible for bringing frontier technologies from research into commercial reality. At Google, he built and led the partner ecosystem behind Google Workspace and Gemini, helping establish one of Google’s largest customer acquisition channels and launching Gemini’s first major partnerships, including Samsung and Wix. He also worked with DeepMind and Google Brain on initiatives spanning healthcare AI, scientific discovery, and advanced research collaborations.
A recognized international speaker on AI, innovation, and the future of work, Yuval focuses on how organizations can successfully deploy AI beyond pilots and proofs of concept, combining frontier language models, quantitative AI, and agentic systems to create measurable business and scientific outcomes. He holds an MSc in Applied Neuroscience from King’s College London and an MBA from INSEAD and is the author of the forthcoming book AI-Political.

Wei Manfredi is Senior Vice President of AI and Architecture at IHG Hotels & Resorts, where she guides the company’s AI strategy, technical architecture, data engineering and enterprise technology across one of the world’s largest hospitality portfolios.
Named one of the 100 Most Influential AI Leaders in the U.S. and a Top AI Leader for 2026, Wei brings 25+ years of experience transforming how global enterprises think about data, architecture, and artificial intelligence. Her career spans senior leadership roles at McDonald’s, Google Cloud, Lululemon, and Visa — each chapter defined by a simple conviction: technology should create possibilities that didn’t exist yesterday.
A first-principles thinker and sought-after speaker on enterprise AI transformation, Wei is known for challenging the status quo — believing that AI’s greatest impact isn’t just automation, but democratization: embedding AI in everything we do by making every employee a creator, not just a consumer, of intelligent technology.

Tadej Magajna is an AI and data science leader, author, and open-source contributor currently serving as Director of AI Data Strategy & Architecture at Danfoss. He combines technical depth in AI, data science, and software engineering with experience leading teams that build applied machine learning and AI solutions. Previously, he was Global Associate Director of Data, Analytics, Data Science & AI at Sandoz, where he led teams delivering applied ML and AI solutions, and a Software Engineer at Microsoft, where he worked on AI systems used by millions, gaining experience building cutting-edge solutions at scale. His background spans big data, machine learning, experimentation, and software engineering across both enterprise and startup environments. Tadej remains hands-on beyond his day-to-day work. He is the author of the book Natural Language Processing with Flair, published by Packt, and an active open-source contributor, including contributions to CPython with changes slated for the upcoming Python 3.15 release. He combines AI expertise with practical problem-solving, real-world impact, and a strong commitment to mentoring in the wider tech community.

Olivier Debeugny is CEO and founder of OVHai LLM (formerly Lingua Custodia), now part of the OVH group. He leads one of the few teams in Europe able to design both foundation and domain-specific Large Language Models.
He founded Lingua Custodia in 2011, initially focused on AI models for the financial sector, before taking on full-time leadership in 2014. Over time, the company expanded into sovereign, large-scale language models for European industry, and was later acquired by OVHcloud to become OVHai LLM.
Having lived and worked across three European countries, Olivier is a committed advocate for the European project and digital sovereignty. For over 15 years, he has worked to convince major European organisations to adopt homegrown AI and digital solutions, driven by the belief that Europe’s technological future depends on building local alternatives rather than copying others.

AI Governance and Cybersecurity strategist, specializing in responsible AI and secure software policy for the Dutch Railways. Experienced CISO in Retail Banking, Media Broadcasting and Enterprise Software industries. Balancing engineering background with a pragmatic, people-centric approach. Credentials include AIGP, CISSP, CISM, CCSP, CIPP/e, and Lead Implementer ISO/IEC 42001:2023 (AIMS).

Matt Bauman is the SVP of Sales at Base44, where he leads the enterprise go-to-market strategy for the rapidly growing AI app-building platform. A specialist in scaling hyper-growth SaaS companies, Matt previously spent six years leading sales at ClickUp, scaling ARR from $10M to $400M. Earlier in his career, he built Pinterest’s SMB advertising business from $0 to $100M and held strategy and operations leadership roles at Snowflake leading up to its IPO, following roles at Google. An alumnus of Stanford Graduate School of Business, Matt brings deep expertise in PLG-to-SLG transitions and consumption-based GTM models.

Bala Muthiah is Director of Engineering at Lyft, leading teams responsible for Healthcare, Enterprise, and Ads. His work sits at the intersection of scale and responsibility, building AI-driven systems where bias mitigation, safety guardrails, and regulatory compliance aren’t afterthoughts but embedded engineering constraints from day one.

A people-first technology leader, Bala has evolved from an output-focused engineer to someone who champions AI as a force for accountability and equity in leadership. He brings a practical perspective to operationalizing responsible AI: the technical patterns that work, the trade-offs that matter, and how to build teams and processes that prioritize reliability without sacrificing speed.

An active speaker and podcast contributor, Bala regularly discusses leadership in the age of AI, building resilient teams under pressure, and scaling innovation sustainably. As a startup advisor and mentor, he works with founders and early-stage teams navigating the complexities of
responsible AI deployment. He’s also committed to expanding opportunity through mentorship and teaching computer science to underserved students. His conviction is clear: technology should scale people, culture, and connection, not just products. Responsibility isn’t a compliance burden but an engineering discipline.

Pranav Gokhale is a leading quantum computing researcher and technology entrepreneur, serving as the CTO of Infleqtion, a company specializing in quantum technologies. He co-founded Super.tech, a quantum software startup that merged with ColdQuanta in May 2022 to become Infleqtion. Pranav earned his Ph.D. in quantum computation from the University of Chicago, where his research aimed to bridge the gap between quantum hardware and software, focusing on practical applications of quantum computing. He has also been involved in developing AI and quantum software tools and optimization techniques to enhance hardware execution performance.

Žiga is working as copyright specialist at the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) in Alicante, Spain. He is dealing with copyright related topics online, such as piracy and Generative AI.
He joined the EUIPO in February 2023. Prior to that he spent 13 years in Brussels, among others working in the Copyright Unit of the European Commission, as well as in the private sector. He holds Masters’ degrees in Geography and History, European Studies, IP and ICT Law.

Dr. Yaser Al-Onaizan is the Deputy CEO & President of AI Products at HUMAIN.
Previously, he served as CEO of the National Center for AI (NCAI), the innovation, research, and development arm of the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA). At NCAI, he led a team of over 600 scientists and engineers, advancing Saudi Arabia’s nationalArabic LLM capabilities, including the launch of ALLaMin collaboration with IBM Watson and Microsoft Azure.
Prior to returning to Saudi Arabia, Dr. Al-Onaizanspent five years at Amazon, where he led key AI initiatives focused on speech and language services. He headed the AI Languages Lab, managing over 100 scientists and engineers across multiple regions, and contributed to establishing AWS AI’s presence in New York City.
Earlier in his career, he spent 15 years at IBM Research and the Watson Group, where he led work in neural machine translation, speech translation, multilingual information extraction, and medical coding. He directed several multi-year DARPA projects in collaboration with leading universities worldwide, including Stanford, MIT, CMU, and Cambridge.
Dr. Al-Onaizanhas been recognized with multiple international awards, has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers, and holds more than 20 patents. He is a senior member of several professional organizations, has served as program chair for internationalconferences, and was Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions as well as a board member of AMTA.
He holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, and an MBA from Columbia University.

Dustin Raney is Chief Strategy Officer at SuperTruth, a data trust infrastructure company that helps clinicians, pharmacists, payers and researchers rely on the data behind AI-driven decisions. SuperTruth scores data for trust and provenance, records consent, and keeps a verifiable account of what every AI agent touched, changed and under whose authority. It does not diagnose or treat patients. It makes the data those decisions rest on trustworthy and defensible. Dustin has spent more than 25 years in marketing and identity ecosystems. Before SuperTruth he led product strategy for Acxiom’s Real Identity portfolio and co-hosted the podcast Real Talk About Identity. He also serves as Chief Data Officer at Artists & Robots, where SuperTruth is the underlying technology platform. His work centers on a single question: not whether an AI system performs well, but whether the data underneath it can be trusted, consented to, and explained when someone has to answer for the outcome.

Mateusz Malinowski is driving breakthroughs in AI and AI-powered tools for filmmakers. Formerly at Google DeepMind , he pioneered visual question answering, shaping today’s VLM field. His mission: create models that can reason and simulate the real world.

Muhammad Lila is an ex-warzone correspondent (CNN, ABC) who has led dozens of missions to Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza, and beyond. He has survived gunfights, explosions, and interviewed world leaders, with 2x Emmy/SAJA nominations.

Today, as the founder of Goodable, he is solving a problem he first encountered in the field: how content algorithms control our attention and the devastating effects it has on our mental and emotional health.

Muhammad’s work sits at the intersection of machine learning, media, and wellbeing science. He is a sought-after speaker who regularly speaks on AI for Good, the ethics of engagement optimization, and what a decade in conflict zones taught him about building technology that takes human beings seriously.

Kirsten joined Octopus Ventures in 2021 to launch First Cheque Fund, its first dedicated pre-seed fund. The Fund is deliberately anti-thematic believing that the best founders are not restricted to any one sector. To date the Fund has backed over 70 startups across Europe.

Delphin Barankanira serves as the ISV Partner Engineering Lead at Google, where he focuses on data analytics, machine learning, and generative AI. Delphin is committed to empowering Google’s ISV partners and clients, helping them achieve their IT and digital transformation goals. His current role is centered on enabling organizations to become AI data-driven and AI-powered.

Daniel Kliewe the head of Research and Development for HAVER & BOECKER (H&B). H&B is a specialist in the sector of mineral processing and packaging technology for materials in bulk. H&B designs, manufacturers and services machines for the above-mentioned applications.
The R&D department has a variety of topics from mechatronics to digital transformation and AI. With more than 10 years of experience in innovation and digital transformation, Daniel is responsible to design H&B’s digital transformation journey and lead the company through it.
Prior to H&B, Daniel was the head of Predevelopment of the HOMAG Group and in charge for the development and organization of the HOMAG Digital Factory.
He studied mechanical engineering and made his PhD in the field of Industry 4.0 at a Fraunhofer Institut.

Frank Karlitschek is a long time open source contributor and former board member of the KDE e.V. He founded Nextcloud in 2016 to create a fully open source and decentralized alternative to big centralized cloud companies. Frank was an invited expert at the W3C to help to create the ActivityPub standard. Frank has spoken at MIT, CERN, Harvard and ETH and keynoted LinuxCon, Latinoware, FOSSASIA, Campus Party and many other conferences. Frank is the founder and CEO of Nextcloud GmbH. He is also a fellow of Open Forum Europe and an advisor to the United Nations regarding Open Source. Frank has been recognized with the European SFS Free Software Award 2023 and the Acteurs du Libre European Award 2023.

A Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree, Ruben Miessen has spent over ten years at the intersection of product leadership and emerging technology. As CEO and Co-Founder of LEGALFLY, he is building AI solutions that free corporate legal teams from the repetitive, low-value work that consumes too much of their time, allowing them to focus on the work that actually requires their expertise. His approach is grounded in deploying AI safely and responsibly, recognising that trust is foundational in the legal industry.

Tom Paton is the founder and CEO of AiMation, the company behind the pioneering AI movie Where The Robots Grow. Under his leadership, AiMation has developed Omnigen-01, a professional-grade AI platform for long-form content, and is preparing to launch a gamified video-on-demand platform set to redefine how audiences experience entertainment. With a career in entertainment spanning more than two decades, Paton has directed and produced 11+ feature films, television projects, and hundreds of commercials and music videos. This body of work has established him as one of the leading voices in AI who also deeply understands the business of traditional media. A self-described futurist, Paton’s passion for innovation and emerging media drives every aspect of his work, positioning him at the forefront of the evolving intersection between technology and storytelling.

Alicia is a technology innovator in the space and robotics/physical AI sectors. She has launched systems to space for NASA, NOAA and Commercial customers around the world. As CTO at Spacedock, Alicia shaped up the future of space infrastructure through the development of intelligent berthing and docking systems. Alicia previously led as Co-Founder and CTO OffWorld, a robotics startup developing AI based mobile robots for extreme environments on Earth as a precursor to Lunar, Martian, asteroid, and free space applications. Now at Laser Aerospace, Alicia continues to push the envelope building the space economy of the 21st century. Alicia’s background in AI, robotics, space and software systems, has heavily influenced her approach to the development of physical AI systems for terrestrial and space applications, with several patents to her name in key technologies. Alicia holds a MSc. and PhD from Stanford University and a BSc. in Theoretical Physics from UAM, Spain.

Taavi Madiberk is the founder and CEO of Skeleton Technologies, which serves leading hyperscalers as the only provider of full power systems for AI infrastructure from the IT rack to the electrical grid. This includes CBU and BBU sidecars, double-conversion UPS, and power support for Solid-State Transformers.
Skeleton now has the largest engineering team and largest R&D team in the high power energy storage sector, and the world’s most modern supercapacitor factory for power systems without geopolitical political dependencies, rare Earth materials, or conflict minerals. It owns its entire value chain with production across Europe and is expanding its presence in the US too.
Madiberk also serves as an advisor to the Prime Minister of Estonia on his AI Council, helping Estonia become the first fully AI literate nation, and has cofounded $1bn+ deeptech firms, delivering critical sovereign capabilities across AI infrastructure, energy, and defense. He spends his time primarily between Europe, the US, and the Gulf as Skeleton continues to scale factories, teams, and deployments to solve the global power bottleneck for AI.

Professor of Human Robot Interaction, School of Computer Sciences, Northumbria University & National Robotarium UK. Prof Baillie, has a PhD and MSc in Computer Science. She undertakes research on the development of new user centred interaction technologies, including robotics, and the impacts that technology has on the population in terms of convenience, usability, performance and security. She is based at Northumbria University and in the National Robotarium, which is a world-leading institute for robotics and artificial intelligence, boasting unrivalled facilities to explore collaborative interaction between humans, robots and their environments. She is Chair of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Human Robot Interaction 2026 in Edinburgh, Scotland and has recently been elected to serve on the ACM’s European Committee.

Giancarlo Miluccio graduated in Economics from the University of Naples and holds an MBA from the Stoà School of Management. He began his career as a marketing specialist before joining L’Oréal as Commercial Manager for Turin. He held various marketing and commercial roles at L’Oréal, in Italy and at the Paris headquarters, increasingly focusing on data usage and governance. In 2014, he became Head of CMI & Data at L’Oréal France and was appointed Chief Data Officer in 2018, overseeing data strategy, including Data Quality, Management, Science, Business Intelligence, and Visualization. In 2020, he joined Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW) as Chief Data Officer and, in 2026, added responsibility for Digital, becoming Chief Digital & Data Officer. At URW, he supervises the digital ecosystem, drives data strategy, and defines the Consumer Insights plan, leveraging innovation and advanced analytics to enhance business performance and create new revenue streams.

Iliya teaches 1.5M+ students on the topics of AI, data science, and machine learning. He is co-founder and CEO of Juma Labs, a marketing superagent that executes complete workflows autonomously – analyzing data, generating content, and delivering ready-to-use assets. Apart from Juma (formerly Team-GPT), Iliya also co-founded 3veta and 365 Data Science.

Matt Henderson is the co-founder and CEO of Coral, an open-source data retrieval layer for AI agents. Previously, Matt was CEO of Stripe Europe and led the company’s international operations across product and engineering. Earlier in his career he was a product director at Amazon and Google, and co-founded the ML analytics startup Rangespan, acquired by Google.

Tee Ganbold is CEO and Co-Founder of Frontier/1, the Security First AI Cloud for Open Weight Model training, inference and observability with the control and ownership of IP, Data and Model the companies require today – rather than giving away everything to the large closed weight models. As nations and regulated enterprises race to build AI capability, Tee’s work gives governments, critical national infrastructure operators, and regulated industries the ability to verify, not just deploy, every layer of their AI stack. Headquartered in London with offices in San Francisco, Oslo, and Dublin, Frontier/1 works at the intersection of technology, policy, and national security — helping leaders in the UK, US, Norway and Europe move beyond infrastructure ownership toward genuine sovereignty. Tee’s central thesis: capability without integrity is not sovereignty, it’s exposure. True control requires coordination across the full stack and across sectors — technical, regulatory, and geopolitical. Before co-founding Frontier/1, Tee worked as a drone analyst, an experience that shaped her operator’s instinct for where capability breaks down under real-world pressure. A British founder splitting her time between London and California, she is also a committed advocate for technology access, supporting IamtheCODE’s mission to empower girls globally through STEM education.

Pedro Ignácio is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Docker, CNCF Ambassador and Microsoft MVP that drives security and innovation to his customers across EMEA and LATAM. Prior to being at Docker, Pedro led the observability engineering team at Latin America’s biggest financial institution, guiding more than 17,000 engineers. Pedro is also heavy on community duty, organizing events, meetups, speaking at conferences and contributing to open source projects.

Viswatej Seela is a Senior Data Scientist working in the U.S. financial services sector, where he designs and deploys production-scale machine learning and generative AI systems used across enterprise operations. His work focuses on bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI capabilities and the practical requirements of reliability, governance, and long-term system ownership in regulated environments.

Viswatej has hands-on experience building end-to-end AI systems, including system architecture design, model evaluation frameworks, monitoring strategies, and post-deployment governance. He has led the deployment of enterprise AI solutions that deliver measurable business impact through automation, operational efficiency, and improved decision support, while meeting strict compliance and risk standards.

In addition to his industry work, Viswatej has authored peer-reviewed technical publications in applied data science and regularly contributes to discussions on responsible AI adoption and real-world AI deployment challenges. He enjoys sharing practical lessons learned from moving AI systems beyond experimentation into reliable, production-ready platforms that organizations can trust and scale.

Alex founded Respeecher with Dmytro Bielievtsov and Grant Reaber in 2018. Since then the team has been focused on high-fidelity voice cloning. Their technology was the first synthetic speech adopted by big Hollywood productions, starting from 2019. Alex is in charge of Business Development and Strategy. The primary focus of Respeecher is improving voice cloning technology in several directions, including the democratization of the technology to let sound professionals and creators all over the world have access to this great tool. Respeecher technology is already applied in numerous projects, including Oscar-winning films, like Brutalist and Emilia Perez.

Nicole Pfister Fetz – a cultural policy consultant – is Secretary General of the European Writers’ Council (EWC) and of the Casa della Letteratura per la Svizzera italiana, as well as guest speaker at conferences, on panel discussions, in internal strategic processes within the cultural sector, and on cultural lobbying at the University of Basel. She has a degree in history of art and history and was Managing Director of A*dS (Authors of Switzerland), President of the Society of Swiss Art History (GSK), Suisseculture Sociale and worked in museums, independent cultural projects and education programmes. She has published numerous articles in the fields of history of art, cultural studies and the politics of literature.

Pieter is CEO of Genpact Germany and leads growth for the mid-market segment in Europe. With nearly 30 years of experience across IT, technology, and business services, Pieter leads Genpact’s growth in the German market and Europe’s mid-market segment, helping clients accelerate their digital and AI-led transformation journeys. Known for his strategic vision and ability to bridge technology with business value, Pieter is a trusted advisor to executives navigating complex change. His passion for building high-performing teams and driving innovation continues to make him a key enabler of Genpact’s global growth story.

Joel Tetreault is the Chief AI Officer at Dataminr, where he leads the company’s AI efforts in applied research and engineering. His teams are in charge of creating AI models that detect and summarize breaking events around the world in real time, as well as the next generation of agentic AI systems for real-time event detection.

A scientist and AI innovator with nearly 20 years of experience, Joel has led research teams and built products used by millions at companies like Grammarly, Yahoo, Nuance, and Educational Testing Services. He has more than 200 publications and patents in top-tier conferences and journals in AI.

Joel holds a MS and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester.

Chrissie is Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Aigency Amsterdam, an AI-native creative studio specializing in high-end synthetic media production for global brands. With a background in design and creative direction, she focuses on bridging traditional creative craft with emerging technology and building AI workflows that work in real-world production environments.

Kim Norman Sahm is a seasoned technology leader and Field CTO with over a decade of experience bridging deep technical expertise and enterprise strategy across cloud-native infrastructure, Kubernetes, and AI-driven platforms. Currently serving as Field CTO at Kimchi.dev by Cast AI, Kim operates at the intersection of innovation and customer impact – working with organizations globally to bring agentic AI and intelligent cloud optimization into production environments. His work is defined by a hands-on, field-first approach: partnering with customers to understand their challenges and co-creating solutions that are practical, scalable, and forward-looking.

Dr. Jana Retkowsky is an Assistant Professor at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, researching what happens to people, jobs, and organizations when AI becomes part of work. Previously, she was an AI adoption advisor at RTL Nederland and before that a postdoctoral researcher at the KIN Center for Digital Innovation. An ethnographer, Jana has interviewed 300+ people across 54 organizations about howAI, from predictive to generative AI, reshape work. Her study of creative work at RTL Nederland was published in Academy of Management Discoveries, it was featured in the Financial Times and NRC. She has also published in Harvard Business Review and Business Horizons, won an Emerald Literati Outstanding Paper Award. As the Ambassador for the Future of Work at BRAIN Nederland, Jana brings research insights to organizations and policymakers. She also wrote the AI deep dive in the ECE Top 250 Insights Report on the Netherlands’ fastest-growing firms by the Erasmus Center for Entrepreneurship. At World Summit AI 2026, she shares a human-centered view of how AI is reshaping work and organizations.

Dmitry Tikhomirov serves as Vice President and Global Head of the Microsoft Business Group at EPAM. He leads Microsoft Business, Technology Consulting and Delivery Services, guiding enterprises through cloud adoption and AI transformation. With over 25 years of experience in software engineering, cloud architecture, and AI, Dmitry is a recognised thought leader. He holds a master’s degree in Telecommunications. At EPAM, Dmitry champions client success by designing scalable AI platforms, redefining business models, and delivering measurable ROI on AI investments.

Diederick Croese is director of Quantum Delta’s Centre for Quantum & Society, lead Action Line 4 and member of the OQI Advisory Committee. He co-founded ventures like SingularityU Benelux, Minkowski and more recently, Applied Complexity and Simurgh Academy. He was part of the European Space Agency’s HRE Innovation Board and served as a moderator of programs focused on innovation and complexity for Comenius. At Deloitte he co-founded Fast Ventures. Concurrently, he contributed to HF Young, Founder Institute Amsterdam, and TEDxAmsterdam. Diederick started as a lawyer at Clifford Chance. He has a background in law (University of Amsterdam & Fordham University New York), governance (Erasmus ESAA) and philosophy (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).

Koen Groenland is passionate about translating the complex scientific world of Quantum Technology to tangible solutions that aid society. He is a recognized speaker and science communicator, known for engaging and interactive presentations. Koen obtained a PhD in the near-term applications of quantum computers from QuSoft, and is the author of ‘Introduction to Quantum Computing for Business’ (www.introtoquantum.org). As Innovation Officer at the University of Amsterdam, he is responsible for collaborations with industry, incubating spin-outs and growing an active ‘quantum ecosystem’. His key interests include developing use-cases for quantum computers, enhancing material science simulations, and the quantum impact on cybersecurity.

David is an Investigative researcher within the Algorithmic Accountability Lab at Amnesty Tech. He works at the intersection of technology, AI and human rights across research, policy and advocacy. His research focuses on investigating the deployment of AI and algorithmic systems by both State and private sector actors.

Noortje van Genugten is Vice President of Product at Albert Heijn, where she leads Product teams shaping the future of one of Europe’s most digitally advanced retailers. In her role, she drives large‑scale innovation across stores and digital channels, focusing on how AI and GenAI unlock better customer experiences while elevating the daily work of 100,000+ associates. With a background spanning analytics, data science, finance, and operational excellence, Noortje has been a central force behind Albert Heijn’s acceleration in AI. She previously co-built the company’s analytics and data science capabilities, and led breakthrough initiatives in demand forecasting, dynamic markdown, and food‑waste reduction, areas where AI now delivers measurable impact at scale. Noortje is the founder of the Women in Technology community at Albert Heijn, championing inclusion, visibility, and career growth for women across Product, Tech and Data Science.

Dirk Bergmann is Head of AI R&D at Haver & Boecker, a 137-year-old German industrial machinery manufacturer. Over more than a decade at the company, he has built and now leads a growing international team developing industrial AI infrastructure – from computer vision systems in production use and predictive analytics to VLA and reinforcement learning pipelines for humanoid robot manipulation. His team operates multiple Unitree G1 platforms and is developing the Industrial Humanoid Benchmark (IHB), a structured framework for evaluating humanoid platform readiness in real factory environments. Earlier in his career, Dirk spent four years deploying industrial systems on-site from Cochabamba to Tokyo across four continents

David Casem is CEO and Co-Founder of Telnyx, where he leads the company’s vision to modernize global communications infrastructure. Under his leadership, Telnyx has evolved from an early-stage startup into a globally licensed carrier operating its own private IP network and delivering voice, messaging, wireless, and AI capabilities on a unified platform

Luca Cartechini is the Co-Founder and CEO of Shop Circle, an AI-first platform building a permanent home for exceptional B2B software companies. Shop Circle has completed 20+ acquisitions and raised nearly $250M from leading global investors, serving 180,000+ customers worldwide. The platform acquires and scales mission-critical software businesses through its centralised AI team, embedding AI into products and deploying agentic workflows across the portfolio to drive growth, expand TAM, and improve margins. Beyond Shop Circle, Luca has lectured on entrepreneurship and corporate finance at ESCP Business School for five academic years. Earlier in his career, he worked in Equity Research at Jefferies, covering European technology, and in Venture Capital, investing in high-growth B2B software companies. Luca’s focus is on building a category-defining software platform for the AI era.

Itay is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Figma Weave (prev. Weavy), bringing 25 years in post-production and VFX into a new era of media creation. A former Flame artist, he now leads Weave’s brand vision, creative direction, and community movement toward Artistic Intelligence – scaling ideation and media creation.

Thien is a distinguished professional with over 15 years of expertise in digital marketing, data analytics and AI, renowned for his ability to drive transformation across diverse global business sectors. His comprehensive knowledge of digital channels, Martech, Adtech and AI technologies and their strategic application in marketing has consistently led to the successful execution of transformation projects, enhancing customer engagement and marketing analytics and fostering significant business growth. Throughout his extensive career, Thien has collaborated with leading enterprises, deploying innovative solutions and business cases to optimise marketing effectiveness and media efficiency improving marketing performance and business outcomes

Varya is the founding head of frontier research and partnerships at Birla AI Labs. Her team of researchers and engineers spans India, Germany, the US, and the UK, and she runs the lab’s collaborations with universities, governments, and enterprise partners. Birla AI Labs sits within the Office of Ananya Birla at the Aditya Birla Group.

Underlying her work is a sustained interest in how technology shapes knowledge, agency, and opportunity at scale.

Prior to this, she led product and government affairs at Network Capital – a career navigation platform. She managed the company’s partnership with the Government of India’s Atal Innovation Mission, bringing mentorship to 7.5 million school students, and organised Tinkerpreneur, the world’s largest online bootcamp, which taught entrepreneurship to over 50,000 students. She worked with Network Capital through its fundraise from Facebook and a subsequent acquisition.

Varya holds a BA (Hons) in Political Science and Economics from the University of Delhi and an MSc in Comparative Education from the University of Oxford. Her research on proof of personhood won Paper of the Year at the Future of Privacy Forum in 2024. Her broader research examines epistemic agency, trust, and privacy in digital environments.

Jasper Wognum is the co-founder and CEO of BrainCreators, a deep-tech company that turns expert knowledge into intelligent digital inspectors for infrastructure, industry, and the built environment. A serial entrepreneur, Jasper previously founded LookLive, an AI-driven fashion discovery platform, and co-founded AI Salon Amsterdam, a community connecting innovators, researchers, and policymakers shaping the future of responsible AI. As a thought leader with over two decades in technology and entrepreneurship, Jasper advocates for pragmatic, human-centered AI that delivers measurable real-world impact.

Kirill Skrygan is CEO of JetBrains, the company behind intelligent software development tools trusted by more than 15 million users and 88 Fortune Global Top 100 companies. He leads JetBrains as the company combines its deep expertise in code intelligence with AI to help developers and organizations build, understand and maintain software with confidence and stay in control as software development evolves. Before being appointed CEO, Kirill spent 14 years at JetBrains, playing a pivotal role in shaping industry-leading software development products used by millions worldwide. Earlier in his career, he worked in industrial .NET programming for U.S. healthcare systems. A software developer at heart, Kirill is particularly interested in how AI is changing the way software is built, the role of developers and engineering teams, and how organizations can adopt AI at scale without compromising quality, accountability or control. Kirill lives in Amsterdam and is passionate about inspiring people, a skill he developed while leading more than 100 athletes at the Ultimate Frisbee Club. Outside of JetBrains, he enjoys spending time and traveling with his family.

Diana Voiculescu is Vice President for High Tech and Consumer Goods at Genpact and Country Leader for Romania. Over a decade with Genpact, she has held European operations roles of increasing responsibility, building deep expertise across finance, global operations, and high-tech services. She works with global clients to scale digital operations and co-create AI-enabled solutions that combine technology with strong process and operational insight. Diana is also a strong advocate for future-ready talent and resilient delivery models. She is focused on expanding high-value work and strengthening regional talent hubs. Her experience at the intersection of AI, operations, and scalable transformation brings a practical enterprise perspective to discussions on the secure, resilient infrastructure needed to power the modern economy.

Brian Murphy is the Head of Data Science and Technology at Salesforce Ventures. Since joining in 2022, he supports the broader Ventures team by enabling data-driven investing and portfolio development. Before joining Salesforce Ventures, he worked at Two Sigma Investments and Harvard Business School. Brian holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and graduate degrees from Harvard University and the University of Oxford. Salesforce Ventures is the global investment arm of Salesforce and one of the most active technology investors in the world. For more than 15 years, we have backed exceptional founders building at the frontier of software and AI, with a portfolio that includes Anthropic, ElevenLabs, Physical Intelligence, Crusoe, Lovable, and hundreds of other leading companies. Beyond capital, we help founders scale by connecting them to Salesforce’s global ecosystem of customers, partners, and expertise.

David Martineau is Chief AI Officer at Sia, based in Paris. He advises executive committees and technology leaders across all aspects of AI-driven transformation. With an engineering degree from CentraleSupélec, he brings deep expertise in artificial intelligence, data science, and quantitative analytics.

Helping JetBrains customers to increase productivity, improve business outcomes and get AI ROI with agent-first engineering. Lapsed software developer, startup CTO, product manager and technology journalist.

Responsible AI leader with 18 years’ experience across retail and tech, having held key roles at Decathlon, IKEA, and Albert Heijn. Architected and scaled AI/ML solutions now serving 1 billion unique customers across 80 countries, generating 4 billion visits annually. Expert in ML and MLOps, I lead cross-functional teams to drive cost efficiency, elevate KPIs, and foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous learning.

At SAP Niels is responsible for Business AI in the Benelux region. Niels combines technical expertise in the domain of data and AI with a background in Organizational Psychology and Business Administration

Since 2023, Sven Stevenson has been the Director for the Coordination of Supervision on AI and Algorithms at the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, DPA). In 2023, the DPA took up the new role of national coordinating authority for the supervision of AI systems and algorithm risks. His department works on proactive identification and analyses of risks related to AI systems and algorithms. This is published twice a year in the AI & Algorithmic Risks Report Netherlands (ARR). The department facilitates cooperation between supervisors, national compliance desks, academia, NGOs and sectoral bodies. In addition, the department works on guidance and policy contribution. Currently, the department is strongly involved with the coordination and preparation of national supervision in the Netherlands on the AI Act.

Before joining the DPA, Mr. Stevenson was employed at the Dutch Central Bank for 14 years, working in the Financial Stability Department and the Resolution Department. He was seconded to the IMF (2014) and was co-chair of the Taskforce on Deposit Guarantee Schemes at the European Banking Authority (2018-2023). Mr. Stevenson holds an MSc. in Economics (2007) and an MBA (2021) from the University of Amsterdam.

Laura bends design systems, materials, and sometimes herself (often upside down). She likes to say she lives under a rock—her own creative escape from the noise. Her process runs on morning dog walks, a second brain that doubles as a therapist, and a refusal to build what everyone else is building.

As the Head of R&D for Siemens’ AI& Robotics within Factory Automation, I lead global teams in delivering cutting-edge AI solutions that transform production automation. Our mission? To accelerate the adoption and scalability of Industrial AI, Machine Vision and Robotics, enabling our customers to harness AI’s power for greater efficiency and adaptability across industries. With over 12 years of experience in software development management (PMP certified) and expertise in agile methodologies (TDD, CI, Pair Programming, Scrum, SAFe, XP, FDD), I am dedicated to fostering agile, high-performance teams that drive strategic product innovation. My 17+ years in discrete and process industries encompass comprehensive IT and OT projects, including MES/MOM, LIMS, PIMS, B2B, and tailored systems for sectors like metals & mining, food & beverages, and petrochemicals.

Dr. Kern is the CEO of LinkGevity, an AI-powered biotech company driving innovation in drug discovery for aging and resilience loss. Carina is renowned for her pioneering work on aging mechanisms and lifespan extension. Her research has led to the development of a first-in-class necrosis inhibitor targeting cellular degeneration (Anti-Necrotic™). This novel therapeutic has garnered global attention and the support of major government and scientific institutions, and is now advancing toward clinical trials as a potential breakthrough treatment for age-related disease.

Joe McDonald is a serial founder with over 12 years of experience in the energy sector. After being turned down by Google for not being considered ‘Google material,’ he started his entrepreneurial journey by becoming a founding employee at energy startup Limejump. As former Vice President of Sales and Product at Limejump, he led the development of virtual power plants that allow small, renewable energy assets to access the market opportunities of larger utilities and steered the company’s successful exit to Shell in 2019, earning him a spot on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Europe list. Motivated by the inefficiencies in energy market transactions and a belief that energy should be a human right, he co-founded tem. in 2021 to reimagine the entire transactions infrastructure of energy. The platform uses a matching algorithm to make the way we buy and sell energy more transparent, decentralised, simpler and a fairer deal for all.

Senior SAP Development Consultant specialized in delivering custom development projects with a strong focus on SAP Business Technology Platform and AI-driven solutions. With deep expertise in extensibility patterns and a hands-on approach to both architecture and development, bridging the gap between core SAP capabilities and the cutting-edge possibilities offered by BTP and artificial intelligence.

James leads Gen25’s Strategy and Transformation practice, bringing over a decade of experience delivering complex change across international organisations. His background combines consulting leadership with senior in-house roles across multiple industries, with direct accountability for growth, operating models, service lines and large-scale transformation programmes. He works with executive teams on AI strategy, growth transformation and operational improvement, translating ambition into commercially grounded, executable programmes. James was also a contributor to the European Commission report “The Opportunity for AI to Enhance Business Support Processes”, shaping perspectives on how AI can drive enterprise productivity and performance.

Amit is Genpact’s global leader for AI and Agentic Services across the Hitech and Manufacturing industries. He helps clients reimagine their businesses and deliver value at scale through AI. With more than 20 years of industry experience, he has supported numerous companies across industries in unlocking business value through AI-led transformation across their operations. He also offers deep insight and a strong point of view on the future of AI, along with how companies should adopt it.

A dual British/German national with deep insight into European buyer behaviour, Justin has lived in the Heidelberg area since 2006 and brings over 25 years of experience in taking enterprise tech to market for global players like Cisco, AppDynamics, Software AG, Microsoft, and now Camunda. A seasoned speaker and panellist, including appearances at multiple PMA events in 2025 (London, Berlin and Amsterdam), Justin has led as CMO, Global Digital Transformation Lead, and VP of Product Marketing. Across every role, his focus remains consistent: tackling real customer challenges with substance, strategy, and proven results.

Specialising in AI-driven application development and enterprise innovation within the Development & Technology Services team. As the architect of the GDH LIVE Hackathon format, he brings SAP’s latest AI capabilities to life at flagship events across the globe — while also advising customers on AI and automation solutions that tackle real-world business challenges.

Shubham Chandra is President of Chandra Associates, the biotechnology R&D firm in Katy, Texas, he founded in 2005, and the inventor of AromaVision. His work centres on applied AI, with 48+ patent applications pending in medical AI, retinal diagnostics, VOC sensing and genomics. AromaVision pairs an economical gas sensor with an interpretable AI layer grounded in over 5,000 aroma molecules, making smell a readable data source for agriculture, food, energy and health, with the AI running on site so data stays with its owners. He has taken an invention from patent to shelf: his breathable modified-atmosphere packaging, protected by 30 granted patents across nine jurisdictions including the US, EU, Japan and India, is licensed to a Fortune 500 company and sold in the US consumer market. That work gave him experience of licensing and of how fresh-produce markets adopt new technology. His career began in the cold chain, as a Senior Mechanical Engineer at Arthur D. Little consulting on Department of Defense refrigeration programs, followed by more than 18 years as a consultant to U.S. Army DEVCOM (formerly NSRDEC). He is a Board Advisor to Adnexus Biotech and Networkli, and holds an MS in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University.

I am an ex-banker turned startup founder turned venture capitalist, with a strong belief that the most innovative startups have the power to reinvent the way we live. I have been on the roller coaster of entrepreneurship and understand the importance of ‘just being there’ for a founder. Like the majority of my Wharton classmates, I graduated and joined finance. I started off as a banker at JP Morgan Chase before eventually starting my own company that was incubated at Y Combinator. As founder/CEO of a healthtech venture, I led workflows across product, operations, sales, fundraising and HR to try and successfully piece together the crazy puzzle of startup success. After 4 years at DocTalk, I had tasted failure in terms of scaling a business, and wanted to share my learnings of what to do and, more importantly, what not to do with aspiring entrepreneurs. I launched StartupConnect, a collaborative social organization for founders to learn from their peers. During this journey, I saw that working with driven founders on early-stage ideation and execution invigorates me and the possibility of backing founders and partnering with them in a mission-oriented manner became my calling. Since then, I have worked at Progression Fund and Accel before meeting Mattias and Mike and falling in love with their vision of building a truly tech-driven VC. My personal experiences have shown me that startups are really really hard. Thousands of data points have to line up for progress to be made. The life of a founder is not one of glamor but of grit and determination – where lows are soul-crushingly low and very frequent while the rare high is never as all-encompassing as you would like. I always add this lens to my relationships with founders. I am continuously excited by the remarkable founders working on fantastic ideas. I firmly believe that through our combination of data-driven investing and human-centric relationships, Moonfire is uniquely positioned to help early-stage founders reach their next milestone while never losing focus over the bigger long-term target. I am excited for the journey ahead and am happy to chat on how we could partner up. Dont worry, I am quite informal in how I communicate and will give you a real representation of my thoughts.

Roderik Koenders is Lead AI at Eraneos and an experienced builder of production AI systems and the teams behind them. With expertise in agentic AI, data engineering and Python, he helps public and private organizations find, build and embed agentic ways of working. Previously, he spent nine years at Booking.com, where he led the experimentation platform and built the statistical methodology and governance that enabled 10.000 employees to test their assumptions rather than trust them. He now asks the harder question: not whether AI works, but how to make sure it delivers real value, and how to build an organization that can sustain it.

After years steering spatial, TV, and multimodal systems, Jessica now focuses on scaling design craft without losing your sanity in the auto-layout weeds. Equal parts systems architect and workflow pragmatist, she treats flight itineraries with the same unhinged attention to detail as her component variants.

Dave Kiwi is Partner and Practice Lead Data & AI at Eraneos, with over 20 years of experience in digital transformation and innovation. He is highly experienced in Data & AI and has led the development of secure data and AI solutions for a diverse range of organisations in the industrial sector. Dave was CTO at a leading market player and combines deep insight into complex business processes with academic expertise. He holds a PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and is the founder of the VU Knowledge Hub for the Strategic Management of AI. His passion lies at the intersection of technology, strategy and impactful innovation.

Marina Adami is a journalist at the Reuters Institute reporting on the media industry around the world, with a particular focus on AI. As well as reporting on key AI and media issues, she has carried out and documented her own experimentation with AI tools, attended and reported on industry conferences, and interviewed the journalists at the forefront of newsroom AI applications. She also leads a monthly AI-focused takeover of the Reuters Institute newsletter.

Cristiano Ferreira is Head of Global Business Services (GBS) at Ferring Pharmaceuticals and General Manager of the Ferring Services Center. Cristiano is a GBS thought leader focused on shaping and advancing end-to-end, value-driven operating models that enable scale, resilience, and measurable business impact. In this role, Cristiano drives and influences the GBS agenda across Finance and other enabling functions, with a strong emphasis on process ownership, governance, and outcome-based performance. Cristiano actively sponsors and steers enterprise transformation initiatives centered on standardization, intelligent automation, and next-generation GBS capabilities. A multilingual executive with a strong track record of leading diverse teams across geographies and cultures, Cristiano is known for influencing senior stakeholders, bridging global and local perspectives, and enabling teams and partners to successfully deliver tangible results and sustainable transformation at scale in direct support of Ferring’s strategic priorities.

Tyler Hannan is an experienced technologist with a passion for human interaction. With a career that has spanned the private and public sectors, large enterprises, consulting, and startups of varying success, he has maintained a focus on data persistence and analysis. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, called on to provide commentary about market trends impacting the design and deployment of database solutions and distributed systems.

Jose Velasco is a Spanish producer, entrepreneur, and CEO of PLIA, an AI-powered production software company built to modernize film and television production. With a background in commercial production, he has worked on more than 150 music videos and advertising projects, developing practical experience across shoots, budgets, teams, and client-driven content.

Through PLIA, Jose focuses on bringing artificial intelligence into the real production workflow: script breakdowns, scheduling, budgeting, production tracking, and communication. His goal is not to replace creativity, but to give producers, line producers, assistant directors, and production teams smarter infrastructure to work faster, reduce inefficiencies, and make better decisions.

Alongside PLIA, Jose continues to develop international film, documentary, and television projects through Souvenir Studios, combining hands-on production experience with a forward-looking approach to how content gets made.

Sarah Darweesh wants to make AI work for people, not the other way around. With a background spanning AI consulting, business transformation, customer experience, and communications, she brings a human perspective to a field that often focuses on technology first. She is particularly interested in the questions many organizations are grappling with today: how do we innovate at speed without losing sight of trust, transparency, and human values? Known for her pragmatic approach and ability to make complex topics accessible, she helps organizations navigate AI innovation in a way that is both ambitious and responsible

Marisa Monteiro Borsboom is a Portuguese lawyer, legal entrepreneur, educator, trainer and mentor. She founded Humanity of Things Agency and the Augmented Human Intelligence Axis (AHIA) to help people understand and shape the technologies transforming their lives. Her work connects the humanities, law and education with AI, cybersecurity and quantum technology. A TEDx speaker on augmented human intelligence and the right to be analog, she wrote “Manifesto of Existence”, a chapter in a book by women authors. She is a leading voice in the Women in Tech global movement and active in G100 advocacy. Marisa has contributed to CEPS task forces on privacy, AI and cybersecurity, and quantum security. She currently participates in the CEPS EU Apply AI Task Force’s Government & Public Sector track. She also contributed to the discussions behind Friends of Europe’s 10 Policy Choices for a Renewed Social Contract for Europe. A member of the Portuguese Quantum Institute and the Executive Board of Women in Quantum Development, she co-leads Public Awareness & Societal Engagement, Working Group 3 of UNESCO’s Global Quantum Initiative, representing the Institute. Her purpose is a human renaissance: a future where intelligence meets agency and humanity.

Panley is a Forward Deployed Engineer at Runpod with nearly a decade of experience in software engineering. Passionate about the intersection of technology and user experience, Panley works closely with customers to help them adopt and scale AI/ML solutions in real-world environments. Through this hands-on experience, Panley has gained valuable insight into how organizations build with AI and overcome implementation challenges. Panley is passionate about making AI more accessible and empowering developers and teams to innovate with confidence.

Ana Hristova is Senior Vice President, AI Transformation at Marlabs Europe, where she helps organizations close the gap between AI ambition and business results. She helps clients identify high-value opportunities for transformation, build the data and organizational foundations required for success, and move from experimentation to practical adoption at scale. With more than a decade of experience in data and digital transformation, Ana has worked across consulting, delivery, business development, and client leadership. Her focus is on helping organizations put the right information in front of the right people, reduce manual effort, and create solutions that people actually use. Today, her work centers on AI transformation, with a particular emphasis on purpose-built agents, trusted data foundations, and the practical realities of deploying AI in complex enterprise environments. Ana is a strong advocate for measuring AI success through business outcomes rather than technology adoption alone, helping organizations bridge the gap between promising demonstrations and lasting operational value.

Brian Rowe is Senior Vice President of AI and Machine Learning at Marlabs, where he leads the company’s artificial intelligence practice and advises Fortune 500 and government executives on enterprise AI strategy, governance, and adoption. A four-time founder with two successful exits, Brian has spent two decades building AI products: from early recommendation engines at iGoDigital and ExactTarget to today’s agentic AI platforms. He also served as Global Director of E-Business at Cummins, where he launched five online businesses and managed a 100-person organization and $20M budget, earning recognition from CIO Magazine. Brian’s recent work includes architecting an agentic AI platform for a global financial services enterprise, and building PromptRouter®, a Marlabs proprietary platform that strengthens enterprise AI security while accelerating advanced analytics deployment. He also founded the Marlabs AI Innovation Lab, which produces reusable accelerators and frameworks that cut implementation time.

Paige Piani is Chief Revenue Officer at Marlabs, where she leads the company’s global revenue strategy and go-to-market execution, helping enterprise clients accelerate their AI and digital transformation. With over 25 years of experience in technology consulting and enterprise services, Paige has built and scaled high-performing organizations that deliver business outcomes for Fortune 500 organizations. Prior to joining Marlabs, she most recently served as Executive Vice President and Head of Healthcare & Life Sciences at Encora and previously held senior leadership roles at EPAM Systems, Cognizant, and Publicis Sapient, where she led large-scale transformation initiatives for healthcare and life sciences enterprises. Beyond her role at Marlabs, Paige serves on the board of directors of Operation Delta Dog, a nonprofit that rescues shelter dogs and trains them as assistance animals for veterans with PTSD and traumatic brain injury.

Theresa Yurkewich Hoffmann is Head of Responsible AI at Kainos, where she leads a multidisciplinary team helping organisations adopt AI responsibly and at scale. A recognised Responsible AI practitioner, Theresa works with public and private sector organisations to operationalise AI governance, assurance, and human-centred principles for high-impact AI systems.

Theresa is an active contributor to the UK’s AI ecosystem, participating in initiatives including the UK AI Assurance Consortium and the BRAID Stakeholder Forum. Theresa has authored thought leadership on trust and sovereignty in AI, advises organisations on navigating emerging regulation, and regularly speaks at international conferences on emerging themes in wider responsible AI. Theresa previously held roles at Microsoft, the City of London Corporation, and various international policy and legal organisations.

Theresa was named a TechWomen100 Winner in 2026.

Dr Angus Finney is a leading authority on Artificial Intelligence and the film and screen industries. He is a co-founder of AFIRM, a Dubai equity investment vehicle, and has recently partnered with Matthew Blakemore’s AI Caramba! Together they are launching an AI risk management framework suite for companies, and co-authoring Snakes & Ladders: An AI Strategy Playbook for Leaders (Routledge, 2027).
Angus is the author of the recently launched AI and the Screen Entertainment Industries (Routledge) and Once Upon A Time: The Future of Human Storytelling in the Age of AI (Kamera Books, May 2027).
Angus is Cambridge University’s MBA Coach on the Creative Industries In the Digital Age concentration at Judge Business School, where he is a Fellow.

Sverker Sikström is Professor of Psychology at Lund University and affiliated with Karolinska Institutet. He is the founder of TalkToAlba, which builds AI tools that support clinicians in mental health care and social work. For two decades his research has asked one question: can people’s own words measure mental health better than rating scales? His lab developed methods that analyse free text with language models. Their studies show that open-ended answers can match, and often beat, standard questionnaires in assessing emotional states, depression and anxiety. The work has been published in Psychological Methods, Scientific Reports, Communications Psychology and the Journal of Anxiety Disorders. TalkToAlba turns that research into practice. It records and transcribes clinical conversations and drafts assessments and notes, which the clinician reviews and signs off. The software is being evaluated in AIMH, a clinical investigation approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority and the Swedish Medical Products Agency. Sverker has supervised more than fifteen PhD students. He speaks on how AI can make clinicians better without replacing them, and on what evidence and regulation must be in place first.

Dmitry Ratushnyak is Head of Data & AI Platform at LIPTON Teas and Infusions, based in Amsterdam. He is accountable for making sure the data organization has the infrastructure it needs to deliver AI and analytics use cases, and that what gets delivered can be trusted. His focus is standardization and trust at the foundation layer: bringing every data engineering pipeline onto common, generic standards, and holding data quality high enough that the business can make decisions on the numbers without second-guessing them. He leads a global team spanning data platform, data architecture and data engineering, working at the point where platform reliability turns into business value.

Amit Kinha, Field CTO, DoiT. Amit sits on the Governing Boards of the FinOps Foundation and the Tokenomics Foundation. He previously built and led the Cloud FinOps function at Citi and was a backend engineer at Goldman Sachs on Marcus and Apple Card.

Fanni Burai is Marketing & Program Manager at B/ACE Global (formerly DutchBasecamp), working with ambitious startups and scale-ups as they take their businesses into new markets and across Europe.

Her work sits where technology meets the market: working closely with founders, investors, corporates and ecosystem leaders to understand what makes a product stick, what customers actually need, and what it takes to scale beyond the first market.

Eric Lajoie is a Telco & AI Sales Specialist for SUSE in EMEA. In his current capacity, Eric is responsible for end to end solution selling, be it GenAI with Agentic Workflows, 5G, or AIOps. His key interests and achievements are in design and implementation of 5G deployments and NVIDIA AI Enterprise solutions with Red Hat and others.

Stefan Stefanov is a Senior AI Product Manager at Progress, working at the intersection of AI, developer tools, and modern software engineering. His work focuses on turning emerging AI capabilities into practical products and workflows for developers, including agentic development, coding assistants, and software factory concepts designed to make AI-assisted engineering more consistent and scalable. With a background in both engineering and product management, Stefan brings a practical perspective on how new technologies move from experimentation into real-world use. He is also an active speaker who enjoys sharing lessons, ideas, and product experiences with the broader technology community. Outside of work, Stefan is an enthusiastic early adopter of new technology—from software tools and smart gadgets to gaming and the latest developments in AI.

Jonas Huthmacher is the Senior Director of Product Management for Global Nexis Solutions (gNS), a business unit of LexisNexis, a division of RELX. He is responsible for the product strategy and development of conversational search capabilities within Nexis+ with Protégé. Over the years, Jonas has held various product leadership roles across search, analytics, intellectual property and innovation solutions within LexisNexis. Prior to joining LexisNexis, Jonas held product management roles at Microsoft and led startup ventures focused on bringing new technologies to market.

Development Consultant for SAP helping customers to extend their business solutions using the SAP Business AI Platform. Architect and developer for CAPM and AI applications with a deep focus on SAP Business Technology Platform.

Peter Souter is a Senior Solutions Engineer at Datadog. He has worked all over the globe for over a decade, helping organizations automate and gain observability into their platforms – from government to startups to large enterprise companies

Jason is an orbital data centres (ODCs) pioneer, and Space industrialist and technologist with over 20 years of experience developing and deploying Space and defence capabilities. Currently CEO and Co-Founder of OwlO Cloud, a European in-stealth Space company. Prior to his current role, he led Axiom Space’s development, deployment, and monetisation of orbital cloud services for commercial, civil, and defence & security applications in Earth-independent cloud computing, cyber, and AI. Prior to Axiom, he was founder and CEO at Finsophy PBC and has held senior management and technical roles with Booz Allen and Raytheon. In his career, he has contributed towards the development and deployment of over 25 novel technologies and platforms in Space, defence, and FinTech. He has a BS in Astrophysics from the Florida Institute of Technology, a MS in Applied Physics from the University of Central Florida, and a MS in Engineering Management from the University of Southern California.

Shobhit Bhutani joined VMware in 2021 as Principal Product Marketing Manager and is VMware’s Gen AI Product marketing lead. Shobhit has 20+ years of leadership experience in Sales and Marketing, Manufacturing and Technical Support at VMware, Dell Technologies, Pure Storage, and Rackspace. Shobhit’s passions are Technology Solutions & Product Marketing. Shobhit holds a Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s in Industrial Engineering.

Himanshu Singh runs product marketing at Broadcom for AI, Kubernetes, Cloud Management, and modern workloads on VCF. His extensive past experience includes product management and product marketing leadership roles, managing and growing cloud businesses at Microsoft Azure, IBM Global Services, and VMware. Himanshu holds a B. Eng. (Hons) degree from Nanyang Technological University Singapore, and an MBA from Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

Ram (Ramkumar Venketaramani) leads Product Management for AI Factory and AI Services in VCF. He has extensive product management leadership experience bringing several new products and solutions to the market in the AI, Edge Computing, and Telco at Ciena, Juniper Networks, Openwave Systems, Bytemobile, and Oracle. He holds Bachelors of Engineering from Bharathiyar University, India and MBA from Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.

Mohamed Elkady is a System Architect and Tech Lead in the Data & AI team at Philips Hue, Signify, where he designs and leads the development of AI-driven systems for smart home products used by millions of customers. He brings more than a decade of experience in software architecture, with a recent focus on taking AI agents from early experimentation to reliable production systems. His work spans agent architecture, cloud platforms, mobile applications, and IoT systems. Mohamed guides technical teams and architects end-to-end AI solutions, with a strong focus on reliability, observability, responsible AI, privacy, and the other practical constraints of building customer-facing AI products.

Rob Krams has received his medical degree, computing degree, and PhD from the Free University in London, and became assistant and associate professor of the world-leading Thorax centre, Rotterdam after working in the USA- best bioengineering department in John Hopkins University (1998-1999, Baltimore, USA). He received several prizes, amongst one of them the prestigious “ Established Investigator” of the Dutch Heart Foundation. In 2007 he became Professor of Cardiac Bioengineering at Imperial College. In 2018, he arrived at Queen Mary University where he became a Professor in Molecular Bioengineering, a Scientific Director of the CVDHub, and a head of Division. He is an editor/co-editor of 13 journals, published more than 600 papers, with more than 50 papers cited >100 times, is cited more than 30,000 times overall and has a H-index of 62. He is invited more than 10-20 times per year for (keynote) lectures and has won more than £26,000k of funding over the last few years

Fabian Schmidt is a serial founder and became one of Germany’s youngest adjunct lecturers in AI & Entrepreneurship at 23. He graduated from Babson College, the #1 ranked university in the world for Entrepreneurship. He’s now building Obsurver, which detects sensor degradation in safety-critical autonomous systems before unreliable data causes problems.

Emils is an award-winning computer scientist and digital health expert building building AI infrastructure for continuous care at CAIA Care. Previous track record of building HealthTech with 1.5M patients in EU and the Middle East, products for Pharma and Hospitals.

Canberk is co-founder and CEO of Novium, a Generative AI company transforming R&D in the chemicals and materials industry. He is focused on using AI to accelerate industrial innovation and product development.

Oscar is Founding Engineer at TryIto, where he works on ML components for its hybrid physics-AI infrastructure for stable physics simulation. He holds an MPhys in Physics from Manchester and MPhil in Scientific Computing from Cambridge, where his research applied graph neural networks to adaptive mesh refinement. He previously processed data for protein-design GNN research at Cambridge’s Sormanni Group and led the physics simulation team at Hyperloop Manchester.

Steve Korver is an Amsterdam-based journalist by background and a generalist by temperament, and has spent over 30 years writing for general audiences about food, drink, travel, culture and, eventually, AI. Along the way he has won awards as a copywriter, editor-in-chief and screenwriter. For the past seven years he has worked mainly as a thought leadership ghostwriter and content strategist for organisations applying AI in life sciences and manufacturing. That work means translating between researchers, regulators, executives and the people their work is meant to serve. He believes good communication is largely about cutting to the chase.

Dorian is Field CTO at Gravitee, where he leads enterprise strategy around AI agent governance, API management, event-driven architectures. Building on his background as Lead Solution Engineer and Technical Consultant, Dorian has guided numerous large organizations in implementing sustainable API strategies and cloud-native systems. Passionate about data across all endpoints, synchronous, asynchronous, and autonomous, Dorian brings practical expertise and vision to discussions on scaling modern integration platforms and safely governing digital workforces.

CJ Maloney is Learning Lead at AI4ALL, where she helps bridge industry expertise and everyday practitioners. Earlier in her career, she held leadership and educator roles at the American School of The Hague and Taipei American School. CJ holds a Master of Education from Cambridge College and an Executive Diploma in Global HR Leadership from Nyenrode Business Universiteit. Her work connects learning, inclusion and technology, with a focus on practical AI literacy for for the future of work. CJ is currently developing WorkReady, a career-transition platform for up-skilling and re-skilling experienced professionals. Her aim is to help make AI tools understandable, useful, safeguarded and accessible. This week, she serves as MC for AI Labs.

Alexandra Podsekina is the Founder of TemsAI, an EU-funded industrial AI platform connecting people, machines and systems on the shop floor. A former senior executive at PepsiCo, Philip Morris International, Mondelēz and Nestlé, she brings 20+ years of manufacturing and transformation leadership to industrial AI

DR. WERNER VOGELS, CTO, AMAZON.COM

Dr. Werner Vogels is Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company’s customer-centric technology vision.

 As one of the forces behind Amazon’s approach to cloud computing, he is passionate about helping young businesses reach global scale, and transforming enterprises into fast-moving digital organizations.

 Vogels joined Amazon in 2004 from Cornell University where he was a distributed systems researcher. He has held technology leadership positions in companies that handle the transition of academic technology into industry. Vogels holds a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

On his blog, all things distributed, Werner shares insights and thought leadership content on a range of topics, such as cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, as well as his annual technology predictions.

Stuart Russell is a pioneer in the understanding and uses of artificial intelligence (AI), its long-term future, and its relation to humanity. He also is a leading authority on robotics and bioinformatics.

Stuart Russell is the author or coauthor of three books on knowledge, reasoning, and machine learning, including the standard textbook on artificial intelligence. Stuart Russell is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC-Berkeley and Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC-San Francisco.

Artificial intelligence. AI is a machine’s ability to perceive its environment and use that information to maximise its chance at succeeding at some goal. All of the technologies behind artificial intelligence are evolving at exponential rates and are just now beginning to rocket up the curve. Soon artificially intelligent machines will be doing things we can barely conceive, in virtually every area of human business, life, and culture. Few people understand this future better than Stuart Russell, who wrote the standard textbook on AI (with coauthor Peter Norvig), now in its third edition.

Robotics. Stuart Russell is also a leading researcher in the practical applications of machine intelligence. If AI is the brain of the machine of the future, the robot is its body. Robots are taking over more and more functions that once required a human actor, with far-reaching consequences — and opportunities — for people, businesses, and society as a whole. He has focused recently on the threat of autonomous weaponry.

Biological information. As an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery, Stuart has been researching computational physiology, with a current focus on Intensive Care Unit monitoring systems. He is a leader in the development of technologies that make sense of biological data and that apply this information in ways that advance human health.

Credentials. In addition to the positions already mentioned, Stuart Russell holds the SmithZadeh Chair in Engineering at UC-Berkeley and is Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics. He is the recipient of many awards and held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris from 2012 to 2014. He is a researcher at a number of research centers, including the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR), the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), and the Synthetic Biology Institute (SBI). He is the founder and Vice-President of Bayesian Logic, Inc., a data analysis start-up under contract with the UN to build a new Nuclear Test Ban Treaty global monitoring system.

Gary Marcus, scientist, bestselling author, and entrepreneur, was CEO and Founder of the machine-learning startup Geometric Intelligence, recently acquired by Uber, and is known for his provocative and bold claims in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Trained by Steven Pinker, he received his PhD at MIT at age 23. His professional research, published in leading journals such as Science, Nature, Cognition, and Artificial Intelligence, has focused on the foundations of cognition in humans, animals and machines, spanning fields from developmental psychology to neuroscience to genetics to artificial intelligence. A special interest has been on the challenge of endowing machines with common sense.

He is also well-known for his writing for the general public, including frequent essays and op-eds for The New Yorker and The New York Times. His books include The Algebraic Mind, The Birth of the Mind, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind, The New York Times Bestseller, Guitar Zero and The Future of the Brain: Essays By The World’s Leading Neuroscientists.

In a 2012 essay for The New Yorker, he was perhaps the first person to publicly criticize deep learning, drawing on arguments he developed in his 2001 technical book The Algebraic Mind. More recently, in a 2018 arXiv article, Deep Learning: A Critical Appraisal, he asked whether deep learning might be “approaching a wall.” The challenges he laid out there were covered everywhere from The
New York Times to Wired to The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.

In another provocative 2012 essay, Moral Machines, Marcus was the first to adapt “trolley problems” to driverless cars, anticipating much recent research on the ethics of AI. His next book, REBOOT: Getting to AI We Can Trust, to be published by Pantheon in Fall 2019, co-authored with Ernie Davis, calls for a fundamental rethinking of current approaches to artificial intelligence.

Yoshua Bengio is Full Professor of the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research, head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), CIFAR Program co-director of the CIFAR program on Learning in Machines and Brains,  Canada Research Chair in Statistical Learning Algorithms. His main research ambition is to understand principles of learning that yield intelligence. He supervises a large group of graduate students and post-docs. His research is widely cited (over 80000 citations found by Google Scholar in September 2017, with an H-index of 101).

Yoshua Bengio is currently action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research, associate editor for the Neural Computation journal, editor for Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning, and has been associate editor for the Machine Learning Journal and the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth is interested in understanding the biological basis of conscious experience, a topic he considers one of the greatest challenges for 21st century science. His groundbreaking research provides fascinating insight into what this means for storytelling. His 2017 TED talk has been viewed over 5 million times.

Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and Codirector of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He seeks to understand the biological basis of consciousness by bringing together research across neuroscience, mathematics, AI, computer science, psychology, philosophy and psychiatry. Key to his work is exploring the relationship between perception and hallucination, and how this applies to the experience of being a “self.” Seth is also Editor in Chief of the academic journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow. He was the 2017 President of the British Science Association (Psychology Section).

Athina Kanioura is Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at PepsiCo. PepsiCo products are enjoyed by consumers more than one billion times a day in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. PepsiCo generated more than $86 billion in net revenue in 2022, driven by a complementary beverage and convenient foods portfolio that includes Lay’s, Doritos, Cheetos, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, Mountain Dew, Quaker, and SodaStream. PepsiCo’s product portfolio includes a wide range of enjoyable foods and beverages, including many iconic brands that generate more than $1 billion each in estimated annual retail sales.

An accomplished innovator and transformation leader, Kanioura oversees PepsiCo’s end-to-end strategy to win both as a total company and in key markets, including our digitalization strategy. She also leads company-wide transformation—ensuring that our scale is leveraged as we focus on accelerating profitable growth and identifying areas of cost efficiency and optimization—in addition to overseeing Data Products, Platforms, and Talent. 

Prior to joining PepsiCo, Kanioura was the Chief Analytics Officer and Global Head of Applied Intelligence at Accenture, where she specialized in applying AI and analytics to drive business value. During her 15 years at Accenture, Kanioura grew the Applied Intelligence function from a subspecialty to a global group at the forefront of scale business transformation. She also ran Sales and Customer Analytics globally and drove the company’s offerings in customer relationship management and personalization. 

Kanioura specializes in transforming businesses with emphasis on data and technology, and brings many years of practical experience globally in industries such as telecomms, oil and gas, financial services, and consumer packaged goods, having worked with companies such as Mondelez, Unilever, P&G, Reckitt Benkiser, Phillip Morris, and Adidas.

Kanioura is a member of the Royal Statistical and Economics Society, where she contributes to shaping government policy around how data is used by bodies like the IMF. She also sits on the board of the Institute of Marketing Sciences and is a keen educator who has held lectureships at UMIST (UK), Imperial College London (UK), and the University of Sheffield (UK), where she also earned her PhD in Econometrics and Quantitative Economics.  Kanioura is based in Purchase, N.Y

Constantijn van Oranje leads TechLeap.NL (formerly StartupDelta), the accelerator for the Tech-ecosystem in the Netherlands. As Special Envoy he is on a mission to turn The Netherlands into a unicorn nation. He and his team connect the Dutch Tech-ecosystem to help ambitious and promising Dutch Tech companies grow fast internationally by improving their access to capital, market and talent.

Constantijn co-founded StartupFest Europe, which is still the biggest start-up event ever organized in The Netherlands. He used to be Chief of Staff of VP Neelie Kroes at the European Commission in charge of the Digital Agenda and lead the Brussels office of the RAND Corporation.

He is currently also Director Digital Technology & Macro Strategy at Macro Advisory Partners in London and New York and Edge Fellow at Deloitte Centre for the Edge, where he advises companies and the European Commission on their digital innovation strategies. Besides innovation and technology.

Constantijn van Oranje is passionate about art, music, photography and nature.

Daphne Koller is CEO and Founder of insitro, a physical AI therapeutics company. Daphne is also co-founder of Engageli, was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years, the co-CEO and President of Coursera, and the Chief Computing Officer of Calico Labs. She is the author of over 300 refereed publications with an h-index of over 150. Daphne was recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2012 and 100 most influential people in AI in 2024. She received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004, the ACM Prize in Computing in 2008, the ACM AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2019, and the AnitaB.org Technical Leadership Abie Award Winner in 2022. Daphne was inducted into the National Academy of Science in 2023, into the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 and elected a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2004, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014, and the International Society of Computational Biology in 2017. 

Lambert Hogenhout is Chief Data and AI at the United Nations Secretariat. He is also an author, keynote speaker and advisor on AI and responsible use of technology. He has 25 years of experience working both in the private sector and with international organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations. He leads governance and strategy in the areas of data and AI and oversees its practical implementation. He has published on data privacy, data governance, the societal implications of technology and responsible use of AI.

Dr. Steve Chien is JPL Fellow, Senior Research Scientist, and Technical Group Supervisor of the Artificial Intelligence Group and in the Mission Planning and Execution Section at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology where he leads efforts in automated planning and scheduling for space exploration.  Dr. Chien was previously Adjunct Faculty with the Department of Computer Science of the University of Southern California, and a Research Scientist at the Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering and a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Computer Science of the University of California at Los Angeles. He holds a B.S. with Highest Honors in Computer Science, with minors in Mathematics and Economics, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the University of Illinois.

He is a founder of the International Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space held every other year from 1997 onward and was the Chair or Co-chair  of numerous workshops.  He is former chair of the AIPS Executive Council (2000-2002), was a founding member of the ICAPS Executive Council (2002-2006), and was founding President of the ICAPS Executive Council 2002-2004. He was also a Councilor for the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (2003-2006)

Dr. Chien was a recipient of the 1995 Lew Allen Award for Excellence, JPLs highest award recognizing outstanding technical achievements by JPL personnel in the early years of their careers. In 1997, he received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for his work in research and development of planning and scheduling systems for NASA. He is the Team Lead for the ASPEN Planning System , which received Honorable Mention in the 1999 Software of the Year Competition and was a contributor to the Remote Agent System which was a co-winner in the same 1999 competition. In 2000, he received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal for service and leadership in research and deployment of planning and scheduling systems for NASA. He is the Principal Investigator for the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment which is a co-winner of the 2005 NASA Software of the Year Award. In 2007, he received the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for outstanding technical accomplishments in the development of the Autonomous Sciencecraft deployed on the Earth Observing One Mission and the development of the Earth Observing Sensorweb. In 2011 He was awarded the innaugural AIAA Intelligent Systems Award, for his contributions to Spacecraft Autonomy. In 2011, he was the team co-lead for the Sensorweb Toolbox team, which was awarded Honorable mention in the 2011 NASA Software of the Year Competition. In 2015 He was awarded a JPL Magellan Award as well as the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for his contributions to automated science scheduling for ESA’s Rosetta mission.

Dr. Chien has supported the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Defense Science Board, and Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.  In 2018, Dr. Chien was appointed to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Chien has presented invited seminars on planning, scheduling, and resource allocation as well as on spacecraft autonomy and autonomous systems. He has authored numerous publications. in these areas, and has served as a consultant to several multinational corporations in these areas. His current research interests lie in the areas of: planning and scheduling, machine learning, operations research, and decision theory.

Roman, an author and a professor at the University of Louisville, is globally recognized for his pioneering research in AI risk prevention and containing superintelligence. His work has shaped international conversations on how to govern and develop AI safely. After captivating audiences with a book signing at WSAI Americas, Roman is bringing his cutting-edge insights to Qatar, where he will challenge conventional thinking about the future of AI.

Head of JDX Silicon Valley Research Center

Dr. Hui Cheng is the Head of JD.com’s JD-X Silicon Valley Research Center and the Head of JD.com Silicon Valley Innovation Center, where he leads teams working on technologies that will revolutionize E-commerce and Logistics. JD-X is developing autonomous ground delivery vehicles, delivery drones and warehouse robotic systems, all powered by artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and computer vision. Dr. Cheng also serves on the board of directors of a high-flying AI and robotics startup company.

Prior to JD, Dr. Cheng was Senior Research Manager of Amazon Go where the new grab-and-go shopping experience was first developed. He was also the Program Director and head of the Cognitive and Adaptive Vision System Group at SRI International where he led more than 30 client-sponsored R&D programs in many areas including social medial analysis, video understanding, cloud-based Big Data analysis, AR/VR, mobile authentication, mobile activity understanding, media forensic, etc.

Dr. Cheng received his Ph.D degree from Purdue University. He has more than 60 publications and holds more than 30 patents.