ai-first
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Andrea Calcagno Put the Store Floor Online - Then Made WiFi Think
A Calabrian engineer followed a stubborn question from Turin to Pisa to New York: what if WiFi could do more than connect? Two decades later, Andrea Calcagno is still rebuilding the answer.
Hexaware Technologies
How a spin-off from an Indian computer-training business became a 32,000-person, AI-first services firm - and pulled off the biggest technology-services IPO in over a decade.
Intense Technologies
A quiet Hyderabad software house has spent three decades building the plumbing behind your phone bill, your bank statement and your insurance onboarding - and selling it back to some of the world's largest companies.
IgniteTech
The company that buys aging enterprise software, wires it up with AI, and rents the whole library for one flat fee - and famously rebuilt its own workforce to get there.
The Four Tests for a Genuinely AI-First Contact Center
Everyone in the category says AI-first and most of them mean they bought a chatbot. Here are four tests that tell purpose-built architecture from a bolt-on you can never quite switch off.
The Field Guide Every CCaaS Buyer Wishes Existed
A ranked 2026 field guide to the leading AI-first contact center (CCaaS) platforms, scored across five dimensions that actually matter to buyers: AI architecture, mobile capability, CRM and data security, deployment speed, and pricing transparency. The cohort covers UJET, Five9, NICE CXone, Genesys, Talkdesk, Amazon Connect and 8x8 — with an honest look at which platforms were engineered for AI from the ground up versus those retrofitting it onto legacy stacks.
Ardoq
Ardoq is a Norwegian enterprise architecture software company that helps large organizations map, understand, and transform their technology and business landscapes. Its cloud-based, graph-powered platform turns tangled application portfolios, data flows, and business capabilities into living, queryable models so leaders can plan cloud migrations, rationalize applications, manage risk, and steer digital transformation with current data rather than static diagrams. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Oslo, Ardoq serves more than 400 enterprises worldwide and has pushed toward an AI-first approach that reasons over the architecture graph.
Quantiphi
Quantiphi is an AI-first digital engineering company founded in 2013 that helps enterprises turn data and machine learning into business outcomes. Working across cloud, data engineering and applied AI, it partners closely with Google Cloud, AWS, NVIDIA and others to build solutions for financial services, healthcare, insurance, retail and the public sector. The firm has grown to roughly 3,500+ employees across six continents and is known for its research-driven approach and its own products - Baioniq, Dociphi and Codeaira.
Jason Davis
Jason Davis is the co-founder and CEO of Simon AI (formerly Simon Data), a New York customer data platform that rebranded around agentic AI in 2025. A machine-learning PhD who built search algorithms at Google, he founded the ad-tech startup Adtuitive, sold it to Etsy in 2009, then ran Etsy's search and data teams as the marketplace grew from $180M to a $1B+ run rate. He and grad-school friend Matt Walker started Simon to give marketers direct, governed access to the data trapped inside their own warehouses. The company has raised roughly $117.8M, including a $54M Series D led by Macquarie Group.
Muhammad Rassam
Muhammad Rassam is a Pakistani founder and marketer who started as a blockchain engineer at the agency Antematter and pivoted into AI-first go-to-market work. He is co-founder of Ertiqah, writes the 'Efficient Entrepreneur' newsletter, serves as Chief Marketing Officer at the LinkedIn-content tool LiGo, and co-founded the cold-email platform ColdSend.pro. Based in Dubai, he is known for building lean, AI-leveraged businesses and for candid LinkedIn writing about hiring, marketing, and founder life.
Samir Deolikar
Samir Deolikar is the Chief Executive Officer of BayRock Labs, a Silicon Valley product-engineering firm in San Jose that ships AI-first software for startups and enterprises. He moved into the CEO seat in February 2024 after two years as advisor, and twenty-plus years across Zensar Technologies and Reliance Industries before that.
Tobi Lutke
Tobias 'Tobi' Lütke is the German-Canadian co-founder and CEO of Shopify, one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms. Born in 1980 in Koblenz, Germany, he received a computer at age six and left school after 10th grade to complete a programming apprenticeship, never attending university. After emigrating to Canada in 2003, he built an online snowboard shop called Snowdevil and — finding every existing e-commerce platform inadequate — coded his own solution in Ruby on Rails in two months. That solution became Shopify, which he launched as a standalone product in 2006. Shopify went public in 2015, and as of 2025 processes over $1.6 trillion in cumulative gross merchandise volume for millions of merchants across 175+ countries, commanding over 14% of the US e-commerce market. Lutke is known for his radical candor, his open-source roots, and his unusual interests for a tech CEO: competitive racing driver, avid skier, and serious gamer who credits strategy games with shaping his business thinking. His April 2025 internal memo mandating AI proficiency as a baseline expectation became one of the most widely-discussed corporate AI policy statements of the year.
Eoghan McCabe
Eoghan McCabe is an Irish technology entrepreneur born in Dublin in 1984, best known as the co-founder and CEO of Intercom — the AI-first customer service platform he founded in 2011 alongside Des Traynor, Ciaran Lee, and David Barrett. After building Intercom into a $1.3B+ unicorn over its first decade, McCabe stepped down as CEO in 2020 due to a neurological autoimmune disorder, then dramatically returned in October 2022, just weeks before ChatGPT launched. Within six weeks he had a prototype of Fin, Intercom's AI agent, and proceeded to cut roughly 40% of staff and redirect the entire company toward AI — a bet that paid off: Intercom hit an estimated $343M in revenue in 2024 (+25% YoY), raised $125M from Kleiner Perkins and $250M in debt from Hercules Capital (March 2026), and recorded its largest-ever quarter by net new ARR in Q1 FY2026.