At Dreamforce 2025 in San Francisco, Salesforce CEO and Chair Mark Benioff unveiled the Agentforce 360 platform and declared the arrival of 'the agentic enterprise' — a new era where humans and AI agents drive customer success together. The keynote positioned Agentforce as the fastest-growing product in Salesforce history, having handled more than 1.5 million customer service conversations in nine months. Benioff framed the moment around a central choice: whether AI replaces people or elevates them, arguing that AI built on trust and deep data context amplifies human potential. The keynote featured new products including Agentforce Vibes (vibe-coding), Data 360, Agentforce Voice, and Agent Script, alongside five customer stories from Williams-Sonoma, Pandora, PepsiCo, FedEx, and Dell.
Microsoft is a global technology company founded in 1975 that builds software, cloud services, devices and gaming platforms used by billions of people and organizations. Best known for Windows and the Office/Microsoft 365 productivity suite, it now anchors its future on the Azure cloud and Copilot AI, positioning itself as core infrastructure for enterprise computing and the generative-AI era.
Databricks is a San Francisco-based data and AI company founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark. It builds the Data Intelligence Platform - a lakehouse architecture that unifies data engineering, analytics, and machine learning on open formats. Used by more than 10,000 organizations worldwide, Databricks helps enterprises store, govern, and analyze data and build AI applications on top of it, all under a single governance model.
Palantir Technologies builds software platforms that integrate large, messy data sets and put them to work for decision-making. Founded in 2003 in the shadow of PayPal's fraud-detection work, the company sells four flagship products - Gotham, Foundry, Apollo, and the Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) - to governments, defense and intelligence agencies, and commercial enterprises in finance, healthcare, energy, and manufacturing. Led by co-founder and CEO Alex Karp, Palantir has grown from a controversial government contractor into a fast-growing public company riding demand for operational AI.
NVIDIA is an American technology company that designs graphics processing units (GPUs) and the accelerated-computing platforms built around them. Founded in 1993 to chase realistic 3D graphics for video games, it turned its parallel-processing chips and the CUDA software layer into the dominant engine of the modern AI boom. Today its data-center systems train and run most of the world's large AI models, and the company sits at the center of the semiconductor industry with a market value above $5 trillion.
IBM (International Business Machines) is a 114-year-old American technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, that helps large enterprises and governments run and modernize their most demanding operations. Today its business centers on three pillars - hybrid cloud through Red Hat, enterprise AI through the watsonx platform and open Granite models, and consulting - while it continues to build the underlying hardware, from z-series mainframes to research-grade quantum computers. IBM reported $67.5 billion in 2025 revenue and remains one of the largest patent holders and research organizations in the world.
Carnegie Mellon math professor and former U.S. Math Olympiad coach Po-Shen Loh argues that as AI surpasses humans at logic and language, the most important skill young people can develop is autonomous thinking. He warns that using AI to do school writing is 'like driving a car one mile for exercise,' explains why AI now solves original Olympiad problems he couldn't, and lays out a win-win-win education ecosystem that pairs middle schoolers, high-school math talent, and Broadway-caliber acting coaches to teach kids how to generate their own ideas, empathize, and think critically in an age of biased information.
Consilient is a New York- and Washington, D.C.-based financial technology company that applies federated machine learning to anti-money laundering and financial crime detection. Its models learn from behavioral patterns across multiple banks and share the algorithms - not the underlying customer data - so institutions can collaborate on catching illicit activity while preserving privacy. Founded in 2020 as a joint venture between K2 Integrity and Giant Oak, the company's Dozer platform has demonstrated in bank trials that it can sharply cut false positives while improving true-positive detection.
HarvestAi is a Potsdam-based agritech company that builds AI software for high-tech greenhouses. Its web platform combines computer vision, machine learning and plant-physiology modeling to predict crop growth, harvest dates and yields, giving greenhouse operators forecasts that its team says exceed 90% accuracy. Growers use it to negotiate sales earlier, plan labor and logistics, and cut waste and energy costs. Founded in 2020 and led by CEO Dr. Georg Caspary, the company has raised roughly EUR 2.97M in seed funding and won first prize in Food/Agritech at Slush.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman is the founder and CEO of Teikametrics, a Boston-based AI platform that helps Amazon and Walmart sellers optimize advertising and pricing across more than $10 billion in marketplace transactions. A former Great Britain 800m runner and Harvard track captain, he started selling sporting goods from his dorm room in 2001, became one of Amazon's first third-party retailers in 2003, exited a fitness startup to News Corp, and has raised roughly $65 million for Teikametrics from investors including Intel Capital, Jump Capital, Centana Growth Partners and SoftBank's Lydia Jett.
Jonathan Manalo is VP of Growth at Microsoft, operating from Central Luzon, Philippines. In this role he drives commercial expansion across one of the world's most influential technology companies - a company whose annual revenue exceeds $281 billion and whose technologies power enterprises from startups to sovereign governments. Based in the Philippines, Manalo sits at the intersection of Microsoft's deep enterprise portfolio - Azure, Microsoft 365, Copilot, and Dynamics 365 - and the rapidly digitizing Southeast Asian market.
Michael Schechter is Corporate Vice President of Search Growth and Experiences at Microsoft, where he has spent over two decades shaping how people discover information on the web. A computer science graduate of the University of Maryland, he has been at the center of Bing's evolution - from leading the captions feature in its early days to orchestrating the AI-powered transformation of Bing with Copilot Search. Known for his candid voice on search industry trends and his willingness to engage publicly on topics like citation transparency and AI reliability, Schechter represents the rare executive who can speak both engineer and user fluently.
Stacie Owen is Vice President of Corporate Relations at Microsoft, based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. With a legal background from her time as a lawyer at Kronis, Rotszain, Margles & Cappel in Toronto, she has transitioned into a senior executive role at one of the world's most influential technology companies - overseeing corporate relations functions for the tech giant that employs over 228,000 people and generates over $281 billion in annual revenue.
Andrew Toy is the CEO and Board Member of Clover Health (NASDAQ: CLOV), a Medicare Advantage insurer using AI to help physicians identify and treat chronic conditions earlier. A Stanford-trained computer scientist who immigrated from Hong Kong at 16, Toy built Divide (acquired by Google for $120M in 2014), led Android Enterprise at Google, then joined Clover Health in 2018 as CTO before ascending to CEO in 2023. Under his leadership, Clover achieved 51% year-over-year membership growth and its first GAAP net income in Q1 2026, powered by the Clover Assistant AI platform that diagnoses diabetes three years earlier than conventional methods.
Toby Bowers is Vice President of Commercial Cloud & AI Marketing at Microsoft, based in the Seattle area. With over 20 years at the company, he leads market strategy across Microsoft's Cloud and AI product portfolios, including business and technical audience marketing, global events, and partner ecosystem engagement. He is the architect of Microsoft's 'Frontier Firms' initiative - a framework identifying and showcasing organizations reimagining their operations through AI - and was a driving force behind the ISV Connect program that grew to 700+ independent software vendors. A prolific blogger on the Microsoft Cloud Blog, Dynamics 365 Blog, and Power Platform Blog, Bowers is one of Microsoft's most visible voices on AI-driven enterprise transformation.
Anibal Morris is a co-founder at Jasper, the AI-powered content platform that became one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history - reaching $1.5 billion valuation in under 18 months. Based in Okatie, South Carolina, Morris is part of the founding team behind one of generative AI's landmark enterprise products, serving marketing teams at companies worldwide with purpose-built AI agents, brand-voice tools, and content automation at scale.
Baker Anthony is a Founder at Jasper, the AI-powered marketing platform that has become one of the most significant generative AI companies for enterprise content creation. Based in Show Low, Arizona, Anthony has been part of building one of the first AI unicorns in the content marketing space - a company that reached $88M in annual revenue and serves nearly 20% of the Fortune 500 with its AI-driven content generation tools.
Clay Bavor is Co-Founder of Sierra, the AI customer experience company he launched in early 2023 alongside Bret Taylor. Before Sierra, Bavor spent 18 years at Google, where he rose from product manager to VP leading Google Labs — overseeing Google's AR/VR efforts (including Cardboard, Daydream, ARCore, Google Lens, and Project Starline), and before that running product and design for Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Workspace. Sierra has raised $1.585 billion in total funding, most recently a $950M Series E at a $15.8 billion valuation in May 2026, serving over 40% of the Fortune 50 with AI agents that resolve 50–90% of customer inquiries.
Guru Hariharan is the Founder and CEO of CommerceIQ, a unicorn-valued AI platform that helps 2,200+ consumer brands - from Nestle to Kellogg's - automate and optimize their retail ecommerce operations across Amazon, Walmart, and other major retailers. A veteran of Amazon and eBay, he co-invented the Amazon Selling Coach, sold his first company Boomerang Commerce's analytics unit to Lowe's in 2019, and pivoted to build CommerceIQ into a $136.6M ARR business by 2024. In May 2025, he launched AllyAI, a suite of agentic AI teammates purpose-built for retail - a product he describes as pioneering the next era of algorithmic commerce.
Kamran Maniar is the Chief Executive Officer at Flux (flux.ai), the AI-powered PCB design platform headquartered in San Francisco. Flux - backed by 8VC and Bain Capital Ventures - has raised $39 million in total funding and serves over one million hardware builders across the globe, making professional circuit board design as accessible as writing a prompt. Operating at the intersection of AI, electronics, and manufacturing, Maniar leads from the crossroads of Silicon Valley ambition and Pakistan's deep engineering talent.
Mudit Garg is the co-founder and CEO of Qventus, a Mountain View-based AI healthcare company that automates hospital operations — from surgical scheduling to patient discharge. Trained as an electrical engineer at IIT and holding an MBA from Stanford, Garg spent time at McKinsey's healthcare practice before founding Qventus in 2012. Under his leadership, the company raised a $105M Series D led by KKR in January 2025, reached a valuation of over $400 million, and has helped health systems across the US free up tens of thousands of excess hospital days and generate tens of millions in surgical revenue.
Rahul Raj is Co-Founder and VP of Product Architecture at JIFFY.ai, an AI-powered no-code enterprise automation platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California. With a background spanning SAP Labs, IBM, and Option3.io, Rahul brings deep engineering and systems-architecture expertise to JIFFY.ai's mission of enabling financial services firms to build autonomous, AI-driven operations without writing a line of code. The company — launched at Stanford University — has raised over $105 million in total funding, including a $53 million Series B in March 2022, and serves Fortune Global 500 companies and Big 4 consulting firms worldwide.
Rami Karabibar is the CEO and co-founder of EvenUp, a San Francisco-based AI legal tech company he co-founded in 2019 with Raymond Mieszaniec and Saam Mashhad. After observing the massive inefficiencies in personal injury claim handling during his time at Waymo, he built EvenUp into the dominant AI platform for plaintiff personal injury law - now valued at over $2 billion following a $150M Series E in October 2025. The platform has resolved 200,000+ cases and secured over $10 billion in damages for injury victims, serving 2,000+ U.S. law firms.

Sean Moriarty is the CEO of Primer.ai, a San Francisco-based AI company delivering trusted, mission-critical artificial intelligence to defense agencies, intelligence communities, and enterprise clients. A veteran technology executive who began as a QA engineer at Citysearch in 1997 alongside future founders of OpenTable and Peloton, Moriarty went on to run Ticketmaster as its President and CEO, transforming it into a top-5 global internet commerce company with $1.5 billion in annual revenue across 22 countries. After stints as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mayfield Fund and CEO of Saatchi Art and Leaf Group, he joined Primer in April 2023 to lead its mission of providing AI-enabled information advantage to those who support and defend democracy. The son of a Vietnam veteran and grandson of a WWII veteran, Moriarty brings both personal conviction and hard-won operational expertise to one of the most consequential AI deployments in the world.
Vipul Ved Prakash is a serial entrepreneur and technologist who co-founded Together AI, an AI acceleration cloud platform valued at $3.3 billion after a $305M Series B in February 2025. Previously, he built Topsy (acquired by Apple for $200M+), co-founded Cloudmark (acquired by Proofpoint), and created Vipul's Razor - one of the internet's first collaborative anti-spam systems. A self-described cypherpunk with a table-tennis past, Prakash has been dismantling bottlenecks - from spam to closed AI - for over two decades.
Verdigris is a Mountain View-based AI and IoT company that turns raw electrical data into actionable intelligence for data centers, commercial buildings, and industrial facilities. By clamping high-frequency sensors onto electrical circuits and running proprietary AI algorithms on the resulting waveform data, Verdigris gives facility operators real-time visibility into energy consumption, power quality, and equipment health - detecting failures before they happen, recovering stranded capacity, and driving 20-50% reductions in energy spend. Founded in 2011, the company serves Fortune 500 customers including T-Mobile, Verizon, and NVIDIA across 17 countries.

Eric Zhang is the Chief Executive Officer of Thoth AI, a Singapore-headquartered global AI data solutions company with R&D operations in Silicon Valley. Under his leadership, Thoth AI powers frontier AI models for some of the world's leading AI labs by providing high-quality training data, RLHF workflows, model evaluation, and multilingual customer experience services across 170+ countries in 200+ languages. Zhang operates at the intersection of AI safety, responsible deployment, and global scale - building the human infrastructure that makes AI smarter, safer, and culturally aware.
Barrett Boston is the former Chief Executive Officer of Ottimate (formerly Plate IQ), a San Francisco-based AI-powered accounts payable automation platform. Appointed CEO in October 2021 following FTV Capital's majority investment, Boston transformed the company from a restaurant-focused invoice tool into a multi-industry AP automation leader serving hospitality, healthcare, grocery, retail, construction, and manufacturing sectors. Under his leadership, Ottimate rebranded from Plate IQ, raised $160 million in Series B funding, launched an industry-first AI engine for AP, and introduced Conversational AP - an AI assistant for finance teams. Boston stepped down in March 2026, passing the CEO role to Shawn Lane. His career spans IBM, TravelClick, TriNet, and Merrill Lynch, with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Economics from Duke University.
Deepak Nagpal is the CEO of Audax Labs, a Bothell, Washington-based technology innovation company he has led since 2016. With a career spanning over two decades across NTT DATA, Capital One, and Interra Information Technologies, and an MBA from Oxford's Said Business School, he has built Audax Labs into a multi-practice consultancy operating across AR/VR/MR, AI, IoT, cloud migration, and data analytics - serving industries from automotive and healthcare to BFSI and government, with partnerships spanning Microsoft, Google, Amazon AWS, Hitachi Vantara, Oracle, and Rocket Software.