Jim Gao is the CEO and co-founder of Phaidra, a Seattle-based AI company building autonomous, self-learning control systems for the world's most complex industrial facilities, from data centers to vaccine plants. A mechanical engineer by training, he spent roughly a decade designing cooling systems for Google's data centers before teaching himself machine learning on nights and weekends. After AlphaGo, he launched DeepMind Energy, where reinforcement learning cut Google's data-center cooling energy by up to 40 percent. In 2019 he and two co-founders spun that idea into Phaidra, which by 2025 had raised over $120 million to make AI factories radically more efficient.
Dr. Alok Aggarwal is the CEO and Chief Data Scientist of Scry AI, a San Jose-based enterprise AI company he founded in 2014. A Johns Hopkins PhD with deep roots at IBM Research and as co-founder of Evalueserve - where he coined the term 'Knowledge Process Outsourcing' - Aggarwal has spent four decades building AI systems that actually work in regulated industries. His 2023 book 'The Fourth Industrial Revolution & 100 Years of AI (1950-2050)' topped Amazon bestseller charts in multiple categories. Scry AI serves banking, insurance, manufacturing, and government clients with explainable, audit-ready AI deployed on 60+ proprietary models.