human-centered-ai
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Katy Bunn Is Making the Customer the Meeting’s Most Important Voice
After a decade helping Paycor grow from a regional HR company into a public business acquired by Paychex, Katy Bunn has a new brief: turn marketing from an order-taking function into a source of customer truth.
Kanjun Qiu
Kanjun Qiu is the co-founder and CEO of Imbue, a San Francisco AI research lab building agents that reason and code while keeping humans at the helm. A CS grad from MIT who once funded her studies writing high-frequency trading algorithms, she was Dropbox's first chief of staff, co-founded the ML recruiting startup Sourceress, and now runs a lab that raised over $200M (Series B, backers including Nvidia) at a valuation north of $1 billion. She's also a general partner at Outset Capital, a Sequoia Scout, and co-author of Sew Electric, a book that teaches kids computer science through sewing.
Abhay Agarwal
Abhay Agarwal is the founder and CEO of Poly, the intelligent cloud file browser built to replace Finder and File Explorer for the AI era. A former Microsoft Research AI fellow and Stanford d.school lecturer, he came up through engineering at UC Berkeley and design at Stanford, then founded the human-centered AI consultancy Polytopal before pivoting it into a Y Combinator-backed startup. In November 2025, Poly emerged from stealth with $8M in seed funding led by Felicis, powered by its own Polyembed-v1 embedding model. Agarwal describes the product as 'an LLM with infinite context from your life,' and frames his life's work around a theory he calls Post-Cognitive Design.
Min Lee
Min Lee is the founder, CEO and president of IPMD, Inc., a San Mateo emotional-AI company born at UC Berkeley in 2016. He led the build of EchoAI (also known as Project M), a human-centered emotional-AI platform that reads facial micro-expressions, tone, and language to classify human emotion with a reported 96% comprehension rate - trained over 130,000 hours by a team of roughly 500 collaborators. In 2025 he was named a Visionary CEO in Emotional AI by Business Worldwide Magazine.
Nilou Salehi
Niloufar (Nilou) Salehi is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Across AI, a San Francisco startup building 'agentic memory' systems for enterprise sales teams. An associate professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information known for human-centered AI and social computing research, she put her professorship on pause to serve as Across AI's Chief Product Officer. Across came out of stealth in December 2024 with a $5.7M seed round co-led by Cota Capital and Village Global. Her academic work spans crowd-worker organizing (Dynamo), reliable machine translation for high-stakes settings, and equity in algorithmic systems.
Leigh-Margaret Stull
Leigh-Margaret Stull is the CEO of Mural, the visual work platform trusted by 95% of Fortune 100 companies. Appointed in July 2024, she brought over 25 years of operational and product leadership to the role, having previously served as COO and CPO at CareerBuilder. A Kentucky native now based in San Francisco, she is driving Mural's AI-first strategy around the conviction that empathy, creativity, and trust are the capabilities AI can amplify but never replace.
Sean White
Sean White is the CEO of Inflection AI, the Palo Alto public benefit corporation behind the empathetic chatbot Pi. He took over in March 2024 after co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and most of the team left for Microsoft, and has since rebuilt the company around emotionally intelligent enterprise AI that runs on-premises. A Stanford- and Columbia-trained computer scientist with a deep background in augmented reality and wearable computing, White was previously Chief R&D Officer at Mozilla and head of the Interaction Ecologies Group at Nokia.
Vishal Sikka
Vishal Sikka is the founder and CEO of Vianai Systems, an enterprise AI company he started in 2019. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, he previously created SAP HANA as SAP's first-ever CTO and led Infosys as its first non-founder CEO. He sits on the boards of Oracle and BMW Group, advises Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, and has championed the idea that AI should amplify - not replace - human creativity.