Meet the 2026 AI 75

AI VISIONARIES

CREATIVE KINGPIN

Dale Carman

Co-Founder and Executive Creative Director, Groove Jones

Carman is putting AI to work in real-world creative production. Over the past year, he’s guided Dallas-based Groove Jones into AI-powered workflows spanning spatial computing, immersive media, and enterprise automation — building production pipelines that integrate LLMs, computer vision, and generative systems for clients including Visa, Pfizer, Invesco, and the Army National Guard.

The studio has been “pushing generative AI out of the lab” and into live brand experiences. At Coachella, it partnered with SC Johnson and Method Products on an AI photo experience that generated original imagery tailored to each guest. At the Invesco QQQ Final Four, computer vision analyzed players’ shooting arcs and generated personalized performance scorecards in real time. And for Apple Vision Pro, the team built systems for medical education and multi-headset event orchestration.

Carman’s approach is shaped by decades in creative technology, including leadership roles at Radium and Reel FX. “AI is used to handle repetitive, protocol-heavy work so creative teams can focus on ideas, storytelling, and execution,” the studio says.

 

OPPORTUNITY ARCHITECT

Calvin Carter

CEO, Matic; Co-Founder and General Partner, Dallas Opportunity Partners

In April 2025, Carter acquired Utah-based Scribematic, an AI documentation company, relocated it to Dallas, and became CEO. Rebranded as Matic, the company is building what Carter calls “orchestrated clinical intelligence” — an AI engine connecting medical documentation, coding, and clinical care using large language models. Its “Matic Inside” platform embeds AI directly into electronic health record systems, helping mid-sized EHR vendors compete with giants like Epic. “AI isn’t the strategy anymore,” Carter says. “Architecture is.”

Carter has a track record of moving early on platform shifts — he founded Bottle Rocket the day after Apple opened the iPhone to third-party developers and built it into the most awarded iOS developer in the world before its acquisition by WPP. He also co-founded Dallas Opportunity Partners, an operator-led investment platform backing strategic, tech-forward Texas companies, including ventures in Dallas-Fort Worth’s budding “Y’all Street” space.

VIZIENT VANGUARD

Chuck DeVries

SVP & Technology Officer, Vizient Inc.

DeVries has been called a “hands-on technology disruptor” at Vizient, an Irving-based healthcare services company that serves more than half of U.S. healthcare organizations. As senior vice president and technology officer — a role he’s grown into over 13 years at the company — he has enhanced hospital operations and supply-chain resilience, optimized costs, and scaled AI-driven insights for clinical and operational decision-making across Vizient’s network.

How does he stay on top of technology? One way, he says, is by “playing.” On his own time, he’s trained a diffusion model to create unique Rorschach blot images, then fed them to LLMs to see how they’d “see” them. He prototyped GenAI memory systems using vector stores and small language models. Inside Vizient, he runs “ChuckChat,” a biweekly session for engineers and product teams covering AI trends and where the technology is heading. He’s also brought that thinking to external forums including a Databricks Data + AI Executive Series and the UT Arlington AI & Analytics Symposium.

“The question I keep coming back to for leaders isn’t, ‘How do we make people more productive with AI?'” he says. “It’s, ‘What should machines attempt autonomously by default — and where does human judgment truly add value?'”

INSURTECH ORIGINAL

Chris Gay

CEO and Co-Founder, Evry Health

Gay embedded artificial intelligence into the core of an insurance business. As CEO and co-founder of Evry Health, a B2B health insurer founded in Dallas in 2017, he built an AI-enabled infrastructure and operating platform that Gay says has resulted in digital health engagement five to eight times what legacy health plans experience. In early 2026, Evry partnered with Color Health to add an AI-supported virtual cancer clinic to its employer plans, covering risk assessment, screening, treatment navigation, and survivorship.

Gay has been vocal about using technology to fix prior authorization, one of healthcare’s most persistent pain points. “Let computers do the boring, challenging work of matching records, doing eligibility for patients, facilities, providers, and the code checks,” he said on the Becker’s Payer Issues podcast in December.

The model’s milestone validation came in 2023 when McKinney-based Globe Life acquired Evry — what D Magazine called “rocket fuel” for scaling the company’s tech-first approach. Prior to Evry, Gay co-founded MileMeter, a pioneering, usage-based auto insurer.

PATENT POWERHOUSE

Sailesh Bharathwaaj Krishnamurthy

Head of AI Center of Excellence, Innovation and Engineering, 7-Eleven

Krishnamurthy has built and scaled an enterprise AI/ML platform for the world’s largest convenience retailer and led AI teams in personalization, forecasting, store intelligence, and fraud detection. To date, he holds 100 granted U.S. patents in computer vision, machine learning, and system design, making him one of the most prolific AI innovators in North Texas.

That output started with what he’s called a moonshot: Krishnamurthy was the founding engineer, and later the technical leader, behind 7-Eleven’s cashierless retail store. He’s since extended that work to AI agents and generative AI, presenting a multi-purpose agentic marketing assistant his team built on Databricks’ Mosaic AI at the 2025 Data + AI Summit. His team also won Databricks’ Data Intelligence Retail & CPG industry award. Internally, he recently organized 7-Eleven’s four-day Data & AI Summit focusing on retail in the era of AI and a partnership with American Airlines data leaders on data governance.

ENTERPRISE ENGINE

Brian Kursar

Group Vice President, Head of Enterprise Artificial Intelligence, Toyota Motor North America; Executive Technical Advisor, Toyota Research Institute

Kursar is the executive at Plano-based Toyota North America who’s responsible for turning AI from a research topic into something the automaker’s employees and products actually use. In late 2024, he transitioned from Chief Technology and Data Officer to become Toyota’s first dedicated head of enterprise AI, leading enterprise-wide strategy and the Global AI Accelerator (GAIA) program.

His leadership aims to standardize and scale these AI capabilities across the entire Toyota Group worldwide. He also serves as a technical advisor to the Toyota Research Institute — bridging the lab and production.

The results have been concrete. A GenAI-powered dealer assistant built on Amazon Bedrock now serves more than 2,300 dealerships, handling more than 7,000 interactions per month, according to an AWS re:Invent 2025 presentation. An agentic AI platform developed with Deloitte and AWS has improved supply-chain forecasting accuracy by roughly 20% and planner productivity by about 18%, Deloitte reports.

In manufacturing, AI knowledge accelerators that ingest repair manuals, trouble tickets, and video into a multimodal LLM have dramatically compressed diagnosis time — in one case, cutting a seven-hour G-code calibration troubleshoot to 15 seconds, Kursar told CDO Magazine in 2025. “I like to steer my team away from tech for the sake of tech and always drive the focus on ROI and TCO,” he said.

GOVERNANCE GURU

John Nichols

AI Officer, Global Product Strategy | Clients & Industries, EY

Nichols works with public-sector organizations on the strategic adoption of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies as Innovation Tech Lead for EY’s Government and Public Sector practice. He has a particular focus on AI governance and readiness, advising cities like Fort Worth and Dallas and DFW Airport on the topic. He wrote a white paper on the Texas Responsible AI Governance Act, which went into effect on Jan. 1, and says he has contributed to AI governance conversations with Texas legislators, the Texas AI Advisory Council, and the White House AI Action Plan.

He positions AI as a modernization engine for both public and private markets, emphasizing its ability to unlock new services and community value. “AI’s greatest potential lies not in algorithms, but in the intent and integrity of those guiding them,” Nichols says. He also serves on the Keller Education Foundation Board, where he advocates for AI literacy and workforce readiness across local and underserved communities.

HOMECARE TECHNOLOGIST

Andrew Olowu

Chief Technology Officer, Axxess

Olowu oversees platform architecture, cloud strategy, and the AI roadmap at Axxess, a Dallas-based, cloud-based technology platform serving home health and hospice organizations. He’s been building the company’s technology since 2008. Under his leadership, Axxess launched Axxess Intelligence, an AI suite embedding automation, predictive analytics, and a generative AI assistant directly into clinical, operational, and financial workflows.

He also co-chairs the technology work group for the National Alliance for Care at Home, where he helped lead an initiative around AI principles and partnered with other industry groups to ensure patient data is accessible across the care continuum. Over the past year, he’s led sessions at the Alliance’s Tech Summit on aging-in-place technology and at Convergence AI Dallas on AI as the backbone of value-based healthcare, and helped spearhead virtual discussions on AI adoption that drew more than 1,000 care-at-home professionals, according to the company. “AI tools must be tightly embedded within the EMR or the back-office system,” Olowu has said, “or it’s not scalable.”

AIRPORT FUTURIST

Paul Puopolo

Executive Vice President; Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, DFW Airport

AI is a top strategic priority for Puopolo, who leads technology and innovation at DFW Airport, a facility serving nearly 90 million passengers annually. He’s shaping how artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure are transforming DFW into an “airport as a city.” AI’s at the center of that vision, from real-time digital twins and predictive maintenance to autonomous ground operations, cargo movement, and passenger flow optimization. Most broadly, his team’s AI and analytics work is in service of a human-centric, “stress-free-travel” goal.

The $4 billion Terminal F project is putting that vision into concrete—literally. In December, Puopolo told World Aviation Festival the new terminal will feature self-service bag drops, e-gates at security and boarding, and “sensors everywhere to manage traffic on the curb as well as manage the flow of passengers in the terminal.” Biometrics are already rolling out across the airport, with employees using facial recognition at security portals. And DFW is making infrastructure investments now to support eVTOL air taxis by 2028, with a vertiport planned near corporate aviation.

“Innovation is a process, and it’s a mindset,” Puopolo said. Previously, the U.S. Navy helicopter pilot turned innovator held positions at companies including MetLife, Highmark, and Humana.

AIRLINES AUTHORITY

Richard Ratliff

Executive Scientist and Fellow, Sabre Labs

Ratliff is a veteran AI leader at Sabre Labs, the innovation arm of Southlake-based global travel-tech giant Sabre. As an executive scientist and fellow, his expertise includes applied AI/ML, operations research, forecasting, and systems integration for airlines, hotels, cruise lines, and travel agencies. He’s a recognized expert on global standards in airline personalization, revenue management, and AI safety, publicly addressing how to prevent AI hallucinations and the need for clear AI objectives, for example.

His work sits inside a company undergoing a once-in-a-generation transformation. In March 2026, Sabre unveiled a rebuilt, AI-native platform powered by Google Gemini and backed by more than 50 petabytes of travel data, seizing what it called a “first-mover position in agentic travel” with agentic-ready APIs and a proprietary Model Context Protocol server. A veteran of more than three decades at the company, Ratliff has authored dozens of published papers and blog articles and holds a patent in multi-party, coordinated travel technology.

ACCENTURE ACHIEVER

Naveen Singla

Managing Director, Data and AI Lead for the Chemicals Industry, Accenture

Singla has shaped AI strategy at global scale in multiple fields for nearly two decades. Based at Accenture in Irving, he focuses on specialty chemicals, commodity chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and adjacent industries. As managing director and Data and AI lead, he’s led major AI transformations for clients and their workforces, including developing a comprehensive, five-year AI roadmap for a global food ingredients manufacturer.

He’s also helped implement enterprise-wide AI literacy programs for various companies, educating their employees on the benefits and responsible use of AI at scale. At Accenture, he’s trained about 500 employees on agentic AI—teaching them how to build agentic solutions, then working with them to develop agents that improve their daily tasks. Previously, he worked for Bayer Crop Science and Monsanto.

SKUNK WORKS STRATEGIST

Justin Taylor

Vice President, Skunk Works, Lockheed Martin

Taylor is a VP leading the dynamic targeting and surveillance systems portfolio at Lockheed’s advanced-development Skunk Works unit in the Fort Worth area. In that role with the world’s largest defense contractor, he operates at the intersection of AI; autonomy; open mission systems; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

In 2025, his team used Meta’s Llama model via Lockheed Martin’s AI Factory infrastructure, built out of the Lockheed Martin AI Center, to accelerate software development for the government’s Joint Simulation Environment — deploying an AI agent as an always-available expert for Skunk Works engineers. Previously, Taylor was Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Lockheed Martin within Corporate Engineering & Technology from 2021 to 2023, coordinating the corporation’s AI/ML technology strategy and leading the Lockheed Martin AI Center.

A graduate of The University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, Taylor is a member of the board of directors of Astris AI, a Lockheed Martin company focused on AI/ML solutions for the defense industry. He also serves on The University of Texas Computer Science Advisory Council.

RETAILING REBEL

Yevgeni Tsirulnik

Senior Vice President, Grocery and General Merchandise Innovation, Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions

Described by the company as a “disruptor at heart,” Tsirulnik is a senior retail technology leader driving AI strategy, innovation, and worldwide digital transformation at the Frisco hub for Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions. He oversees cross-functional global teams and has championed the development of intelligent, connected AI retail ecosystems blending computer vision, real-time analytics, and edge intelligence. Toshiba’s ELERA unified commerce platform — with produce recognition, loss prevention, and security suites — is among them. Fast Company named ELERA’s Security Suite to its 2025 Next Big Things in Tech list.

“By combining human insight with the power of AI, we’re transforming loss prevention into a smarter, more adaptive system that builds trust, empowers associates, and improves the shopper experience,” Tsirulnik said. A member of the Forbes Technology Council, he previously was a vice president at NCR in Plano. He has a bachelor’s degree from Tel Aviv University.

 

AI MAVERICKS

GPU GENERAL

Ethan Ellenberg

CEO, Moonshot

Ellenberg is co-founder and chief executive of North Texas-based Moonshot, which is delivering unconventional, gigawatt-scale power infrastructure for AI data centers. Earlier this year, the company teamed with QumulusAI and IXP.us to begin deploying a national distributed AI compute and internet exchange platform combining AI Pods — modular compute units for edge computing — and GPU-as-a-Service. The rollout will start with 25 sites — including an alpha site at Wichita State University — and scale to 125 sites nationwide over the next five years, the company says.

In contrast to centralized hyperscale data centers — which support most of today’s AI workloads — the platform places GPU compute directly at the network edge, closer to where data is generated, reducing costs and delays for network operators and enterprises. In January, Moonshot announced a $50 million investment in a 541,265-square-foot manufacturing headquarters and global HQ in Lewisville. The company’s revenue has grown more than 3,800%, fueled by customers including Foxconn, Google, Anthropic, TeraWulf, and Fermi America, according to the Dallas Business Journal.

DIAGNOSTIC DYNAMO

Nida Fatima

CEO and Founder, Filos Health Laboratory Inc.

A UT Southwestern neurosurgeon turned founder and CEO, Fatima is leading development of AI models embedded directly into routine lab workflows at Filos Health Laboratory in Richardson. The precision diagnostics company — CLIA-certified and COLA-accredited — serves tens of thousands of patients annually. The models use standard blood tests combined with patient history and genetic data to forecast clinical risk at six- and twelve-month horizons — designed to help clinicians identify disease progression and treatment non-response earlier, turning everyday lab results into preventive decision-support. The company is a member of the NVIDIA Inception Program, using NVIDIA’s AI ecosystem to accelerate its predictive analytics work.

“Artificial intelligence should assist physicians, not obscure clinical reasoning,” Fatima says. “Our goal is to build systems that respect the complexity of human biology and the lived reality of patients — not reduce them to numbers.” Before founding Filos, she also held fellowships in neurological surgery at Stanford University and Harvard Medical School.

SUSTAINABILITY SAGE

James Hancock

CEO and Co-Founder, WATTER

Hancock, a former NASA data scientist, has turned a 100-year-old appliance into an AI-powered climate solution, rewriting the energy equation for artificial intelligence. As co-founder and CEO of Dallas-based WATTER, he has integrated servers into standard home and commercial water heaters, turning them as a result into distributed “green compute” nodes for running AI workloads while recycling the waste heat to produce hot water.

The effect of this patented breakthrough tech is to offload AI compute—the specialized hardware, memory, and storage it takes to run AI models—from traditionally distant, energy-hungry data centers into more sustainable, existing building infrastructure. After emerging from stealth mode in 2025 with $5 million in seed funding as a spinout of Hunt Innovative Technologies, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Hunt Energy, the company made a flagship deployment of its product at Dallas’ Hyatt Reunion Tower.

In February 2026, BloombergNEF named WATTER a finalist in its annual Pioneers competition, selecting it from more than 600 applications in the category of “Technologies for Sustainable, Scalable Data Center Infrastructure.”

AI ARCHITECTURE ARTISAN

Manish Jain

VP and Global Head of AI Architecture, Firstsource Solutions Limited

Jain is building new ways to make artificial intelligence work. At Firstsource, he led development of a technique that tackles “catastrophic forgetting,” where specialized AI models become expert in technical jargon but lose their ability to follow basic instructions. His Instruction Residual Transfer method restored conversational fluency to domain-trained models in complex, regulated fields like mortgage and medical coding.

He also spearheaded what the company calls MortgageLM with Dual-Track Architecture — a dual-expert framework that Jain says outperformed standard models in specialized financial tasks — as well as the Firstsource Agentic AI Studio. The latter is an “industry-first” platform replacing static business processes with autonomous, interoperable AI agents, Jain says, adding that its use saved a healthcare payer $60 million by optimizing claims processing.

BIOINFORMATICS BUILDER

Andrew Jamieson

Assistant Professor, UT Southwestern Medical Center

Leading a team of scientists and machine-learning engineers in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics at UT Southwestern, Jamieson builds AI systems for real-world healthcare settings. Recent work uses models that combine video, audio, and text data to evaluate clinical interactions — what STAT News called “an unusual use for AI in medical education.”

His team developed AI algorithms that score students’ clinical notes from simulated patient interactions, transforming how UTSW evaluates medical students. The system has replaced more than 91% of human grading efforts and delivers results within days instead of weeks, according to UTSW. The lab is now prototyping systems that analyze recorded video of the exams to deliver narrative feedback beyond a simple score. “As an innovative school, it’s important we develop the skills on campus to work deftly with AI,” Jamieson said. “If we are not ahead, we’re behind.”

His team also developed an AI-enabled pipeline to rapidly extract structured data from complex clinical documents, accelerating research data collection across the institution. During COVID-19, Jamieson built an AI forecast model that was adopted by Dallas County to inform its pandemic policy. A Ph.D. graduate of the University of Chicago, he previously held positions in industry, including at GE Healthcare.

PHYSICAL PHENOM

Candice Pattisapu

Co-Founder and CEO, Noumenal Labs

Noumenal chief executive Pattisapu thinks getting robots from “human-operated” to “autonomous” is too slow and too expensive. “Training a robot today is puppetry,” she says. “One human controls one robot and the robot tries to copy what the human did. That is like teaching a kid to ride a bike by moving their legs to pedal for them.” So she’s come up with an edge-based intelligence layer — a “third brain” between robots and human operators — to manage the learning process. Her teleoperation-as-a-service platform, called Thermobrain, lets robots ask for “help” only when it’s needed, enabling a single operator to oversee multiple robots instead of just one at a time.

The Dallas company’s work advances early experimentation with new computing approaches, such as thermodynamic systems, and one of Pattisapu’s models recently was adopted by Waymo’s autonomous R&D group. The company’s first product, an autonomous trimming robot called Edison, is being field-tested across 7,500 acres of solar farms with South Texas Curbing, a partner Pattisapu says is “turning down work because they cannot hire enough people.”

Pattisapu plans to license Thermobrain to humanoid robotics companies, targeting teleoperation of 10,000 energy-efficient robots within four years. Pattisapu earned her Ph.D. in psychological sciences from UT Dallas and won Best Paper at Oxford’s 2024 International Workshop on Active Inference.

RADIO WIZARD

Sridhar Rajagopal

Co-founder and CEO, Ennoia Technologies Inc.

Rajagopal leads Ennoia Technologies, an early-stage startup building AI “co-pilots” to move wireless intelligence from centralized clouds to the network edge. Ennoia uses small language models to run wireless networks locally. By operating “offline” on power-constrained devices, the system allows radio access networks (RAN) to shift from manually engineered systems to self-optimizing, self-evolving networks.

Since its 2025 launch, Ennoia has secured technical integrations with industry leaders and earned recognition from the AI-RAN Alliance. Rajagopal previously served as SVP of Access Technologies at Mavenir Systems in Richardson, where he was a lead technical architect for the nationwide Dish 5G rollout—the first standalone Open RAN network in the U.S. Over a three-decade career including Samsung and Nokia, he co-invented more than 55 U.S. patents and was named a 2026 IEEE Fellow for his contributions to cellular standardization.

FRONTIER FOUNDER

Ryan Trimberger

Co-Founder and CEO, 4MindsAI Inc.

Trimberger, a serial entrepreneur with multiple exits, picked Dallas for building his next company — now emerging from stealth. 4MindsAI is challenging retrieval-based models that dominate enterprise AI today. The startup’s platform uses a patented, GPU-accelerated knowledge graph that uncovers contextual relationships across systems and data sources, he says. Models built on it continuously fine-tune as new data comes in, becoming durable assets that reduce hallucinations and enable deeper reasoning. The result: secure, private AI models built in minutes instead of months.

In private alpha, 4Minds surpassed $2.5 million in annual recurring revenue within two months of product availability, with customers spanning energy, construction, financial services, manufacturing, and executive recruiting. The company has quietly raised more than $9 million in seed funding and filed more than a dozen patents on frontier technology, Trimberger says, while forming go-to-market partnerships with Microsoft, Databricks, Deloitte, and NetApp.

“More than 95% of enterprise AI projects ultimately fail to reach production,” Trimberger says. “4Minds was built to change that outcome.” The CEO, who built the team through recruiting alliances with UNT, UTA, and SMU, previously built and exited Stratum, an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider.

AI TRANSFORMERS

 

PLATFORM BUILDER

Melody Ayeli

General Manager, Enterprise AI, Toyota Motor North America

Ayeli leads enterprise-wide AI initiatives — including strategy, scalable application development, and responsible governance — across Plano-based Toyota Motor North America. With more than two decades of experience spanning software development, cybersecurity risk, and technology governance across Fortune 100 companies, she helped launch Toyota’s centralized Enterprise AI group and created engineering teams whose AI platforms serve more than 500,000 users across the company and its affiliates in Canada and Mexico.

Her framework for scaling AI follows Toyota’s “Experiment, Enable, and Ensure” approach — prototyping new models, equipping teams with training and approved tools, and embedding governance to uphold ethical, legal, and organizational standards, she said at a Fox-IT conference last year. In manufacturing, where mastery can take a decade of shop-floor experience, Toyota is closing skills gaps through Gearpal AI, which digitizes institutional knowledge from repair manuals, VHS transcripts, maintenance records, and expert insights.

The company has also deployed ToyotaGPT, a secure, internally hosted LLM assistant approved for use with Toyota’s most sensitive data, and Ayeli revealed the Toyota AI Vehicle Expert, a “curated voice-assistant platform delivering conversational AI to dealers, service centers, customers, and directly inside vehicles” through an architecture that blends edge and cloud processing, according to Fox-IT.

Ayeli navigates a fast-moving regulatory landscape — nearly 700 AI-related bills were introduced in the U.S. in 2024 alone, she noted — which is one reason Toyota formed a Responsible AI Board that she helps lead. “We’re a company that’s very conservative because we put safety and quality first, and so that extends to AI,” she said at Newsweek’s AI Impact Summit last June. This year she’ll serve as a judge for Newsweek’s AI Impact Awards.

REFINERY REFORMER

Madhu Bangalore

Head of Digital, Solution, Data, Analytics & AI, HF Sinclair Corporation

Bangalore runs data and AI for HF Sinclair, a Dallas-based, independent petroleum refiner formed by the 2022 merger of HollyFrontier and Sinclair Oil. His work focuses on embedding scalable AI into core operational and decision-making processes within the complex, asset-intensive organization. On his watch, AI-enabled analytics have expanded across multiple business functions, reducing reliance on manual reporting and accelerating time-to-insight for business and operational leaders.

Another key AI accomplishment at the company over the last year has been the establishment of strong governance models for AI adoption. Previously, Bangalore was director of digital innovation, enterprise data, and analytics at Irving-based Celanese, where he built AI-inclusive data platforms.

AI ACTIVATOR

Tori Begg

Senior Manager, AI Programs, V Digital Services

Begg is the AI leader at digital marketing agency V Digital Services, where she built and deployed proprietary AI systems that have fundamentally changed how the organization operates. She led the evolution of “Max,” an internal LLM and agent layer, from experiment to core business tool — powering proposal support, prospect research, and internal knowledge retrieval. She also drove the rollout of “Client360,” an AI-powered client intelligence platform built on Gemini AgentSpace and connected to Salesforce, TapClicks, and other business systems. Over the last year, she’s boosted organizational AI literacy from 30% to 95% and led AI adoption that delivered a 35% increase in task efficiency, per Begg.

She also co-founded Mind and Machine DFW, a vendor-neutral AI networking group that attracts up to 120 professionals monthly. At V Digital — a division of Voice Media Group, which publishes metropolitan newsweeklies (including the Dallas Observer) and websites across the U.S. — Begg’s role spans technical implementation, change management, and performance measurement.

Nationally, she serves as VP of the C Suite Network’s AI Mastermind Council, briefing executives on emerging AI developments and helping leaders separate hype from actionable strategy. As one nominator put it: She “speaks executive, speaks technical, and speaks regular human.”

LAKEHOUSE LEAD

Naresh Dulam

Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

At the world’s largest bank, Dulam is leading efforts to transform legacy data environments into practical, resilient platforms that make data AI-ready at bank-wide scale. Working at JPMorgan Chase’s technology hub in Dallas-Fort Worth, he has focused on hybrid-cloud “lakehouse” architectures and advocated for new roles to manage AI-driven systems and agents. His mantra: get the foundation right first. “AI is only as good as your data,” he told CDO Magazine last year. “So have a data strategy first, then go for AI.”

A signature concept is what he calls “shift left” — baking data quality, metadata standards, and compliance into AI projects from day one rather than treating them as afterthoughts. “Strong governance turns AI experiments into production-grade solutions,” he told CDO Magazine. He’s pushed that thinking into public conversations through a steady run of 2025 podcast and video appearances, including American Bazaar’s Regulating AI podcast, and the AI & Big Data Expo.

He’s also become a prominent voice on AI accountability, arguing for “shared responsibility” across developers, vendors, and regulating entities. “The explainability should go to the end user who are not aware of this technology,” he told American Bazaar, pressing for AI transparency that reaches borrowers and customers, not just engineers. A graduate of India’s Jyothisamithi Institute of Technological Science, he has years of experience in enterprise software and data at companies including AT&T, Bank of America, and Oracle.

AI SENTRY

Manish Gaur

Cloud Security Architect, Google

Gaur focuses on what happens when AI meets the real world of enterprise security: prompt injection, data leaks, and the growing attack surface of AI agents. As a cloud security architect at Google, he has directly advised executives and engineers at hundreds of enterprises and startups on the evolving landscape of secure AI within cloud environments, according to a Google colleague and former AI 75 honoree who called him “a recognized leader within the worldwide Google Security Community.”

As AI agents grow more sophisticated, so does the attack surface, Gaur warns. “Prompt injection and malicious prompts are no longer just theoretical threats — they can be used to hijack your models, leak sensitive data, or cause reputational damage,” he wrote on LinkedIn. At Google’s AI Agents Dallas event in November 2025, he ran a security booth focused on what Google calls “Model Armor” — an approach to protecting AI applications from these emerging risks.

He’s also written open-source architectural patterns solving complex security challenges through a GitHub organization he maintains, and has presented on a Black Hat cybersecurity webcast and been a featured speaker on Google security at Google Next every year since 2021. Gaur recently led a Dallas AI security workshop, coaching more than 30 customer-security team members. Before joining Google, he was a senior associate at PwC and an IT audit manager at Discover Financial Services.

ROBOTICS REALIST

Francis X. Govers III

Director of Engineering, Uncrewed Systems, Airbus US Space & Defense

Govers is a self-described futurist who builds what he envisions. His career spans three decades and ties to dozens of unmanned vehicles—from NASA and U.S. Army programs to DARPA autonomous-vehicle challenges. Last year, he joined Airbus US Space & Defense in Grand Prairie as Director of Engineering for Uncrewed Systems, leading the development of autonomous platforms for defense and space.

Airbus is currently developing the MQ-72C, an autonomous variant of the U.S. Army’s UH-72 Lakota helicopter that completed its first autonomous flight in Grand Prairie in August. Govers, who previously held autonomy roles at Bell Flight and Collins Aerospace, noted he is pleased to be part of the program, calling the UH-72 an “amazing aircraft.” 

Earlier this year, Govers joined Shield AI’s Inderraj Singh Grewal and Airbus colleague Greg Knutson for a MIT course fireside chat on how autonomous technology can perform missions that are difficult even for experienced pilots. The engineer, who noted that he enjoyed “talking about autonomy and making decisions with uncertainty” at the two-day event, literally wrote the book on AI for robotics: Artificial Intelligence for Robotics (now in its second edition).

Govers also sat down for an episode of The Innovators Playbook podcast in July, exploring “Why AI Still Falls Short: Real-World Robotics.” The engineer said that successful autonomous systems require a blend of classical control and AI to navigate “real-world” constraints like power and safety. While he maintains strict rules for deterministic safety in flight, Govers identifies the evolution of generative models as a transformative shift for robotic intelligence. By leveraging latent space to encode trajectories and plans, he says the technology has ‘given us the ability to simulate an imagination.'”

APPLIED INTELLIGENCER

Bob Heckel

CEO, Computer Visionaries LLC

Heckel is CEO of Computer Visionaries, a Dallas-based applied AI firm that bills itself as a “fractional skunkworks of applied intelligence.” The company was launched by North Texas tech pioneer, Spacee founder Skip Howard, a 2024 AI 75 honoree known for his expertise in computer vision. Howard brought Heckel on to run and grow the business, which focuses on enterprises that need senior AI expertise beyond consulting. The firm builds custom computer-vision and agentic AI systems to operate inside core enterprise workflows, then turns them over to internal teams to own, scale, and operate.

One focus area has been physical retail. Heckel led teams working with a Fortune 100 retailer to improve theft detection, with the company noting reduced theft “in the hundreds of millions.” He also developed a legacy data-capture methodology for training AI systems so companies can preserve their competitive advantage as AI disrupts their industries. A related legacy knowledge-capture platform for small and mid-sized companies is currently in alpha. Previously, Heckel held senior positions at Capstone Commercial Real Estate Group and Crossmark.

VOICE VIRTUOSO

Andi Irvin Hodnicki

Director, AI Service, SoundHound AI

Hodnicki leads a team of AI service professionals at SoundHound, a publicly traded developer of conversational AI software for brands in industries ranging from healthcare and hospitality to auto manufacturing. Recently, the company showcased an agentic AI platform at CES 2026 that lets users build AI agents in minutes, along with expanded in-car voice commerce that enables drivers to make reservations, pay for parking, and complete transactions by voice.

Hodnicki — who has risen through SoundHound’s ranks over nearly four years to become director in December 2025 — runs delivery of AI products to enterprise clients at scale, sets strategic direction for deploying new AI pilots, and oversees the expansion of existing client engagements. Working remotely from North Texas for the Silicon Valley company, she collaborates directly with the product team to design and implement new AI features. SoundHound spotlighted her last fall, noting that she “plays a key role in bringing our voice AI technology to life.”

Previously, Hodnicki was a senior product analyst at Dallas-based Novo Labs, a conversational AI startup that was ultimately acquired by SoundHound through its 2024 acquisition of SYNQ3 Restaurant Solutions. Investor Clinton Coleman, who co-founded Novo Labs, noted that she helped build AI services “during the early, scrappy days” and now leads a much larger services organization at SoundHound. Before that Hodnicki held analyst and management positions at Sunoco and Crossmark, respectively.

ACES ACE

Aroon Jham

Senior Director, Go-To-Market Analytics, Thomson Reuters

Jham has embedded agentic AI into existing workflows at Thomson Reuters, pairing the technology with governance and driving adoption across sales, marketing, and customer-facing teams to improve business outcomes. He led the design and development of the framework, called ACES, which orchestrates multiple specialized agents within Microsoft Teams to gather and contextualize data and deliver product-fit insights.

In July, he was an AI100 honoree at MachineCon 2025, where he was named one of the nation’s most influential AI leaders for achieving measurable business results through the application of AI and analytics. Jham also is the author of “Innovating for Profit,” which focuses on using AI/ML initiatives to grow company revenue.

AI ALL-ROUNDER

Yatin Karnik

Founder & CEO, Confer Solutions AI

Karnik is proving that transformative AI doesn’t just come from coastal tech hubs, but from practitioners with deep domain experience who can execute at Fortune 1 production scale wherever they are. In 2025, at Walmart Global Tech, the former Wells Fargo SVP served as chief AI architect on a consulting basis for Sam’s Club. There, he created the retailer’s first Model Context Protocol server for catalog operations and its first production AI agent: a LangGraph-based catalog debugging tool that slashed merchant troubleshooting time from four or five hours to 15 minutes or less.

Simultaneously, he boosted annual recurring revenue at his McKinney-based Confer Solutions AI to $150,000, deploying voice and email agents for clients including cross-border mortgage provider MoXi Global. Says one admirer: “The North Texas AI ecosystem is stronger because Yatin is building here.”

CLOUD CAPTAIN

Hemant Madaan

CEO, AptaCloud

Madaan is a serial entrepreneur, AI consultant, and founder of Richardson-based AptaCloud, a modern cloud and AI integration firm focusing on agentic AI systems. The company’s flagship offering, which targets mid-market and enterprise companies, enables customers to automate disconnected reporting, logistics, and operations systems into streamlined workflows.

Aimed at industries where AI uptake typically is slower, AptaCloud has led deployment of AI agents for oil-and-gas field workers in Midland, for example. There, the company’s AI conversational agent ingested 30,000 operating documents and reports, letting workers check standards and compliance in real time. In the healthcare space, Madaan’s team built an ambient AI scribe for urgent care clinics that listens during patient visits, summarizes notes, and pushes data directly into electronic medical records.

DOUBLE-DUTY CIO

Ravi Malick

Senior Vice President and Global Chief Information Officer, Box

Malick is an advocate for making AI operational, safe, and meaningful for business at Box, an AI-powered, cloud-based content management and file-sharing service provider, working remotely from North Texas for the California company.

His role is twofold, he told the InfoGov Hot Seat podcast in June: running IT, security, and operations internally while spending significant time externally “working with customers, speaking at events, really waving the Box flag.” Early on at the company, he helped form an AI governance council driven by the chief privacy officer, specifically to prevent what he called “false starts or pauses” when AI experiments hit unanticipated risk. His philosophy: go slow to go fast. For CIOs working with governance teams on AI he advises then to reach out and engage. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

Malick has since published a five-step framework for becoming an AI-first company. No 1 on the list? AI must be a capability expander — not just speeding up existing tasks but enabling new possibilities. Malick also spoke at Dreamforce 2025 on preparing for “an agentic world,” and guest-lectured at UT Dallas on agentic AI.

Prior to Box, Malick was a VP-level executive for Dallas-Fort Worth companies including Vistra Energy, TXU Energy, and Energy Future Holdings. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science from Brown University.

INNOVATION INCUBATOR

Mark McSpadden

Head of Innovation, USAA Labs

McSpadden incubates new products, experiences, and business models for USAA, a Fortune 100 financial services company with 37,000 employees and more than 14 million members. As head of innovation for the San Antonio-based company’s USAA Labs, he leads the team responsible for testing emerging technologies — including conversational, non-bot AI banking assistants — and piloting new digital experiences before integrating them into the core business.

North Texas-based McSpadden is an experienced enterprise innovation operator, previously having served as vice president, global product and UX for American Express Global Business Travel, and as vice president, digital experience, at Sabre Corp. A speaker at conferences and events across the globe, including TEDx and AI World, he has a bachelor’s degree in technical management from Texas A&M University.

AUTONOMY AUTHORITY

Jaime Mineart

Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Caterpillar Inc.

Mineart runs AI, autonomy, and robotics strategy for Irving-based Caterpillar — a role that means making machines, job sites, and entire enterprises what the company calls able to “see, think, act, and learn together.” As CTO and senior VP, she’s put AI, machine learning, and digital twins to work across global operations, while helping shape a $100 million “workforce of the future” commitment announced in 2025 to prepare workers through digital technology, AI, and robotics training.

Most recently, she’s been the face of Caterpillar’s AI and autonomy story at public forums, including the Consumer Electronics Show and Fortune Brainstorm Tech. Already, she’s pointed out, the technologies are improving jobsite outcomes and moving people out of risky work environments at Caterpillar. Mineart has spent her entire career at Caterpillar, starting there as an engineering intern while pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering at Purdue University.

INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATOR

Manuj Naman

Founder and CEO, Anantak Robotics Inc.

A pioneer in Dallas-Fort Worth’s emerging AI-and-robots cluster, Naman founded Farmers Branch-based Anantak Robotics in 2014, which develops AI-powered autonomous vehicles for warehouses and factories with a philosophy that “autonomy must adapt to the facility — not the other way around.”

The company’s robotic vehicles use camera-vision autonomy, mapping software, and AI-driven obstacle detection, as well as on-board localization and path-planning. The robots navigate and operate alongside human operators using onboard intelligence — something Naman is renowned for championing.

In December, Anantak and Canadian manufacturer Motrec International announced the launch of one of the world’s first hybrid autonomous tow tractors — the MX340 — which features Anantak’s intelligent navigation system. Last year, Naman also co-authored a peer-reviewed paper on optimizing human-robot collaboration for efficiency in retail logistics, using Anantak-style autonomous pallet movers as a reference point. With a background in engineering, consulting, and finance, he’s now advancing the next generation of industrial automation.

CODING COGNOSCENTI

Ravi Narayanan

Chief Technology Officer, CorroHealth Inc.

Narayanan has pioneered the use of AI and natural language processing to automate revenue cycle management for hospitals and other healthcare facilities. After co-founding Medical Savant, a coding automation software firm, he became CTO at Plano-based CorroHealth following its acquisition of Medical Savant in 2021. “Where today companies are struggling with ROI from AI adoption and people talk of an AI bubble, Ravi has shown how AI can be put to use to improve the bottom line,” said Dr. Gopal Gupta, a 2025 AI 75 honoree and co-director of UTD’s Center for Applied AI and Machine Learning.

Gupta led the UTD side of a collaboration announced in early 2025 that integrated a “back-end reasoning engine” into CorroHealth’s PULSE platform, moving beyond simple pattern matching to mimic human-like logic. Gupta says the work has achieved near 100% automation of medical code extraction from electronic health records.

Narayanan earned a bachelor of technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and previously founded and co-founded AerialView Technologies and A4 Networks, respectively.

TRUST ENGINEER

Tommy Scillian

Founder and Managing Partner, Red4 Technology

Scillian helps growth-stage and mid-market organizations in industries including energy and transportation build AI-enabled organizational intelligence systems through Southlake-based Red4 Technology, which he calls a “deep-tech strategy and execution studio.” His diagnosis: “Most organizations treat AI as a tool rollout or a model selection problem instead of a systems architecture problem. That’s why most pilots stall.”

His approach is rooted in cybernetics — treating organizations as adaptive systems that link sensing, learning, governance, and execution. “If adoption and trust are not engineered into the system, AI fails quietly through workarounds, low usage, and organizational drift — even when the models are strong,” he says. In one oilfield services deployment, an IoT- and edge-AI compliance system generated approximately $1 million in pilot revenue with an estimated $10 million pipeline tied to expanded rollout, according to Scillian.

Last year, the founder’s paper on his framework, the Red4 Innovation Operating System, was accepted into the SSRN Management, Innovation & Strategy research network. His work grew out of earlier endeavors at NASA and Cisco, and he has since filed multiple provisional patents spanning AI-based authentication, post-quantum cybersecurity, and LLM-driven automation.

STORE SEER

Alexandros Siskos

SVP, Customer Success and Marketplace Strategy, Everseen

Siskos leads marketplace strategy from North Texas for Everseen, an Ireland-based vision AI company that works with more than half of the world’s top retailers. Everseen’s computer vision platform is deployed across 8,600 stores, processing more than 220 million products daily. Siskos, who joined as Everseen’s first U.S. employee, helped guide its expansion to global profitability.

The company’s scale of daily video processing has surpassed Meta and is set to pass YouTube, which sees close to 6.5 petabytes every day, he told Conversations On Retail last March, noting the company’s millions of transactions are equivalent to streaming video for close to three centuries. Retailers including Woolworths, Kohl’s, and Ahold have publicly attributed P&L impact to Everseen’s technology, and a Forrester study found a 374% ROI from a single use case, Siskos noted.

He predicts that the future of retail tech is about using AI as an “intelligent overlay” that sits on top of existing infrastructure to make it smarter in real time. Asked what advice he has for retailers who haven’t started with AI yet, Siskos was blunt. “What do you mean ‘start’? You should have already started,” he added. “Start small — but just start. Period.”

Siskos serves on the board of Mind & Machine DFW, a nonprofit for builders and users of AI. Earlier in his career, Siskos led the North American expansion of Blue Yonder, a SaaS ML/AI company later acquired by JDA, and held roles at Walgreens, Accenture, and Nielsen.

TRANSIT TRAILBLAZER

Shawn Taikratoke

Co-Founder and CEO, Mozee

Taikratoke is the CEO and technical co-founder behind Mozee, an Arlington-based, AI-powered deep-tech company reinventing urban transit with a fleet of small, fully autonomous, multi-passenger electric shuttles coordinated by Mozee’s own proprietary end-to-end neural network and planning system. The company’s “modular agile transit” platform, or MAT, uses existing roads and predefined routes, adapting in real time to demand using cameras, AI vision, radar, and IR sensors that ensure passenger safety, obstacle detection, and event-route risk mitigation.

The company is poised to deploy a large commercial fleet in Arlington’s Entertainment District and is aiming to serve as the official “gap-filler” transit solution for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Taikratoke is an experienced software engineer with a background spanning robotics, autonomy, and real-time systems.

MODERNIZATION MAESTRO

Bryan Tharpe

Senior Director, Market Solutions, Slalom

As a senior director at Slalom, a global consulting firm, Tharpe has enabled AI adoption over the last year at large North Texas enterprises in sectors ranging from energy and transportation to financial services. In the case of one midstream energy client, for example, he leveraged AI to modernize an aging integrated gas management system within regulatory and compliance deadlines, setting it on track to complete the project in roughly half the originally planned time.

With more than 20 years of experience helping organizations adopt advanced technology, he has focused most recently on integrating Slalom’s agentic AI accelerator directly into company workflows, looking to reduce manual effort and enhance business outcomes. Tharpe has a bachelor of science degree in computer science from The University of Texas at Dallas.

EXCHANGE ENGINEER

Dinand Vanvelzen

Chief Technology Officer, Oculon Intelligence (TXSE Group)

Vanvelzen is helping build AI-native financial technology infrastructure in Dallas as CTO at Oculon Intelligence — the surveillance and market-intelligence division of the TXSE Group, the company behind the Texas Stock Exchange. He joined in January as a key architect for Oculon’s agentic AI platform, which TXSE Group founder James H. Lee said reflects the company’s belief that “being able to write and control our own technology will be a major advantage.” Oculon’s SaaS platform consists of an integrated suite of execution analytics, regulatory reporting, and cross-market surveillance tools enhanced with multiple large language models that aim to improve investor outcomes by turning compliance with complex U.S. rules into a competitive advantage.

The platform launched last fall amid the SEC’s overhaul of Rule 605, the first update in over 20 years to how brokers report trade execution quality — a change that exponentially increased the data firms must track and report. Vanvelzen, who has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Zuyd University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, previously spent 20 years building trading tech at companies including Citadel LLC and TradeStation.

TELECOM TASKMASTER

Praveen Vemulapalli

Director Technology, CDO Data & Gen AI Architecture & Strategic Platforms, AT&T

Vemulapalli, a leader in AT&T’s Chief Data Office, has led the enablement of thousands of autonomous agents operating across the company’s ecosystem. A previous AI 75 honoree who has worked closely with him describes the work as “a measurable shift from traditional predictive models to adaptive, reasoning-based AI agents that transform how AT&T operates.”

Vemulapalli paved the way for this accomplishment by helping lead a multi-year overhaul that moved AT&T’s massive on-premises Hadoop data lake to a unified, cloud-based lakehouse on Azure Databricks. “We prioritized retiring our most compute-intensive workloads,” he told Databricks. The shift achieved a projected five-year ROI of 300% while significantly reducing data-center costs, according to a Microsoft case study.

Vemulapalli has been with AT&T since 2012, rising from principal big data architect to his current director-level role overseeing Data and Generative AI Architecture. He is also responsible for the AT&T Enterprise Palantir Data & GenAI Platform. His team is advancing the company’s data and generative AI capabilities, including cloud-cost optimization, security architecture, and comprehensive data-architecture strategies across the Dallas-based telecom giant.

AI CHAMPIONS

 

LOGISTICS LUMINARY

Masood Khan

Global Logistics Manager – Aerospace, Defense & Marine, TE Connectivity

Khan, global logistics leader at TE Connectivity in North Texas, has built a prolific track record in AI education and literacy in the region. Last year, he co-authored the “Beginner to Executive Prompting Guide,” which gives executives a practical framework for using AI with structure rather than guesswork. His second book, “Sustainability Rewired,” reached No. 1 New Release in four Amazon categories and was adopted into Arizona State University’s graduate curriculum.

His co-author on the prompting guide, Babar Bhatti — co-founder of Dallas AI and a previous AI 75 honoree — called Khan “a defining force in how AI is understood, taught, and applied across Dallas-Fort Worth.”

Over the past year, Khan served as a judge at the UTD AI Hackathon and led the 300-attendee “AI and the Future” summit in Richardson, where he organized a four-hour track on AI ethics, safety, and responsible use. He has also built more than 80 custom GPT systems supporting logistics, sustainability, healthcare, and community education, and launched a new AI podcast. In his global supply chain role, Khan additionally built and deployed a complete Product Carbon Footprint calculator, giving teams a more accurate, AI-assisted way to quantify emissions at the product and component levels.

CAMPUS CATALYST

Mei Lin

Innovation Strategist, University of Texas at Arlington

Lin works in the gap between AI tools and the people who need to use them. As innovation strategist in UT Arlington’s Office of Information Technology, she says she’s built AI governance frameworks, intake processes, and proof-of-concept pipelines guiding adoption across a campus of roughly 50,000 students, faculty, and staff. Her team has deployed practical AI agents — including an IRB search tool and a travel-policy assistant — designed to eliminate repetitive work and shorten turnaround times for essential university operations, she says.

Outside the university, she’s become one of North Texas’s most visible AI educators. Lin co-leads the Global AI Community’s DFW chapter and says she has organized more than 10 hands-on AI events in the past year. A Microsoft Copilot 365 MVP, she teaches working professionals how to put tools like Copilot to use in their daily jobs at universities including UNT, UTD, and DBU. She also authored AI Project Power in 2025, a practical playbook that has ranked in Amazon’s Technical Project Management category, and says she is contributing to PMI’s upcoming global AI standards for project management.

Says one of her advocates: “Mei is not only teaching AI—she is building the ecosystem, developing job-ready skills, and empowering people of all ages and backgrounds to thrive in the AI era.”

ONLINE ORIGINAL

Ram Kumar Nimmakayala

Product Leader – AI/ML & Data, Western Governors University

Nimmakayala is building AI and ML literacy at scale in his role at Western Governors, one of the country’s largest nonprofit universities. As principal product manager for AI at the online school, Plano-based Nimmakayala oversees AI-powered systems spanning the full learning lifecycle: outreach, admissions, mentoring, assessment, and alumni engagement.

Over the past year, WGU has reported improved retention rates and increased student satisfaction, reflecting how well these systems have resonated. “Data and AI aren’t just technologies,” he’s said. “They’re tools to humanize experiences and scale meaningful outcomes.”

At WGU, Nimmakayala also led a 92-person internal AI hackathon, bringing together faculty and mentors and legal, risk, and architecture teams to work with data and models. Previously, he led multimillion-dollar AI work at Ericsson, especially in 5G networks and customer experience, partnering with firms like AT&T and NVIDIA.

PIPELINE BUILDER

Gaurav Shekhar

Associate Dean, Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas

Shekhar is an AI-focused academic leader who promotes practical, industry-ready AI and analytics education at UTD’s Jindal School of Management, which is a major contributor to the region’s AI/analytics talent pipeline. Over the last year, he’s helped reposition the school as a focal point in North Texas for AI education and workforce readiness, redesigning graduate curricula, for example, and creating formal structures like an AI Council made up of senior industry leaders.

The work has led one colleague to call him Jindal’s “primary AI champion.” Shekhar has played a key role in expanding UTD’s Graduate Business Analytics and AI program, now one of the country’s largest. In addition, Shekhar organized the first AI Day at UTD, attracting more than 200 companies as well as hundreds of executives, students, faculty, and community members to align around AI talent needs and collaboration opportunities.

It’s part of a philosophy he shared on the Tech Leaders Untold podcast in November. The future of work in an AI era will reward communication and adaptability as much as coding—college, he said, should be about networks, leadership, and problem-solving, not just technical skills.

TINKERER IN CHIEF

Anmolika Singh

Data Scientist, Stanley Black & Decker

Singh is impacting the broader AI ecosystem in North Texas on two fronts: her day job deploying AI at an industrial giant, and the community she’s built for innovators across the region. As a member of the AI and data analytics team at Stanley Black & Decker in Plano, she helped create the company’s AI-powered CribMaster inventory management tool. Outside work, she founded the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of AI Tinkerers, building a hub for collaboration among innovators from startups, academia, and Fortune 500 companies.

Singh also writes frequently and speaks publicly about machine learning, data science careers, and women in STEM, serving as vice president of professional development for the Society of Women Engineers, Dallas Section. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in data science from Penn State.

LONE STAR LAUNCHER

David Steele

Director of Texas, Plug and Play Tech Center

Steele leads Texas operations across multiple major verticals, including Enterprise and AI, for Plug and Play, a global innovation platform, VC firm, and startup accelerator that acts as a bridge connecting startups, corporations, investors, and communities. As the organization’s director for the Lone Star State, he aims to enhance Texas’ innovation strategy and grow statewide programs across artificial intelligence, fintech, smart cities, advanced manufacturing, and aerospace and defense.

Steele, who has a background in sports business, founded the group’s sportstech accelerator in Frisco and previously was director of North Texas, where he oversaw and expanded Plug and Play hubs in Frisco and McKinney. He also is an adjunct professor at the University of North Texas, focusing on sports business strategy, partnerships, and emerging technology.

MENTOR MACHINE

Lokesh Kumar Viswavarapu

Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Toyota Connected North America Inc.

Viswavarapu, who works on AI systems that Plano-based Toyota Connected is putting into production, is also building the next generation of AI talent in North Texas — one student, one career-switcher, one hackathon team at a time. Over the past year, he says he directly mentored 25 individuals, including high school students, university students, and working professionals transitioning into AI roles, coaching them in model selection, system design, and ethical engineering. The engineer also mentored 14 participants in the Dallas AI Summer Program, where two of his three teams placed first and second. His academic contributions include guiding master’s-level research on non-invasive activity recognition for assisted living, published through IEEE, and delivering technical talks at UNT’s AI & Data Science Executive Summit. He has also served as a judge for UTD HackAI 2025.

“My approach has been deliberately practical,” he says, “helping students and professionals not only learn AI concepts, but apply them responsibly to real-world problems.” At Toyota Connected, Viswavarapu says he contributes to deployed AI programs, including EV Charge Assist and work tied to Woven City, Toyota’s smart-city initiative in Japan. He also participates in generative AI research funded through the Toyota Global AI Accelerator. Last year, he was a named inventor on a Toyota patent integrating machine learning into vehicle systems.

AI CATALYSTS

 

ADOPTION MAXIMALIST

Hamiz Awan

Co-Founder, Partner, Quant and Technology Lead, Plutus21 Capital; CEO, Plutus21 Partners

Awan spent nearly a decade building Plutus21 from the SMU Incubator into an AI-native investment firm that replaces passive capital with embedded execution. He and Richard Raizes co-founded the Dallas-based firm in 2017 with a contrarian bet on “misunderstood and underappreciated” technologies, starting with blockchain. The employee-owned firm focuses on investing in AI, blockchain, and financial technologies and now operates with two connected arms: Plutus21 Capital is the investment arm; Plutus21 Partners is the operating/execution side.

Over the last year, Awan architected, trained, and deployed “Peter,” the firm’s proprietary large language model for investment analysis. Peter ingests earnings transcripts, financial statements, and alternative datasets at a scale no human team could match, translating qualitative information into structured, investable signals, according to a partner. The system shapes capital allocation across the firm’s AI Core strategy. Plutus21 Partners then embeds engineers and AI systems directly into mid-market portfolio companies, giving them the hands-on technical muscle to scale.

Awan notes that the firm built Plutus21 Partners “out of necessity” after discovering that funding alone doesn’t fix execution.

Awan, who has called his team “Adoption Maximalists in frontier markets,” documents his evolving thesis on his Substack newsletter FuturProof, which contains more than 240 posts tracking his thinking from early blockchain mechanics to deep technical reviews of artificial intelligence. “Your main durable competitive advantage is not how great your technology is,” he has said, “but how many users you have and how many sticky users keep coming back.”

MAVERICK MONEYMAN

Chris Camillo

Investor; Youtuber; Co-Founder, Dumb Money

Trend-spotting investor Camillo, co-founder and co-host of Dallas-based DumbMoney.tv, has emerged as a private-market investor in AI and humanoid robotics, which he calls “infinite labor machines” with trillion-dollar potential. Camillo turned about $20,000 into tens of millions in trading profits over time by leveraging social and cultural data — especially TikTok comments — before Wall Street catches on.

In recent years, he reportedly made two direct, early-stage, eight-figure investments in companies at the heart of the fast-growing humanoid-robots sector, according to Digital Habitats 2025 reporting. One’s in Apptronik, an Austin-based firm whose Apollo robot is designed for logistics, manufacturing, and industrial automation. The other’s in Apptronik rival Figure AI, whose strategic partners include OpenAI and Microsoft. Camillo’s “social arbitrage” investment method is heavily AI-aligned, with multiple DumbMoney segments devoted last year to AI plays.

WEALTHTECH ACCELERATOR

Pamela Cytron

CEO, The Founders Arena

Cytron is an ecosystem builder connecting AI entrepreneurs to capital through The Founders Arena, an Arlington-based global WealthTech accelerator she founded three years ago in collaboration with First Rate Inc., SEI, the city of Arlington, and the Arlington Economic Development Corporation. The nonprofit, WealthTech- and FinTech-focused accelerator has supported 24 startups from around the world across five cohorts, with four exits to date, according to the organization. Past participant Quinn, an Israeli-based financial planning platform, raised an $11 million seed round in 2025, and Milan-based MDOTM won the 2025 Morningstar FinTech Showcase.

Besides coaching founders on AI commercialization, positioning, and go-to-market execution, Cytron advises institutions on AI readiness and risk, influencing how banks, wealth firms, and partners evaluate AI beyond demos. “We’re not here to chase every shiny AI pitch,” she said last fall. “We’re here to elevate evidence-based technology that is built to withstand both market euphoria and scrutiny.”

WORKSHOP WARRIOR

Ben Gold

Executive Director, AI Connex; Founder, AI Academy 4 all

Gold has made it his mission to democratize AI adoption for companies — especially small and medium-sized ones — through customized assessments, action plans, and targeted training programs. As executive director at AI Connex in Frisco and under his own Ben Gold AI brand, where he focuses on practical AI training for solopreneurs and companies, he says he’s conducted more than 100 AI workshops with thousands of participants for organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, translating complex concepts into real strategies.

As a fractional Chief AI Officer for firms like California-based Pacific Packaging Components, he’s rolled out AI automations across sales, marketing, operations, and HR, ensuring that they become embedded in everyday work. Gold, who has more than 20 years of technology experience, is also a keynote speaker on practical, results-driven approaches to AI transformation.

SILICON VALLEY TRANSPLANT

Michael Moe

Founder and CEO, GSV (Global Silicon Valley)

Investing guru Moe, a force-multiplier for AI adoption in education and workforce tech, shifted his operations from Silicon Valley to Dallas five years ago, putting North Texas at the center of activity emanating from his GSV company. Short for Global Silicon Valley, GSV is a 15-year-old, growth-focused investment platform with legacy stakes in the likes of Facebook, Palantir, and Dropbox.

Last year, GSV Ventures co-led a $6.3 million seed round in January 2025 for Amigo, a startup building AI “digital clones” of world-class experts to scale coaching and consulting beyond one-on-one delivery.

Moe, the company’s founder and CEO, annually convenes global buyers, founders, and funders via the ASU+GSV Summit—an edtech- and AI-focused event he co-created with Arizona State University that’s been called the “Davos of Education.” He also launched the AIR Show in 2024 — short for AI Revolution in Education — alongside ASU+GSV, which drew roughly 10,000 attendees and more than 140 AI and education partners by 2025. His thesis: AI is the new air, he told the 2025 gathering — ubiquitous, essential, and reshaping learning from Pre-K to Gray.

He also co-created the Dallas-based Global Mission Summit, which brings national leaders to North Texas for sessions like one exploring how AI and adaptive learning can make world-class education more accessible. “It’s not man versus machine — it’s man and machine,” he said last year. “AI should be seen as an augmentation tool, not a replacement for human intelligence. The best outcomes will come from ‘multiplication by division,’ where AI handles tasks it excels at—automation, data processing, repetitive workflows—while humans focus on uniquely human capabilities like leadership, creativity, and critical thinking.”

BRAVERY HUNTER

John Redgrave

Co-Founder and General Partner, DTX Ventures

Considered a leader in the “new guard” of Dallas venture capital, Redgrave is an AI, cyber-safety, and startup growth specialist with two nine-figure exits to major tech companies under his belt — now channeling that experience into DTX Ventures, a Dallas-based fund he describes as “bravery hunting”: backing early-stage founders brave enough to tackle hard problems in AI, cybersafety, and national-interest technologies.

He’s also an angel investor through Redgrave Capital, backing more than 40 startups with multiple unicorns and six exits to date. DTX filed its first institutional fund with the SEC in early 2025.

The nine-figure exits came from Lattice Data, where he served as COO, which Apple acquired in 2017, and Sentropy, which he founded to supercharge content moderation, which Discord snapped up in 2022. Lattice was a software company that taught machines how to read with human-level intelligence whose extraction engines were used in human-trafficking investigations. After the Sentropy acquisition, Discord put him in charge of Trust & Safety for a platform serving more than 150 million monthly users, working closely with global governments on internet and national security.

Previously he was an early senior leader at Palantir, creating the company’s healthcare vertical and overseeing Strategy & Operations for high-impact national projects, including helping move outbreak tracking “from clipboards to computers” alongside the CDC.

CORPORATE SCOUT

Vikram Taneja

Head of AT&T Ventures and AVP Corporate Development, AT&T

Taneja heads up AT&T’s Dallas-based internal corporate venture arm investing in advanced connectivity, IoT, robotics, cybersecurity, and physical AI. He’s a key innovation gatekeeper, sitting at the center of the company’s emerging tech network linking corporate development, startup ecosystems, and cross-industry partnerships.

“We’re focused on pushing the boundaries of what’s possible by engaging with startups, early-stage companies, and other venture funds developing connectivity-centric technologies that need capital, guidance, and support to get to the next level,” he’s said.

Most recently, AT&T Ventures backed the humanoid-robotics startup Apptronik in a round that brought Apptronik’s reported valuation to at least $5.3 billion. “We view humanoid-form ‘physical AI’ as a powerful way to pair advanced robotics with the scale and flexibility of next-gen connectivity,” Taneja said of the investment. An experienced venture leader who frequently appears at global tech conferences, Taneja previously worked at companies including ORIX Ventures, J.P. Morgan, and PwC.

OUTCOME OPERATOR

Shadman Zafar

CEO, Vibrant Capital

An operator-turned-investor and prolific inventor, Zafar spent years overseeing digital strategy at premier banks like Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup (where he led the latter’s GenAI and productivity-first AI initiatives). Now he’s undertaken an ambitious new endeavor in launching Vibrant Capital, a platform dedicated to scaling applied AI in enterprise sectors in the real economy where AI impact is materially measurable in workflows.

A named inventor on more than 100 patents spanning finance, telecom, and entertainment, Zafar says he’s targeting industries including financial services, insurance, and healthcare — and surrounding their founders with experienced CIOs.

The firm will measure success by “cycle time, quality, safety, cash, and customer experience,” rather than by model performance, Zafar says. “If the work stays the same, the model is just decoration,” he says.

AI ACADEMICS

 

AI² STEWARD

Reuben Burch

Vice Provost for Research; Professor of Engineering, Texas Christian University

Burch is the lead voice behind TCU’s AI² initiative, a $10 million effort that’s one of the university’s largest tech bets and its first major research investment focused on artificial intelligence. With contributions from Dell Technologies, AWS, Microsoft, and others, the campus-wide endeavor is aimed at centralizing and accelerating responsible AI research, education, and operations across TCU.

Burch has framed AI² as a model for secure, scalable AI adoption in higher ed—and as a key component in the university’s drive toward Carnegie R1 research status. Burch, who spent 14 years in industry R&D before joining TCU, also characterizes AI² as an “immediate boost” to the university’s strategic plan. He’s highlighted four governance pillars for AI at TCU: AI tools in teaching, AI tools in research, research about AI, and responsible/ethical AI practices.

DATA DIAGNOSTICIAN

Haihua Chen

Assistant Professor, University of North Texas

As assistant professor of data science at UNT and director of the university’s Intelligent Data Engineering and Analytics Lab, Chen focuses on evaluating and improving the data that powers machine learning and LLM systems. Over the last year, he’s published research showing how organizations can determine whether their data is “good enough” for machine learning — and what to fix if it isn’t.

His work spans healthcare AI, legal intelligence, misinformation detection, and scientific discovery — with more than 1,500 citations across his published research, he says. His NSF-funded projects include training undergraduates to work with vector embeddings, the backbone of modern AI search and recommendation systems, and using AI to improve health information for Hispanic communities during disaster recovery. In early 2026, he published a paper proposing a “machine-for-machine” data ecosystem to address what he calls a critical bottleneck: the need for high-quality training data and manual annotation at scale.

Chen has co-authored more than 60 peer-reviewed papers and is a reviewer for 20 journals. His work, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and other grants, is helping train the next wave of students in North Texas who will build and apply AI systems.

EARLY ADOPTER

Daniel Ernst

Interim Chief AI Strategist, Texas Woman’s University

As interim chief AI strategist and assistant professor of English at Texas Woman’s University, Ernst leads university initiatives to integrate AI into curriculum and operations, developing workshops, training, and resources to prepare students and faculty for the AI future. He and the TWU AI Collaborative have built practical tools including a faculty and staff AI literacy course and ready-to-use syllabus statements for classroom AI policy, according to the university. An undergraduate AI literacy certificate is planned for fall 2026.

Ernst was among the first on campus to workshop generative AI with faculty back in 2023, when he argued it was “ultimately just futile to ban ChatGPT” and urged colleagues to treat it as a new tool rather than a threat.

His own research includes work on AI and the future of writing, and he has argued that generative AI “could replace the boilerplate, the sort of clear-your-throat writing that we don’t like doing in the first place” while writing itself “will still exist.” His expertise on these topics has appeared in academic journals and in public media including NPR and The Conversation.

DISTRICT DEPLOYER

Angie Gaylord

Chief Academic Officer, Dallas Independent School District

Gaylord, who oversees the instructional playbook for more than 140,000 students, is leading responsible AI adoption at Dallas ISD. In her role as CAO, she is piloting AI in digital literacy, hybrid models, and math classrooms. The math effort is backed by a $1.7 million grant from the Texas Instruments Foundation to Educate Texas, which Gaylord spearheaded. “Our leadership team has a readiness to innovate in this space,” she said in August. “We hope this tool builds our teachers’ confidence in teaching math concepts in middle school including rigorous algebraic thinking.”

She leads the district’s internal AI task force and presented an AI-focused briefing to the superintendent and board in 2025, telling them the district is “at a crucial juncture with the convergence of PK-12 education and digital integration of AI.” The district adopted an AI Handbook in June 2025 codifying classroom expectations for age-appropriate, teacher-led AI use.

Prior to her appointment as CAO in 2023, Gaylord had nearly three decades of education experience. She was a featured speaker on “AI in K-12 Education” at the 2025 Convergence AI Dallas summit, and recently was named a Google GSV Fellow for 2026.

COMPUTATIONAL HUMORIST

Christian (Kiki) Hempelmann

Professor of Computational Linguistics and Director of the AI Initiative, East Texas A&M University (Commerce, Texas)

Hempelmann is a computational linguist, an AI-humor researcher, and the leader of ETAMU’s AI Initiative as well as its Semantic Artificial Intelligence and Creativity Laboratory. In the latter roles he shapes AI curricula, helps forge partnerships with industry, and prepares students for AI-driven careers. He’s one of the few researchers globally who shapes international discourse on AI and humor.

But the professor says, while AI can “be prompted to craft a joke,” it will “never wield humor to get out of a scrape or explore possibilities,” as he told Undark Magazine last year in an article shared by the Smithsonian.

His lab’s Project Mercury builds hybrid systems — combining knowledge graphs and embeddings — to represent the meaning of jokes, grounding computational humor in formal semantics. In the summer of 2022, Hempelmann was a consultant at Amazon, specifically as an applied scientist at its Grand Challenge Lab, where he built a prototype computational humor system and hosted a closed-door roundtable on computational humor with international leaders in the field.

The holder of a Ph.D. in computational linguistics from Purdue University, he previously worked in private industry — as chief scientific officer at hakia.com and director of R&D at RiverGlass — building natural language search systems based on ontological semantic technology. His published research has earned more than 3,800 citations.

ANTIBODY ARTISAN

Junzhou Huang

Jenkins Garrett Endowed Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington

Within the North Texas research ecosystem, Huang is playing a central role in the push by UTA to apply AI to drug discovery and chemical safety. With a research focus on the likes of machine learning, computer vision, medical image analysis, and bioinformatics, he’s the principal investigator on major external grants, including a multimillion-dollar NIH award for AI-driven antibody design.

He’s also leading a $200,000 project funded by Johnson & Johnson to explore AI-based toxicology prediction—an early-stage step in drug development that can flag safety issues in advance of clinical trials. Huang’s research has been recognized with multiple awards, including from Google and Microsoft. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from Rutgers University in 2011, the same year he joined UTA.

GeoAI GENERAL

Yan Huang

Regents Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas

Huang is a deep-tech innovator and leading researcher in geospatial artificial intelligence, advancing the field with new methods for spatiotemporal modeling, mobility intelligence, and distributed sensing. As a UNT Regents Professor—the highest faculty rank there—she is internationally recognized for her contributions shaping GeoAI, which is AI that works with location-based data to help systems understand spatial relationships and make predictions based on the likes of maps and satellite imagery.

The field has substantial societal impact, by strengthening disaster response, for example. With recent work spanning AI-driven traffic forecasting to distributed sensing, Huang published 10 papers in 2025 — including a Best Paper Candidate at ACM SIGSPATIAL — and is currently leading $6 million in active research projects, including AI-powered cognitive distributed sensing for the Department of Defense and real-time roadway debris detection for the Texas Department of Transportation.

A two-time ACM SIGSPATIAL 10-Year Impact Award recipient and ACM Distinguished Member, her work has earned nearly 8,000 citations.

BIOSCIENCES BRIDGE

Eric C. Larson

Interim Director, SMU Institute for Computational Biosciences; Bobby B. Lyle Endowed Professor in Engineering Innovation; Associate Professor, Computer Science, Southern Methodist University

At the SMU Institute for Computational Biosciences, located at Dallas’ Pegasus Park, Larson is leading a rapidly growing, cross-disciplinary AI institute that sits at the nexus of data science and the life sciences. There, he’s expanding the institute’s research portfolio and connecting SMU’s data-science talent pipeline with biotech startups and corporate R&D, according to SMU. He stepped into the role in July 2025, just as SMU entered its first years as a newly designated Carnegie R1 research university.

With a background in healthcare, aviation, and education AI, he draws on a deep foundation in sensor data analysis and pattern recognition, as well as a history of using machine learning to extract actionable signals from unstructured, real-world data streams. His lab has produced eight patents — six commercialized — and his research has attracted more than $14.7 million in funding from agencies and partners including NSF, NIH, the Department of Defense, Goldman Sachs, and Raytheon, according to his CV.

Larson, who provided a public overview of SMU’s AI research at the 2025 Convergence AI Dallas summit, earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Washington. He trained there under Shwetak Patel and Les Atlas, two pioneers in sensor-based AI and applied ML.

CLINICAL COLLABORATOR

Eric Peterson, M.D.

Vice Provost and Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Research; Vice President for Health System Research; and Professor, Internal Medicine, UT Southwestern Medical Center

Peterson is an internationally acclaimed health-system leader who’s driving AI-enabled quality, safety, and outcomes innovation across UT Southwestern and national clinical data networks. The cardiovascular clinical researcher is on the steering committee of UT-REAL Health AI Collaboration, a state-funded initiative that aims to turn UT System health institutions into national leaders in responsible AI.

UTSW is already a leader in AI-powered research. In 2025, for example, Peterson co-led a groundbreaking LLM stroke classification study—one of UTSW’s most important AI clinical research findings to date. With more than 1,400 peer-reviewed publications, he has been ranked among the top 1% of all published researchers in clinical medicine. Every day, he’s said, UTSW is “finding new ways to harness AI to … deliver the most advanced treatments to our patients.”

AG INTELLIGENCER

Jianzhong Su

Professor of Mathematics; Co-Director, Smart Agriculture Research Center (SARC), The University of Texas at Arlington

As co-director of SARC, one of the first major AI-driven agricultural research centers in the country, Su is driving the use of the intellectual powerhouse behind using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science to address agricultural threats at scale. A professor of mathematics, he specializes in spatiotemporal modeling — the mathematical framework behind modern AI forecasting systems.

With a growing national focus on resilient food systems, the UTA research center is helping by using AI to forecast outbreaks of bird flu, to identify early signs of plant pathogens, and to turn raw satellite and soil data into “climate-smart” strategies. “Agriculture is essential to society, yet it has historically seen less AI integration than other industries,” Su said. “UTA has tremendous strength in technology and data science, and that positions us to help modernize agriculture in Texas and beyond.”

AI IMPACT INNOVATORS

 

DIASPORA DIGITIZER

Lola Adey

Founder and CEO, VibeCode Africa; Founder, PIPA

Dallas-based AI literacy consultant Adey founded the nonprofit VibeCode Africa to educate underserved African communities and the diaspora on AI literacy and the use of artificial intelligence for wealth creation. The organization delivers practical, structured training and hosts innovation summits, including its inaugural event in October 2025 in Dallas. There, more than 100 attendees built functional AI solution prototypes including MobiHealth, a healthcare app designed for African languages.

To date, Adey says, she’s trained more than 1,000 people, built multiple AI prototypes, and partnered with schools, churches, NGOs, and governments to make AI accessible to non-technical learners. She also built PIPAplan, an AI product-management tool aimed at helping teams turn “messy notes and histories” into structured, actionable plans.

MUNICIPAL MAVERICK

Brita Andercheck

Chief Data Officer, City of Dallas

Andercheck leads Dallas’ Office of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence, whose AI-driven analytics work on human trafficking won Gartner’s Eye on Innovation Top Project award for North America. The award acknowledged work that set “a new standard for data-driven social impact,” according to the city. In addition to the trafficking dashboard, which uses an algorithm to identify high-risk victims, her office leads other initiatives, including one to detect code violations through AI-equipped city vehicles.

The Bloomberg Center for Cities at the Harvard Kennedy School called her office “the most sophisticated data analytics shop in the country.” Separately, Gartner named her one of the Top 5 Most Impactful CDOs in the World, evaluating more than 600 CDOs across public and private sectors worldwide. Last year, Andercheck presented the city council with a “City AI Plan” outlining AI governance and best practices, as well as upcoming projects.

AI DEMYSTIFIER

Bhavani Kola

CEO and Founder, Eclatech Solutions

Kola is the CEO and founder of Eclatech Solutions, a Fort Worth-based tech services company she launched in 2023 to “demystify AI” for educators, students, nonprofits, and corporate teams across North Texas and nationally. Her immersive AI-literacy workshops introduce attendees to GenAI, equity-focused AI usage, and the technology’s real-world applications, including practical prompt engineering.

The Ohio-based Instructional Technology Council says Kola is “at the forefront of the AI revolution in education,” noting that she’s trained more than 1,000 educators in a single year and will keynote the organization’s 2026 national eLearning conference. With more than 24 years of experience in education and educational technology, she also creates actionable AI guidance through YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

OPPORTUNITY HATCHER

Brandon Powell

Founder and CEO, HatchWorks AI

Dallas-based Powell, who describes himself as an “AI humanist,” founded HatchFutures to ensure artificial intelligence doesn’t widen the opportunity gap — it closes it. The nonprofit arm of his Atlanta-headquartered AI consultancy HatchWorks trains underserved, at-risk youth and educators across the U.S. and Latin America in AI, and places students into real-world, six-week internships alongside HatchWorks engineers.

“Our big, audacious goal with HatchFutures is to train 1,000 educators in AI by 2030,” Powell said in early 2025, naming Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Colombia, and Costa Rica as focus cities. “We believe AI is going to change those poverty cycles.” Last October, Powell announced that HatchFutures was “ramping up” its efforts in Dallas as HatchWorks expanded its local presence.

The nonprofit work is powered by HatchWorks AI, the Atlanta-headquartered consultancy Powell founded in 2016 and pivoted to AI-first roughly two and a half years ago. Over the past 12 months, AI-related revenue has surpassed legacy services revenue, he says. In 2025, Powell was featured among Forbes’ “Top 5 AI Leaders Bringing Artificial Intelligence to Everyone.”

MISSION MULTIPLIER

Brandon Rapp

Founder and CEO, Allouve

Rapp founded Allouve, a privately held, Dallas-based strategy, data, analytics, and AI firm that specializes in supporting under-resourced social-sector organizations that are bettering humanity. The company partners specifically with the likes of nonprofits, public agencies, and environmental and social-impact enterprises, aiming to bolster their AI knowledge bases with responsible, human-centered, AI-powered engagement tools.

Using AI agents (often retrieval-augmented) and modern data systems, Rapp’s firm is helping nonprofits improve their real-time decision-making, increase their service capacity, and use data ethically and effectively. His specific goal is to deploy 1,000 “operational workers” (or AI agents) into nonprofits so understaffed teams can offload routine work and focus on their mission. He holds a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

DIRECTOR’S GUIDE

Joanna Ridgway

Chief Revenue Officer, Cien.ai

Ridgway co-designed and co-authored the AI Governance Compass for Private Boards, a structured framework presented at last year’s conference of the national Private Director Association. The Compass organizes AI oversight into four quadrants and 16 focus areas, providing directors with a simple, repeatable way to assess where they stand, quickly identify gaps, and turn the results into a tailored board agenda. Private boards across the country are now using the framework to keep their AI governance focused and actionable, she says.

At Dallas-based Cien.ai, a GenAI-driven data analytics company, Ridgway leads global sales and has landed major consulting partnerships and moved AI analytics into live client decision-making. She also speaks frequently on AI for executive audiences, including an international conference of leading U.S. and U.K. business leaders.

NEUROTECH INVENTOR

Aaron Tate

Director, Emerging Technology, Center for BrainHealth

As director of emerging technologies at UT Dallas’ Center for BrainHealth, Tate oversees a lab that actively works to identify, protect, license, and market AI-, VR-, and data-driven innovations that turn brain-science research into scalable products.

Two of his primary deployed systems — a virtual coaching platform called Charisma, and The BrainHealth Project, a large digital platform for personalized cognitive training — combine GenAI, game tech, and cognitive science for social and mental health interventions and study. Tate is a named inventor on the primary IP powering both systems, including a 2025 patent covering the evaluation and coaching of social competencies in immersive virtual environments.

Tate and partners moved Charisma from a resource-heavy, on-premise model to a cloud-based system on AWS over the last two years, integrating generative AI that recognizes facial expressions, gaze, and tonal cues in real time during coaching sessions — reducing cognitive load on human coaches and expanding the platform’s reach. In August 2025, the platform, which has served more than 500 participants, including autistic individuals and people with social anxiety, was named a Top 3 finalist for the Global Innovation Management Institute Award.

A former game developer who joined the Center for BrainHealth in 2012, Tate frequently discusses the lab’s work at conferences and for the Frontiers of BrainHealth lecture series. The BrainHealth Project was an early innovative win as a finalist in Fast Company’s Innovation By Design 2021 award category.

About the AI 75

Following an open nomination period that began in November, the 2026 honorees were selected by the Dallas Innovates editorial team, led by Co-Founder and Editor Quincy Preston, with strategic guidance from the DRC’s Duane Dankesreiter.  The review process focused on identifying the thought leaders and experts who are shaping the field of AI from North Texas, taking several factors into account, including the substance of a nominee’s AI contributions over the past year, their leadership within the community, their body of work, and the potential for future impact.

We invite you to follow the progress of these 75 leaders as they continue to move the needle across the region. If you know a leader who belongs on a future list, we look forward to your nominations for the 2027 class, which opens in fall 2026.

More AI 75 honorees

Track the evolution of the North Texas AI ecosystem through our past lists. See the leaders who defined the 2025 and 2024 classes.

This report was produced by Glenn Hunter, Quincy Preston, and David Seeley.

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