This list celebrates changemakers creating meaningful impact through leadership, innovation, fresh perspectives, transformative mindsets, and lessons that resonate far beyond the workplace.
Elastic is making the case that security is a data problem and that it can leverage its Elastic Workflows to bring automation directly into its Elastic Security offering.
The argument, timed for the RSA Conference 2026, comes as enterprises are trying to secure AI agents and similar workloads. The issue for customers is that they have to navigate platformization pitches as well as cybersecurity's alphabet soup of acronyms such as XDR (Extended Detection and Response) and SIEM (Security Information and Event Management).
Monday.com's agent lab launched Agentalent.ai, a marketplace where customers can hire AI agents for business roles.
The move, which lands shortly after Monday laid out a welcome mat for AI agents, is notable because it's likely to be the first of several similar efforts. It's possible that enterprises will be able to hire AI agents for tasks on a temporary basis.
Cisco expanded its security offerings for AI agents including DefenseClaw, an automated open-source agent security framework built on Nvidia's OpenShell.
DefenseClaw was a headliner for a series of new agentic AI security efforts from Cisco. DefenseClaw brings together open source tools to ensure every agent skill is scanned and sandboxed, has a verified MCP server and features inventoried AI assets.
The generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) boom changes every aspect of digital value chains, enabling companies to insert AI into any corner of enterprise automation. GenAI’s strong text-generation abilities have been revolutionary when it comes to programming languages, which are more structured than human languages.
Agentic AI will transform enterprise business processes as much as technology and require new architectures and leadership approaches. Simply put, everyone is going to move up the abstraction layer.
AI has accelerated the rate of change for enterprises and CEOs and boards of directors need to keep up, lead and transform industries. Constellation Research brought together 120 public company CEOs and board members at its Futures Forum to empower the "responsible heretics" that will challenge the status quo.
The leaders at the Constellation Research's Futures Forum collectively oversee more than $500 billion in revenue. The three-day forum operated under Chatham House rules for many of the decision-makers and buy side.
Accenture said AI projects lead to data projects half the time, enterprises with strong digital cores are expanding AI initiatives and companies are looking to transform their SaaS implementations.
AI has revamped services companies and given smaller firms that ability to compete with giants. Here is a look at the moving parts, scaling and the new models emerging.
At Constellation Research's AI Forum in Silicon Valley, Forever Human.ai and Soul of the Machine, which launched at AI Forum 2025, walked through AI-driven services. Here are the takeaways from Tracey Cesen, Founder & CEO Forever Human.ai, and Sunil Karkera, Founder of Soul of the Machine.
Agentic AI is going to revamp the customer’s experience and interactions are going to look a lot different.
That's the big picture from a CX automation panel at Constellation Research's AI Forum 2026. Here's a look at the takeaways.
Focus on the cognitive load. Benjamin Weinger, SVP and Strategic Business Unit Head of Cognizant Moment: "We have made shopping more convenient. We haven't made it easier. We haven't changed the cognitive load."
Actian CEO Marc Potter said AI is proving to be a wakeup call on data governance as companies realize it's a business imperative.
"Everyone has been talking about governance, but it has been more at a policy level and no one was enforcing it," said Potter. "There was a disconnection between data governance and reality. Because of AI, there's a reality check that data is not as good as companies thought. Data quality is getting real."
Sandy Carter, Chief Business Officer of Unstoppable Domains, said "there are claws everywhere now" and enterprises need to give OpenClaw and its various derivatives a spin (in a secure sandbox).
Speaking at Constellation Research's AI Forum 2026 in Silicon Valley, Carter and other CxOs walked through OpenClaw usage, what it means for work and early experiments.
Alibaba Cloud posted third quarter revenue growth of 36% driven by AI demand. The company's traction with its Qwen family of models also remained strong.
The cloud results from Alibaba overshadowed a weaker-than-expected quarter from the company overall. The miss was due to Alibaba's commerce unit.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang held court with financial and industry analysts this week at Nvidia GTC 2026 and riffed on tokenomics, why he wished OpenAI and Anthropic were public companies to prove out the tokens to revenue equation and why OpenClaw will become part of the enterprise mix.
Huang's follow-up with analysts fleshed out a barrage of news headlines from Nvidia GTC 2026. Here's a look at the takeaways:
Agentic AI is at an inflection point and engineers will have token budgets just like they do laptops. Huang said:
Snowflake said it is launching Project SnowWork, an autonomous enterprise AI platform that aims to automate work.
With Project SnowWork, which is in research preview, Snowflake is looking to orchestrate planning, analysis and execution for multi-step tasks grounded in enterprise data.
Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri said agentic AI is more of a friend to enterprise software than a foe since it can expand the market. However, AI's displacement of human workers is going to be a big issue.
Boomi CEO Steve Lucas said data movement is critical to AI workloads and AI agents. The company recently unveiled its next iteration that revolves around data readiness and activation. He also had some notable rants.
Nick Tzitzon, Vice Chairman at ServiceNow, said AI's pace of change shouldn't upend good business decisions, managing teams well and becoming multi-dimensional as an employee and overall human.
Tzitzon, speaking at Constellation Research's Futures Forum, touched on multiple topics. The forum features 120 public company CEOs and board members that collectively have more than $500 billion in revenue. The three-day forum is operating under Chatham House rules for many of the decision-makers and buy side.
Here's a look:
Cisco Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, is excited about the AI-driven future, but can't ignore the risks. Patel talked space data centers, hiring the next generation and the risks and rewards ahead.
Here's a look at what Patel had to say at Constellation Research's Futures Forum about the current AI landscape. The forum features 120 public company CEOs and board members that collectively have more than $500 billion in revenue. The three-day forum is operating under Chatham House rules for many of the decision-makers and buy side.
Artificial intelligence has revamped the software development and building systems with code generation, but it doesn't replace engineering rigor. If anything, enterprises need more enterprise rigor to ensure you're not scaling code problems with AI.
Nvidia GTC 2026 is turning out to be a bit of a coming-out party for Akamai's Inference Cloud. Akamai's Inference Cloud is the first global implementation of Nvidia AI Grid, which routes AI workloads across edge networks for lower latency and cost with improved performance.
Akamai has been advancing its Inference Cloud in recent weeks. Using its expertise in distributed compute, Akamai first expanded into offering cloud workloads and now has focused on expanding inference from data centers to the edge.
CoreWeave said its Nvidia HGX B300 instances, part of the Nvidia Blackwell Ultra platform, are generally available on its cloud infrastructure and said it will be among the first to deploy the Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 platform and Nvidia Vera CPU rack in production in the second half of 2026.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company has line of sight to $1 trillion in orders, double what was predicted in November. The reason: AI inference has reached an inflection point and that's driving demand.
"We have we have reached that moment of inflection. The inference inflection has arrived," said Huang. He said there's a $1 trillion in AI demand through 2027, double what Huang projected at GTC DC.
Nvidia launched a project called NemoClaw, which aims to replicate OpenClaw for the enterprise. And the bet is that NemoClaw pairs well with Nvidia's DGX Spark and DGX Station systems.
The AI infrastructure last year rolled out DGX Spark and DGX Station, two efforts to give AI developers the horsepower to create and tune models locally. The latest DGX Spark and DGX Station systems will be available through ASUS, Dell Technologies, GIGABYTE, MSI, Supermicro and HP with orders now and shipping in the months ahead.