This list celebrates changemakers creating meaningful impact through leadership, innovation, fresh perspectives, transformative mindsets, and lessons that resonate far beyond the workplace.
Walmart's head of AI acceleration, product and design riffed on OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Gemini for agentic commerce, transformation, the retailer's role in the AI economy and the future of customer experience and why shoppers will "be doing a lot less scrolling."
Microsoft is getting ahead of the thing that's most likely to derail AI infrastructure--NIMBY, or not in my back yard.
The company outlined a plan called Community-First AI Infrastructure, which boils down to being a good neighbor and taking steps so AI data centers don't raise electricity prices and deplete resources for locals.
Have you ever attended an event and just had something stick in your head…for days or even weeks? Months? Since attending Smartsheet ENGAGE in early November 2025, a thought has been rattling around: what matters for work?
While global leaders gather in Davos to discuss "Cooperation in a Contested World," corporate Boards face a starker reality: your fiduciary duty now extends into the gray zone. This is not the world of traditional risk management. It is a domain where Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) exploit hardware-level vulnerabilities to exfiltrate IP, where fragmented AI policies across 50 U.S.
Apple Intelligence as well as a new Siri will be based on Google's Gemini models.
The news, initially reported in August by Bloomberg, is a big win for Google. Apple has a partnership with OpenAI and has embedded ChatGPT into Apple devices.
Here's the joint statement:
Google is making its play to lead agentic AI commerce across its units as it combines AI Mode commerce features and agents with a new end-to-end commerce protocol and Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience.
Nvidia, which is quickly becoming the champion of AI open-source models in the US, argues that open AI models are roughly six months behind more expensive proprietary frontier models. If that's the case, CxOs should base nearly all of their AI plans around open-source models.
In Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's CES 2026 keynote, there were a lot of talk about agentic AI systems, physical AI and robotics, but his open-source comments stuck with me. He said the following (emphasis added):
Retailers are busy trying to figure out agentic AI driven commerce and keep frontline workers engaged so they can drive customer experience.
Those are the key themes from the National Retail Federation Big Show in New York City. Like previous years, the show features a parade of tech vendors pitching retailers on how to leverage the latest innovation. In 2026, that innovation is all about shopping agents, AI and employee experience.
OpenAI is planning on being a healthcare industry AI player with the launch of OpenAI for Healthcare, a HIPAA-compliant version of ChatGPT for clinicians, just days after debuting ChatGPT Health for consumers.
At CES 2025, you really couldn’t avoid the humanoid hype. Humanoid robots were everywhere.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shared the stage with a bunch of robots.
Snowflake said it will acquire Observe to integrate observability tools into its platform.
With the move, Snowflake can extend into IT operations management software and keep their telemetry data within its AI Data Cloud.
UserTesting, which provides customer experience insights, said it has acquired User Interviews, a platform for recruiting people for user and market research as well as AI training.
The move brings together two complementary companies that have multiple joint customers. UserTesting and User Interviews appeal to designers, researchers, product managers and marketers.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.