This list celebrates changemakers creating meaningful impact through leadership, innovation, fresh perspectives, transformative mindsets, and lessons that resonate far beyond the workplace.
What if the border crisis isn't a crisis at all? What if it’s a predictive modeling problem?
The current state of human logistics is a massive, unstructured data set. The inputs are complex human variables: skills, desires, and social networks. The output is chaos, because we're not running a proper algorithm. We have people with unmet needs and a market with insatiable demand for human capital, yet the two rarely connect.
OpenAI launched a new benchmark that grades large language models (LLMs) on real-world work tasks and enterprises need to take note as they ponder AI agents.
OpenAI unveiled GDPval, a system that grades LLMs on tasks that humans currently do. Yes, we know (since vendors tell us repeatedly) that AI is collaborative with humans and not a replacement. But if you were to look to AI as a human labor replacement, OpenAI's GDPval is likely to be handy.
Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said the company is seeing an inflection point with companies adopting artificial intelligence enterprise-wide and scaling use cases.
Speaking on the company's fourth quarter earnings call, Sweet said:
Watch this exclusive interview with Octavian Tanase, Chief Product Officer at Hitachi Vantara, and Larry Dignan, Editor in Chief of Constellation Research, as they explore the future of AI in the enterprise.
Discover how Hitachi Vantara is integrating autonomous AI, leveraging edge computing, and forming strategic partnerships to deliver comprehensive, sustainable solutions for data-driven businesses. Don’t miss these insights on the evolving AI landscape and what’s next for enterprise technology.
Databricks said OpenAI's foundational models will be available in the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and Agent Bricks natively in a partnership worth $100 million.
The deal highlights how OpenAI is expanding the distribution for its ChatGPT family of models beyond Microsoft and direct access.
The European Commission has formally opened an investigation of SAP and its maintenance and support practices for on-premises deployments in Europe.
In a statement, the EC said it has started an investigation into whether SAP "may have distorted competition in the aftermarket for maintenance and support services" for its on-premises ERP applications.
Hitachi Vantara is embedding AI agents throughout its storage systems, seeing customers embrace more hybrid cloud and on-premise AI architectures and betting on AI at the edge and sovereign AI as growth markets.
Think your friends think of you as a friend? Odds are, they don’t. It isn’t that they dislike you, although of course that could be the truth. More likely, they just don’t have the bandwidth to put you into their inner circle. We crave connection, but we’re tethered to tech, not each other. Is it even possible to have them simultaneously?
Tech is easy. Humans? Complicated. And for most people, the easier-traveled road is the likely one taken.
For me, the eternal researcher, it starts with questions.
SAP said it has launched its sovereign cloud offerings on AWS European Sovereign Cloud and inked a deal that brings OpenAI to Germany's public sector customers.
The partnerships revolving around sovereign cloud in Europe include multiple clouds. With AWS, SAP Sovereign Cloud apps with security and regulatory compliance will run on AWS European Sovereign Cloud, a new independent cloud. AWS has said it will invest €7.8 billion in the EU.
Microsoft said it will add Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 to Microsoft Copilot Studio and Researcher in a move that highlights how the company is diversifying from OpenAI.
Until recently, Anthropic was more of a AWS and Google Cloud play with Microsoft serving as the venue for OpenAI models.
Qualcomm laid out a vision where AI workloads are hybrid between the cloud and edge devices such as smart glasses, smartphones and wearable devices. The conduit for these AI workloads will ultimately be 6G.
At the Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said AI will remake every device you wear, come complete with AI agents and be proactive with you in real time.
OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank have announced 5 new data centers under the Stargate project good for 7 gigawatts of capacity. The data centers will be largely powered by Nvidia-based infrastructure.
Snowflake, Salesforce, BlackRock and other enterprise vendors have launched the Open Semantic Interchange initiative, which aims to standardize data and ensure semantic metadata interoperability.
Nvidia and OpenAI said they have struck a partnership where OpenAI will deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI datacenters built on Nvidia's Vera Rubin GPUs. Nvidia will invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as each gigawatt is deployed.
In other words, Nvidia is investing in $10 billion a gigawatt deployed. OpenAI will also be the first public reference for Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform when the first phase of the deal comes online in the second half of 2026.
Thoma Bravo has acquired PROS Holdings, a pricing and revenue management software company, in a deal valued at $1.4 billion.
The deal is the third in less than a month for Thoma Bravo, which recently took Verint and Dayforce private.
Oracle has named Clay Magouyrk, who led Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Mike Sicilia, who led Oracle Industries, co-CEOs as Safra Catz becomes Executive Vice Chair.
The company announced that changes in a statement and SEC filing.
Technology conference season is about to hit overdrive. Enterprises are plotting IT budgets for the year ahead. And the fourth quarter, which is critical, is about to kick off. And the only thing that's scaling into 2026 are open questions that aren't going to be answered quickly (even if vendors tell you otherwise).
Here's a look at the themes I'm watching through the rest of the year.
On May 16, 2025, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin of the Northern District of California granted preliminary certification of the case of Mobley v. Workday as a collective action. Specifically, the suit claims that Workday’s artificial intelligence (AI)-based applicant recommendation system unfairly discriminates against job seekers above the age of 40. The plaintiff claims that he was denied across multiple companies using the same system. The judge’s preliminary certification of the case as a collective action enables qualified individuals across the U.S. to opt in to the lawsuit.
POTUS Cracks Down on H-1B Abuse to Bolster Domestic Jobs
On September 19th, 2025, the President issued a proclamation restricting entry of certain non-immigrant workers. In that proclamation:
From Navy SEAL Lessons to AI-First Businesses: Redefining Success | DisrupTV Ep. 411
In Episode 411 of DisrupTV, hosts R “Ray” Wang and Vala Afshar engage with three distinguished guests:
Southwest Power Pool (SPP) is building a mini AI factory with Nvidia, Hitachi Vantara and other Hitachi units to better simulate future demand on the electric grid in its region.
The first phase of the SPP effort is expected to become operational in the fourth quarter of 2025 or early 2026. Hitachi Vantara announced the partnership with SPP in June. The goal at the time was to develop industrial AI infrastructure to speed up simulations to resolve energy shortages, boost grid reliability and respond to outages.
Google's move to layer Gemini and AI features in Chrome, including AI agents, will revamp the browser just as a bevy of players are looking to reinvent the primary vehicle for enterprise applications.
In a blog post, Google outlined how it was building Gemini into Chrome and will soon be available in Google Workspace with "enterprise-grade data protections and controls."