Key Notes
- The 2026 AI 100 recognizes people across nearly 90 organizations, spanning enterprise deployment, company founders, public policy and research.
- Honorees include Claude Code creator Boris Cherny, Mistral chief executive Arthur Mensch and mathematician Terence Tao alongside finance and healthcare leaders.
- Participating honorees will appear on the Nasdaq Tower in Times Square on October 21 and 22 following an open nomination process and panel selection.
H2O.ai has named its 2026 AI 100 honorees, bringing together model builders, researchers, public officials and executives responsible for putting artificial intelligence to work. The list includes Claude Code creator Boris Cherny, Mistral chief executive Arthur Mensch and mathematician Terence Tao, alongside leaders in banking, healthcare and government.
Now in its third year, the recognition program spans nearly 90 organizations across North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. H2O.ai announced the selections on October 14, emphasizing the people translating AI advances into practical applications.
The breadth of the list gives it a different emphasis from the model leaderboards that dominate much of the industry’s attention. Its categories cover enterprise executives and innovators, founders, public-sector leaders, and researchers and academics working on AI for good. The result is a view of the people building, deploying and governing the technology, rather than a numerical ranking of competing models.
From Claude Code to Climate Research
The honoree list includes several recognizable names from the companies developing advanced AI. Alongside Anthropic’s Cherny and Mistral’s Mensch are Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman, Demis Hassabis and Safe Superintelligence co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Their inclusion places the creators of widely used AI systems alongside the executives deciding how those systems enter everyday business operations.
That second group includes PepsiCo’s Athina Kanioura, Northwell Health’s Kristin Myers, Commonwealth Bank’s Ranil Boteju and Wells Fargo’s Saul Van Beurden. The organizations represented extend well beyond software companies, illustrating how the responsibility for AI deployment now reaches finance, consumer goods and healthcare.
Research honorees include MIT’s Priya Donti and Sara Beery, the University of Pretoria’s Vukosi Marivate, Hugging Face’s Margaret Mitchell and UCLA’s Tao. Their fields bring questions about climate, scientific discovery and responsible development into the same conversation as commercial adoption. Tao has also been a prominent voice in the debate over AI and mathematics, including how researchers can use models to explore and explain difficult results.
Public-sector selections include United Nations technology envoy Amandeep Gill, New York financial regulator Atur Desai and the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Ho Hern Shin. Including officials alongside founders makes the list relevant to readers following the institutions that shape how AI can be used, as well as the companies selling it.
How the AI 100 Was Selected
H2O.ai opened nominations to its community, partners and the public. The judging panel included Evident co-founder Alexandra Mousavizadeh, Ohio State University researcher Tanya Berger-Wolf, former Federal Reserve Board official Loren Bushkar and H2O.ai risk and technology executive Agus Sudjianto.
The program is organized by H2O.ai, which sells AI software and infrastructure. Readers should therefore understand the AI 100 as the company’s recognition program, rather than an independent certification of an individual’s work or proof that one employer’s technology outperforms another’s. The published roster identifies honorees by organization, role and category.
H2O.ai founder and chief executive Sri Ambati framed the announcement around recognizing the people behind AI’s practical progress, including those working outside the spotlight. That theme fits a broader shift toward deployment: products such as Gemini agent are pushing companies to think about how models connect to workflows, data and human oversight, rather than treating model access as the finished product.
Participating honorees are scheduled to appear on the Nasdaq Tower in New York’s Times Square on October 21 and 22. That display is a recognition event; the selections themselves belong to H2O.ai’s program. The full roster is available on the company’s website for readers looking up a particular person, institution or area of work.
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