Arun Nandi

Arun is a visionary AI and Analytics expert recognized as one of the Top 100 Influential AI & Analytics leaders. He is the Head of Data & Analytics at Unilever today. With over 15 years of experience driving analytics-driven value in organizations, he has built AI practices from the ground up on several occasions. Arun advocates the adoption of AI to overcome enterprise-wide challenges and create growth. Beyond his professional achievements, Arun loves to travel, having explored over 40 countries and is passionate about adventure motorbiking.

Brett Simpson

Brett is a co-founder of Arete (formed in 2000) and is based in the firm's London office. He focuses on the global semiconductor component sector. Brett is a regular public speaker at industry events and after 17 years looking at the sector, has a wealth of experience to draw on. Prior to Arete, Brett spent two years at Goldman Sachs in an equity analyst role, specialising in European technology following three years with Ericsson UK, working in business development, covering all aspects of wireline and wireless telecom infrastructure.

Ahmed Menshawy

Ahmed Menshawy is the Vice President of AI Engineering at Mastercard. In this role, he leads the AI Engineering team, driving the development and commercialization of AI products that deliver business value across the organization. His work focuses on enabling Mastercard to harness the power of AI to solve complex problems, optimize operations, and enhance customer experiences. Ahmed collaborates with cross-functional teams to bring innovative AI solutions from concept to market, ensuring they align with Mastercard’s strategic objectives

An accomplished author and recognized contributor to the AI community, Ahmed has co-authored Deep Learning with TensorFlow and written Deep Learning by Example. His most recent book, Graph Learning for the Enterprise, published by O’Reilly, provides practical insights into efficiently training and deploying graph learning pipelines at scale

Gayathri Radhakrishnan

Gayathri is currently Partner at Hitachi Ventures. Prior to that, she was with Micron Ventures, actively investing in startups that apply AI to solve critical problems in the areas of Manufacturing, Healthcare and Automotive. She brings over 20 years of multi-disciplinary experience across product management, product marketing, corporate strategy, M&A and venture investments in large Fortune 500 companies such as Dell and Corning and in startups. She has also worked as an early stage investor at Earlybird Venture Capital, a premier European venture capital fund based in Germany. She has a Masters in EE from The Ohio State University and MBA from INSEAD in France. She is also a Kauffman Fellow - Class 16.

Daniel Wu

Daniel Wu is an accomplished technical leader with over 20 years of expertise in software engineering, AI/ML, and team development. With a diverse career spanning technology, education, finance, and healthcare, he is credited for establishing high-performing AI teams, pioneering point-of-care expert systems, co-founding a successful online personal finance marketplace, and leading the development of an innovative online real estate brokerage platform. Passionate about technology democratization and ethical AI practices, Daniel actively promotes these principles through involvement in computer science and AI/ML education programs. A sought-after speaker, he shares insights and experiences at international conferences and corporate events. Daniel holds a computer science degree from Stanford University.

Donald Thompson

Donald is currently a Distinguished Engineer at LinkedIn, primarily overseeing the company's generative AI strategy, architecture, and technology. He has more than 35 years of hands-on experience as a technical architect and CTO, with an extensive background in designing and delivering innovative software and services on a large scale. In 2013, Donald co-founded Maana, which pioneered computational knowledge graphs and visual no-code/low-code authoring environments to address complex AI-based digital transformation challenges in Fortune 50 companies. During his 15 years at Microsoft, Donald started the Knowledge and Reasoning group within Microsoft's Bing division, where he innovated "Satori", an internet-scale knowledge graph constructed automatically from the web crawl. He co-founded a semantic computing incubation funded directly by Bill Gates, portions of which shipped as the SQL Server Semantic Engine. Additionally, he created Microsoft's first internet display ad delivery system and led numerous AI/ML initiatives in Microsoft Research across embedded systems, robotics, wearable computing, and privacy-preserving personal data services.