09-02-2026PACESETTERS 2026

Introducing the Fast Company Pacesetters

Meet 40 executives who are finding innovative ways to integrate generative artificial intelligence, autonomous agents, and machine learning into their businesses and customer experience.

BY Fast Company Staff

Not long ago, using AI to optimize customer experience meant a chatbot, often a frustratingly limited one. Now, just a couple years later, it means a steady and constantly evolving conversation between companies and the humans they serve—one where AI agents anticipate needs, fix problems, and make decisions at blazing speed. If you have customers, this shift is affecting you.   

Enter Fast Company’s Pacesetters program, a new recognition program presented by Tata Consultancy Services. The Pacesetters program aims to track and celebrate a rich new vein of innovation in the AI age: the intersection of technology and the customer journey. (Here’s how we selected the winners.) “Progress happens when vision is matched with execution, and the executives honored this year exemplify what it means to lead with purpose and build for what comes next,” says Amit Bajaj, president of TCS North America.

At AWS, for example, Ruba Borno helped reinvent the AWS Marketplace with agents that help cloud customers choose from the 30,000 software solutions on offer. At Yum Brands, Cameron Davies’s team built a tool called Byte by Yum to support KFCs and Pizza Huts with mobile app ordering, delivery optimization, menu management, and more. And at Virgin Atlantic, Neil Letchford’s team deployed a multi-agent conversational “concierge” to sand the edges off the stress of complex travel bookings.  

These are just a handful of the honorees who make up this inaugural class of 40 Pacesetters. Together, they show the meaningful, measurable impact of AI in the everyday moments when customers decide whether a company is truly working for them. 

When Amin started at Clay—a New York-based software company that targets sales outreach with AI automation—the company’s product had a steep learning curve. Amin transformed the user experience with Sculptor, Clay’s AI copilot that lets customers build production-ready research agents and workflows with plain language prompts instead of overly technical configuration. With Sculptor’s AI agent, Claygent, customers can use the program without code or prompt-engineering skill. Under Amin’s leadership, Sculptor has cut hours-long tasks to 15 minutes for more than 14,000 customers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, and brought the company’s valuation to $5 billion.  

Global Vice President of Augmented Beauty and Open Innovation 

Balooch helped bring AI into a core business function—research and innovation—which has directly impacted customer experience and product lines. He helped L’Oréal deploy Nvidia Alchemi, a discovery platform based on a collection of domain-specific AI models that Nvidia has trained with chemistry data. The beauty company’s more than 4,000 scientists will use the Alchemi platform to search for novel combinations of molecules for new products based on L’Oréal’s own wealth of biological data about skin. Also on Balooch’s watch, L’Oréal Paris released Beauty Genius, an AI conversational tool combining generative AI, augmented reality, and L’Oréal’s proprietary beauty knowledge across haircare, haircolor, makeup, and skincare. 

Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer 

Bell joined the Home Depot as executive vice president and chief technology officer in April 2026, after leading AI transformation at Ford Motor Co. She holds a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, and at Home Depot, her expertise in data science and AI is helping the massive home improvement retailer drive innovation around agentic systems and machine learning. That includes transformations to remove friction around online and in-store experiences, enhancing digital tools that help both homeowners and professionals get things done, like recent AI launches including a digital concierge known as Magic Apron and an AI-powered Material List Builder for project preparation. 

Vice President, Global Specialists and Partners Group 

Borno is vice president of the Global Specialists and Partners Group at Amazon Web Services (AWS), overseeing decisions that affect how tens of thousands of technology partners offer their technology and services in conjunction with AWS. Focused on AI applications that enable what was not previously possible, rather than simply replacing humans with automated tools, she’s worked to deliver AI agents that can qualify sales opportunities and provide guidance to sales teams. She’s overseen the reinvention of AWS Marketplace, which offers more than 30,000 cloud-based software solutions for deployment on AWS and now features an Agent Mode conversationally guiding customers to offerings that meet their needs. An express private offers feature, facilitating specialized deals with minimal sales team involvement, helped cut procurement times by 60%.   

Cofounder, Partner, Technology

Celik founded Carbonaires to vet and finance carbon removal projects for companies across the globe. But he soon found that customers weren’t sure what they wanted and were easily confused by the sphere’s countless acronyms, project types, and wide variety of prices. He implemented Roadmapr, Carbonaires’s customer-facing platform that turns the market confusion to plain language and gives live pricing and project performance updates. Customers like Microsoft, Klarna, Shell, and L’Oréal purchase carbon removal credits through Carbonaires, helping the company remove more than 200 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  

Chief Digital Officer

AI is having an immediate impact on clinical documentation, a time-consuming task that's long been a pain point for doctors. Many physicians—especially primary care doctors—spend an extra 90 minutes to three hours per day completing patient records. Chandra headed up an effort to get the clinic’s doctors to use an “AI scribe” tool that listens in on patient visits (via a cellphone app), summarizes the issues discussed, and enters the data in the electronic medical record. Chandra ran a pilot program in which doctors tried a number of competing AI scribe tools and finally chose a solution from San Francisco-based Ambience, whose app is powered by OpenAI models. According to Chandra, 4,000 of the organization’s physicians now use the Ambience tool. 

Chief Technology and AI Officer

Chopra’s mandate at the beauty and cosmetics company E.l.f. covers enterprise-wide technology, data, and AI strategy. In her role, Chopra has deployed impactful internal AI tools, including a chatbot called “B.F.e.l.f” that is used by more than 80% of employees. A tool called “e.l.f.uencer” auto-generates responses to comments left by consumers on social media platforms (the tool is trained on the company's style book and years of human-written social comments). Then there's an IT help desk assistant called “e.l.f.line” that can do support work equivalent to that of one human help desk employee. Chopra also built a cross-functional steering committee spanning legal, marketing, and R&D, with the goal of moving most agentic AI pilots into full production within six months. 

Davies is part of the core team guiding Yum’s AI strategy across KFC, Taco Bell, and, until recently, Pizza Hut. Arising from that strategy is an internal technology platform called Byte by Yum, which provides AI-driven support for both restaurant operators and customers. It includes online and mobile app ordering, point-of-sale functions, kitchen and delivery optimization, menu management, and labor management. One of the tools is an AI-powered inventory forecasting tool, which the company said on an earnings call cut the number of times restaurants ran out of food stock by 85% and improved restaurants’ consumer satisfaction by up to 10%. 

Chief Information and Data Officer 

Doniz leads technology and data strategy........

© Fast Company