AI Shakes Up the 30 Most Powerful Enterprise Software Execs and Investors

From left to right: Yamini Rangan, Melanie Perkins, Satya Nadella, Adam Selipsky, and Mamoon Hamid. Photos via Getty and Wikimedia. Art by Shane Burke.

The rise of artificial intelligence that can understand or mimic language has upended the power balance in enterprise software this year. Some executives have become more powerful, others have become less relevant, and a new cohort of company operators and investors is suddenly pulling the strings as customers incorporate the new AI software.

There are four new faces among the top 10 executives. And the top dog from last year, Adam Selipsky of Amazon Web Services, was eclipsed by a rival this time because of the cloud king has moved slowly in helping customers use large-language models. The fast-moving AI field caused other changes on the list: Leaders of two database software juggernauts, Snowflake and Databricks, are now within one rank of the other, though Snowflake runs a much bigger and better business. Last year these leaders were five spots apart.