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What A.I.’s Most Powerful Leaders Said at Observer’s A.I. Power Index Party

Bloomberg CTO Shawn Edwards and Candidly CEO Laurel Taylor took home top honors as founders, investors and executives shared where A.I. is headed next.

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On Wednesday night, 145 A.I. founders, CEOs, investors and executives gathered at Dante Elizabeth Street for Observer’s inaugural A.I. Power Index Party. The evening celebrated the 2026 A.I. Power Index honorees, and the mood was bullish. But the conversation kept returning to the same question. Now that the technology works, who is it for, and who answers for it?

Jeff McMillan built and led artificial intelligence at Morgan Stanley for more than a decade before launching his own A.I. consulting firm. He told Observer he felt humbled to be in the room. “A.I. can serve good, or it can serve evil,” he said. “And that’s a choice.” Paraphrasing Pope Leo XIV’s recent remarks on A.I., he added, “A.I. should serve humanity. Humanity should not serve A.I.”

McMillan places the responsibility on the companies deploying the technology. “We’re spending a lot of time worried about what Sam Altman and Anthropic do. But they’re just the mechanism,” he said. “It’s the companies that will deploy this that have the ultimate responsibility.” He is optimistic that A.I. will create new kinds of work, including jobs managing and supervising A.I. agents, but the pace worries him. “That’s the good story. The bad story is that’s going to happen very quickly,” he said. “What is the role of governments, companies and educational institutions to make sure those people don’t get left behind?”

Anusha Dandapani, United Nations International Computing Center chief data and A.I. officer, shared the concern. “We need to avoid a world in which adoption moves faster than accountability,” she told Observer. “A.I. should scale human capability, but it should not dilute human accountability.”

Shortly after 7 p.m., Brennan Pothetes, founder of Infinity Constellation, took the podium and the room hushed. The “turmoil around A.I. and A.I. adoption” was why he wanted to be the evening’s presenting sponsor, Pothetes said; he was drawn to awards that offered “shining examples” of A.I. creating real leverage in business, and that championed what he called “the good capitalist.” Pothetes pointed to the $6 trillion global services market as ripe for rewriting, and to the gap between capability and adoption.

“A model is not a business. Technology is not a workflow. You can’t bolt A.I. onto an old process and call it a day—not if the customer doesn’t trust it, the team doesn’t use it, and it doesn’t change the P&L,” he said. The unglamorous work, in his view, still comes down to human judgment and operating expertise. “The people being recognized tonight are making that shift. They’re turning A.I. from a shiny demo into how work gets done. Tonight, we’re not celebrating promise, we’re celebrating proof.”

The first proof belonged to Shawn Edwards. Bloomberg’s CTO received the 2026 A.I. Enterprise Award for his work turning the Bloomberg Terminal into an A.I.-native system without losing the trust of the financial services industry that depends on it. That work included a series of A.I. releases that culminated in ASKB, a conversational A.I. interface.

In accepting, Edwards spoke about building A.I. capable of making “mission-critical decisions.” He said ASKB had received a “phenomenal” response. “In all my years of working, I’ve never seen a technology have such a profound impact so fast,” he said. “It’s a great time to be in finance, and it’s a great time to be in tech.”

The information Bloomberg’s customers needed was often already there, Edwards said, but there was too much of it for any one person to process. “The time it takes to explore one idea in the past, now you can explore ten,” he said. The “spark of an idea” still has........

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