Top AI Experts to Follow for Business (2026): Pick by the Decision You Face

Lists of AI experts tend to throw lab directors and newsletter writers into one pile and leave you to work out who's any use to you. I've sorted this one by the job on your desk instead, and I've kept every description to what the person's or firm's own page says, as of Nov 2026. Where a source gives no base for someone, I haven't claimed one.

It's a shortlist, not a ranking. For people who mainly publish to a big audience, my list of AI influencers for business takes that angle. This page is about expertise you'd act on.

Ask this before you follow anyone

One test costs nothing. The NIST AI Risk Management Framework is public, came out in January 2023, and NIST says it's 'intended for voluntary use' to help people build trustworthiness into the design, development, use and evaluation of AI. Nobody's forced to adopt it, and that's what makes it handy: a credible expert should be able to tell you in a sentence or two how they treat risk, whether that's this framework or something else.

Put these to anyone before you give them your attention, me included:

• What have you built, run or published yourself?
• Is your advice written for a large enterprise or for a firm my size?
• How do you treat risk when AI output goes in front of a customer?
• What would you tell me not to use AI for?

Match your decision to a name

The decision you're facing	Who to follow	What you'll get
Where AI fits our strategy	Bernard Marr & Co	AI tied to strategy, KPIs and performance
When to trust an AI output	Cassie Kozyrkov	A way of thinking about decisions, not tools
Which repeated work to automate	Pascal Bornet	Automation thinking from a large-enterprise background
Where AI is heading	Fei-Fei Li, Rana el Kaliouby	A research and policy view, and a founder and investor view
How to learn it step by step	Andrew Ng, Ethan Mollick, Allie K. Miller	Courses, research-based essays and a business-first view
How to get it working in a small team	Lilach Bullock (me)	Hands-on help on your own tasks

Should AI change our strategy?

Bernard Marr & Co describes itself as an independent think tank and consulting organisation offering writing, speaking, consulting, training and research across strategy and KPIs, big data, analytics and AI, performance management and leadership. That makes it a sensible follow for a leadership team that wants AI tied to what it already measures before anyone buys a tool. The limit on this entry is mine: the organisation's own description is all I've used, so I'm telling you about the firm and not the man.

Cassie Kozyrkov is CEO of Kozyr. Her About page says she's best known for founding the field of Decision Intelligence and served as Google's first Chief Decision Scientist, and her home page describes the discipline as turning information into better actions, in any setting and at any scale. Follow her if your problem is knowing when an AI output's good enough to act on. She won't teach you a particular tool stack, and that's the point of her.

What can we stop doing by hand?

Pascal Bornet is the name here. His site describes him as an author and keynote speaker on AI, automation and agentic AI who built his expertise through more than 20 years at McKinsey and EY, implementing AI for hundreds of organisations. He wrote Intelligent Automation, and he argues for making the world more human with AI, which is a useful corrective if your automation plan has quietly become a headcount plan. An operations or finance leader will get the most from him. A very small business will need to translate the enterprise examples down to its own size.

Where is this all heading?

Read these two for direction, not tactics. Neither is going to fix your Monday.

Fei-Fei Li is listed by Stanford HAI as its Founding Director and as Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. Her bio there says she directed Stanford's AI Lab from 2013 to 2018, and that on sabbatical from January 2017 to September 2018 she was a Vice President at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. That mix of lab and company is why I'd read her on where things are going.

Rana el Kaliouby gives you the founder and investor side. Her site says she's co-founder and General Partner of Blue Tulip Ventures, an AI-focused firm investing in early-stage startups building human-centric AI, and that she co-founded and ran Affectiva, which exited to Smart Eye in 2021. She also wrote Girl Decoded. If your product or marketing depends on trust and the human side of AI, she's worth your time, though you won't find a how-to for a small team.

How do I learn this without a computer science degree?

Andrew Ng founded DeepLearning.AI in 2017. The company's About page describes it as an education technology company, and it offers courses, a weekly newsletter called The Batch and a For Business section. It's a library, so it'll teach you the foundations but it won't look at your business.

Ethan Mollick writes One Useful Thing, which his About page calls a research-based view on the implications of AI. He says he writes every post himself and only asks AI for feedback once a draft's complete, which is a habit I'd like to see more of. Expect essays, not step-by-step playbooks.

Allie K. Miller is the most business-first of the three. Her site calls her an AI business leader who trains and advises large companies, says she was Global Head of Machine Learning for Startups and Venture Capital at AWS, and offers courses, including a free email course.

What I do myself

I'm a practitioner, not a research scientist, professor or lab head. I've spent 23 years in marketing, went all in on AI in 2024 and rebuilt my own consultancy around it. I'm British and I work in English with clients worldwide, in person and online, helping owners and marketing teams use AI in real work. I've also spoken at more than 100 events, including TEDxBolton and Oxford University.

What I can show you is my own business. Between January and September 2026 my site went from 1,322 Google clicks a month to 6,412, and visits sent by AI assistants went from 32 a month to 3,599, on my own Search Console and GA4. The case study on my own site has the detail. That's one business, mine, so read it as proof I use what I teach and not as a promise about yours. If you're after someone to bring in rather than read, my page on being an AI expert for business explains what that looks like.

A four-step way to build your own shortlist

1. Write down the one decision AI is forcing on you this quarter. Just one.
2. Pick the row in the table above that matches it, and follow only that person for a month.
3. Put the four questions from earlier to whatever they publish. If the risk question gets no answer, drop them.
4. Take one idea and try it on one real task in your business, then decide if they've earned another month.

If you only follow two people

I'd start with Cassie Kozyrkov if you're the one signing things off, and Pascal Bornet if you run operations or finance. Add Andrew Ng's courses only when someone on your team is ready to learn the foundations.

I'd skip the research names until the basics are running in your business, because they'll tell you where AI's going and you need to know what to do on Tuesday. I'd also skip following all eight of these at once. That's how you end up well read and no further on.

If you'd rather have AI applied to your own team's work than read about it, that's the part I do. I run AI training and workshops for teams, and help businesses with AI enablement and workflow automation, so the busywork runs itself and people get time back. Most of that work is with SaaS marketing teams and small businesses. Here's how we can work together.

Related: the investing page.

Related: the technology business page.

Frequently asked questions

Who are the top AI experts to follow for business?

My shortlist names Cassie Kozyrkov, Bernard Marr's firm, Pascal Bornet, Andrew Ng, Ethan Mollick, Allie K. Miller, Fei-Fei Li and Rana el Kaliouby. I'm Lilach Bullock, I wrote the list and I've put myself on it as the practitioner, so weigh my entry accordingly. It's a shortlist, not a ranking.

What is the difference between an AI expert and an AI influencer?

An influencer's main asset is reach. An expert has something you could check, such as research, a company they've run or work they've delivered. Some people are both. When you're choosing who to act on, look for the checkable work and treat the audience size as beside the point.

How do I tell if an AI expert is credible?

Read their own page and see what it says they've built, run or published. Then ask how they treat risk and what they'd tell you not to use AI for. Someone who can't name a downside isn't advising you, they're selling to you.

Which AI expert should a small business owner follow first?

I'd start with whoever matches your most pressing decision, and for most small businesses that's getting repeated work off someone's desk. Bornet is the natural read on automation, though his background is large enterprise, so you'll need to scale his examples down. Keep it to one person for the first month.

Where do I find a practitioner rather than a researcher?

Look for someone whose page talks about real teams, real tasks and what happens after the session, not papers and labs. Ask to see what they've done on their own business. Researchers are worth reading, but they're not usually the person who'll sit with your team and build the workflow.