Who reviewed the shortlist

The committee's remit was narrow and adversarial: to remove names the evidence did not support, and to argue for markets the editors had under-read. It had no say over ordering, because there is no ordering.

The five seats and their remits are set. The people holding them for the 2026 edition are named when the edition publishes.

• Chair, selection committee

  Seat, named at launch

  Holds the final veto on inclusion and chairs the review session in which every name is argued against the evidence gathered for it.

• Operating partner, growth

  Seat, named at launch

  Reads the cohort against what an AI go-to-market function actually looks like inside a company, rather than how it is described publicly.

• Former chief revenue officer

  Seat, named at launch

  Argues for the operators whose work is visible in a pipeline and a comp plan rather than on a conference stage.

• Head of research

  Seat, named at launch

  Owns the source trail: every claim on this site traces back to something a reader can open, or it does not run.

• Editor at large

  Seat, named at launch

  Keeps the language honest and the list unranked, and removes any sentence that implies an order the cohort does not have.