Announcing the 4th annual VentureBeat AI Innovation Awards at Transform 2022

As adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) reaches new heights across the enterprise, VentureBeat returns on July 19 with its annual flagship event, the AI-focused Transform — today’s leading event on applied AI for enterprise business and technology decision-makers.

During Transform, which begins with in-person, all-day programming on July 19 and continues with six days of virtual programming over two weeks, industry experts will come together to provide comprehensive coverage across the breadth and depth of the world of applied AI, as well as industry-focused vertical tracks in healthcare, finance, retail, manufacturing and security.

At the July 19 in-person event at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, VentureBeat will recognize and award noteworthy, compelling, innovative and successful AI initiatives through our fourth annual VB AI Innovation Awards.

Drawn both from our daily editorial coverage and the expertise, knowledge and experience of our nominating committee members, these awards give us a chance to shine a light on the people and companies making an impact in AI.

Introducing the 2022 AI Innovation Awards nominating committee

Tonya Custis, director of AI research, Autodesk

Tonya Custis has 15 years of experience in performing AI research and leading AI research teams and projects.

She has a Ph.D. in Linguistics, an M.S. in Computer Science, an M.A. in Linguistics, and a B.A. in Music. Her research interests include Natural Language Processing & Understanding, Information Retrieval, and Machine Learning.

Prior to joining Autodesk in 2019, Tonya held AI research positions at Thomson Reuters, Honeywell and eBay.

Seth Dobrin, global chief AI officer, IBM

Seth Dobrin is IBM’s first-ever global chief AI officer and leads the entire corporate AI strategy. In his role, Seth is responsible for connecting the AI development and governance across IBM’s divisions with a systemic creation of business outcomes. Before being appointed as global chief AI officer, Seth led the digital transformation of IBM’s software business as chief data officer. 

Andrea Huels, head of AI, Lenovo North America

As head of Lenovo’s Enterprise AI business in North America, Andrea Huels helps Fortune 500 companies drive agility and re-invent their operations with AI.

Prior to Lenovo, Andrea served as director of business development at Dematic, where she was instrumental in building the technology ecosystem necessary to deploy intelligent supply chain transformation to retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers. Her background includes two decades of global strategy, growth and innovation leadership roles with GE, ExxonMobil, Crane, Imerys, Omron and General Mills. 

Di Mayze, global head of data and AI, WPP

Di Mayze has over 20 years of technology and data experience across media, FMCG, finance and retail, offering consulting for companies such as Hearst UK, dunnhumby & Walgreens Boots Alliance.

She joined WPP in 2014 as MD of Acceleration (part of Wunderman Thompson) and left in 2017 to become a freelance data strategy consultant for Wavemaker, VML, Geometry, Wunderman Thompson and MediaCom. In January 2020, Di joined the OPEN team and became global head of data and AI for WPP. 

Stephanie Moyerman, senior director of risk and trust science, eBay

As senior director of risk and trust science at eBay, Stephanie Moyerman works with a team of scientists and engineers to ensure a safe ecommerce platform.

Prior to eBay, Stephanie was a senior science manager in Amazon’s customer trust and partner support department and a principal engineer and director within Intel’s sports and wearable sensing divisions. Stephanie holds a Ph.D. in Physics – Experimental Cosmology and M.S. in Computational Science, Math, and Engineering from University of California at San Diego. 

Shawn Wang, chief AI officer, Anthem

Shawn Wang has led digital transformations at an enterprise level through AI and data science, both at Sears and Anthem. At Anthem, Shawn has leveraged his consumer-first approach to transform Anthem into a platform-based digital-first healthcare company. Through applying AI to optimize business processes and personalize healthcare experiences, Shawn has helped Anthem instill a data-driven culture, leveraging insights into actions and outcomes.  

AI Innovation Awards categories

Conversational AI

Built on natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding and other machine learning (ML) technologies, today’s conversational AI applications go far beyond chatbots. This award will highlight the sophistication, scale and effectiveness of conversational AI, which is shaping the customer experience. 

Applied AI  

The field of AI is rife with new ideas and compelling research, at an increasingly blistering pace, but the practical applications of AI matter to businesses right now, whether that’s RPA to reduce human toil, or streamlined processes, or more intelligent software and services, or other solutions to real-world work and life problems. 

AI on the Edge

Today’s AI applications and workflows go far beyond the cloud, moving to edge devices closer to human activity – even reaching as far as users’ mobile devices . This award goes to a company taking AI in distributed computing to the next level. 

AI for Good

This award is for AI technology, the application of AI, or advocacy or activism in the field of AI that protects or improves human lives or operates to fight injustice and bias, improve equality and better serve humanity.

AI Innovators

Focused on companies that have raised $30 million or less in funding and have been in operation for two years or less, this award spotlights a startup that holds great promise for making an impact with its AI innovation.

Counting down to the AI Innovation Awards

We look forward to sharing a list of final AI Innovation Award nominees toward the end of June, as well as editorial and social media coverage of nominees and winners. Awards will be presented at VentureBeat’s in-person event at Transform on July 19 in San Francisco. Stay tuned!