Power Players: Europe’s Top AI Influencers

For a long time now it has been hard to escape the impact AI has been having on our daily personal and professional lives.

What may have started as a curiosity for many; generating an image, asking a chatbot a question or experimenting with a new productivity tool, has rapidly developed into a technology reshaping how companies operate, how research is conducted and how entire industries approach their future.

Europe has been an important part of that global development. Across the continent, researchers, founders and technology leaders are building everything from frontier models and AI agents to healthcare applications, infrastructure, cybersecurity tools and autonomous systems. At the same time, established European companies are incorporating AI into products and operations that already reach millions of people.

Behind those developments are individuals making decisions about what gets researched, built, funded and deployed.

Presented alphabetically, this list brings together 50 of Europe’s most influential AI leaders.

Alex Kendall – Wayve (UK)

Co-founder and CEO of London-based Wayve, founded in 2017, who are developing end-to-end embodied-AI systems for automated driving. Kendall has built Wayve around an AI-first approach to driving, using learned models rather than relying primarily on hand-engineered rules.

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Alexandre LeBrun – Nabla/Advanced Machine Intelligence (France)

CEO of Paris-based Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI), founded 2025 by Yann LeCun to develop world models for AI reasoning. LeBrun previously co-founded medical AI startup Nabla and Wit.ai, acquired by Facebook in 2015, spending over a decade building conversational and applied AI technologies.