The Top Voices has announced the winners of the Tech Impact Awards for AI 2026, the fifth edition of its global, free awards program.
This year’s edition focused on the people and companies turning AI into working technology and real-world products. For the final evaluation, applications were considered across two tracks: Builders, recognizing individuals directly responsible for building AI products, models, infrastructure and tools, and Business, recognizing companies and teams bringing AI products and services to market.
Following the final evaluation by the judging panel, three winners were selected in each track.
Builders
1st Place — Sachin Malhotra, Anthropic
Sachin Malhotra works on the infrastructure required to support AI-driven software development at Anthropic.
His work addresses an engineering challenge created by the rapid growth of agentic coding: as AI increases the volume and speed of software development, testing, incident response and operational safeguards also need to scale.
According to his award submission, his work includes a redesigned test impact analysis service, an AI-assisted on-call system for CI/CD incidents, and a permission framework for safely operating engineering agents. Claude now serves as a first responder for CI incidents at Anthropic. Anthropic has also released a generalized on-call setup kit that other teams can use to build similar workflows.
2nd Place — Sokratis Kartakis, AI Operations / AgentOps
Sokratis Kartakis has worked on operational frameworks for taking AI systems from experimentation into production, spanning MLOps, GenAIOps and AgentOps.
His work focuses on the infrastructure and engineering practices needed to deploy and operate increasingly autonomous AI systems reliably. Across roles at AWS and Google Cloud, he has worked with enterprises on production AI architectures and developed guidance around the operationalization of machine learning, generative AI and agentic systems.
His recent work extends these principles to Agentic Engineering, focusing on the infrastructure, guardrails, tools and evaluation systems surrounding AI agents.
3rd Place — Sumit Sharma, Renude
Sumit Sharma designed and developed the AI architecture behind Renude’s B2B AI Skin Advisor, a system that provides personalized skincare analysis and product recommendations.
The platform combines multi-agent workflows, hybrid retrieval, computer vision, product recognition and structured skincare knowledge, alongside evaluation, monitoring and safety mechanisms designed for production use.
According to the award submission, the system serves more than 100,000 daily users and has contributed to measurable improvements in purchase conversion across B2B deployments.
Business
1st Place — PAISA Technology
PAISA Technology, led by CEO Lesego Pitsoane, develops AI-enabled safety technology for mining and heavy-equipment environments.
Its Collision Avoidance and Prevention System combines AI-powered camera perception, radar and proximity sensing with vehicle interfaces. The technology is designed to detect and classify hazards around heavy machinery and support interventions such as slowing or stopping equipment when required.
The company has moved from technology development into commercial field deployment, bringing AI into environments where reliability, integration with physical equipment and operational safety are critical.
2nd Place — Hud
Hud, co-founded by Roee Adler, May Walter and Shai Wininger, is building production intelligence infrastructure for the AI-native software development era.
Its Runtime Code Sensor captures function-level production behavior and makes that context available to engineers and AI agents. The technology is designed to help teams evaluate code changes, verify deployments against real production behavior and investigate failures using evidence from live systems.
According to the award submission, Hud’s technology runs across millions of services in production and is used by engineering teams including monday.com, ZoomInfo and Guardz.
3rd Place — CaseCraft.AI
CaseCraft.AI, founded by Mikhail Yatsuha, Alexander Mints, Dmitry Bagrov and Ruslan Kosarenko, is a UK legal technology company building an AI-native platform for claims litigation.
The platform combines AI with structured legal workflows and human oversight to help users assess cases, process evidence, prepare correspondence and documents, track procedures and manage claims.
According to the award submission, CaseCraft.AI had recorded more than 4,500 matters with a cumulative value of £14.9 million as of August 2026, while also expanding into enterprise use cases.
Honorable Mention from The Top Voices — Olzhas Abishev
The Top Voices is also recognizing Olzhas Abishev with an Honorable Mention for his work exploring personalized AI in healthcare.
Abishev developed a personalized AI health assistant around the medical history of a young patient living with multiple chronic conditions. Rather than functioning as a general medical chatbot, the system was designed to maintain longitudinal context across diagnoses, symptoms, medications, medical records and new health information.
The initial project began as an individual real-world case and was used by the patient and her family over several months. While still at an early proof-of-concept stage, the work explores an important direction for healthcare AI: moving from isolated questions and answers toward continuous, patient-specific support between clinical visits.
The Honorable Mention is a recognition from The Top Voices and is separate from the jury ranking in the Builders track.
About the Tech Impact Awards for AI 2026
The Tech Impact Awards for AI 2026 brought together builders, founders, engineers and companies working across the AI stack, from infrastructure and developer tools to applied AI products and enterprise solutions.
Finalists were reviewed by an international judging panel with experience across AI engineering, product development, enterprise technology and innovation.
The 2026 jury included Julia Diament (Microsoft), Arkalyk Akash (ElevenLabs), Tharun Kumar Reddy Polu (Salesforce), Jun Qian (Oracle), Maksim Zayats (Constructor), Danila Akhmedov (Appfluo), Mario Truss (Adobe), Maarten Voorneveld (Microsoft), Daria Kasatkina (Tabby), Patrick Lanners (BMW Group), Alan Ross (IAAD & WAAA), Divya Mahajan (Amazon), Dmitry Ulyumdzhiev (Reflection), and Dmitry Anisimov (BlancVPN).
The Top Voices thanks every judge for the time, expertise and independent perspective they brought to the evaluation, and everyone who applied to this year’s Awards.
Congratulations to all the winners of the Tech Impact Awards for AI 2026.