Utah AI 100 Returns for Second Year

Sandy, Utah — September 2, 2026

AI Utah honored its second cohort of 100 AI leaders on August 27, gathering builders, investors, community partners, and ecosystem supporters at the Utah Mammoth Ice Center in Sandy. It's a marked step up in scale from the inaugural event in January 2024, which drew its honorees to a private reception at Weave's Lehi headquarters.

This year's list also dropped the three-way Futurist/Builder/Integrator structure AI Utah used in 2024 in favor of a single, unified list of 101 builders.

The event was invite-only, and organizers were explicit about who didn't make the cut: executives and titles alone don't get someone through the door. In a LinkedIn post following the event, AI Utah president and co-founder Jon Bradshaw wrote that the honorees are engineers actively building and improving AI systems — not, in his words, people who simply know how to prompt ChatGPT — paired in the room with investors positioned to fund what they build.

Standing on a table, Bradshaw framed the event as an attempt to close a gap he sees in Utah's ecosystem: the state has the engineering talent, he argued, but not yet the deep, early relationships between that talent and the venture capital community that let ideas, talent, and capital compound the way they did around companies with Utah ties, like Cloudflare.

For some honorees, this wasn't a first appearance. Kristie J. Rowley, PhD — on the inaugural 2024 list under Domo, now senior manager of AI/ML engineering at BambooHR and founder of Advanced Data Solutioning, (and pictured on the right below) — captured the event's unusual format: "Where else do you get to talk AI and hit the ice in the same night?"

She thanked AI Utah, its sponsors, and everyone who helped put it together for capturing what she called the community's mix of talent, unexpected opportunity, and creativity.

Daniel Rodriguez-Granrose, PhD, PSM, founder and CEO of Intactis Bio Corp, pointed to the depth of the talent in the room: the quality and quantity of the builders at the event, he said, made clear that the Silicon Slopes branding is earned.

The event was hosted by the Utah Mammoth, with support from FrazierVC, Fullcast, Filevine and TrueMark. Women Tech Council, Leland, Forge Utah, TechBuzz, Silicon Slopes, Sego Leadership, AIM Utah and 47G served as media and community partners, while Clint Berry, Matt Smith and Jon Bradshaw judged the event.

The format was designed to put people working on difficult technical problems in the same room with investors and others who can help turn that work into companies. Several AI Utah 100 honorees told organizers it was one of the most interesting rooms they had been in for a long time because of the concentration of people tackling hard technical challenges. The broader goal, organizers said, is to create the kind of unexpected conversations and relationships — the “happy accidents” — that can lead to something bigger. AI Utah also wants the 100 to serve as a beacon for Utah's AI ecosystem, giving people outside the state a clear place to find the engineers, founders and investors doing meaningful work in AI and connect with them.

Pattern, a main sponsor of the event, was represented by three of its own honorees this year. Jacob Miller — a 2024 Integrator honoree, now the company's VP of Platform Intelligence — said Pattern was proud to help build out Utah's AI builder ecosystem. Lead AI engineer Jeremy Mumford added that the event showcased the breadth and depth of AI talent across the state.

The 2026 Utah AI 100