•7 min read•from SaaStr
The First 44 Speakers for SaaStr AI Annual 2026: The Founders and Operators Actually Shipping AI at Scale

May 12-14 · San Francisco Bay Area
We’re 15 days out and the lineup is 100% designed to help you know what you need to know AI + B2B cold. That’s our goal.
Here’s a look at 44+ of the founders, CXOs, and operators taking the stage, grouped by what they’re actually going to talk about.
🚀 The AI-Native Headliners (Founders Who Scaled to $100M-$5B with AI at the Core)
- Adam Guild, CEO & Founder, Owner.com. How he went AI-native across an entire $1B vertical B2B company instead of just bolting AI onto the product.
- Anton Osika, CEO & Co-Founder, Lovable. From zero to $200M ARR in under a year, and what happens when 8M people can build their own software from a sentence.
- Grant Lee, CEO & Founder, Gamma. How Gamma hit $100M ARR profitably with no traditional sales team, in a fireside with SaaStr’s CAIO Amelia Lerutte.
- Alex Mashrabov, CEO & Co-Founder, Higgsfield. $0 to $300M ARR producing 4.5M videos a day, without ever training a foundation model.
- Zachary Lipton, Co-Founder & CTO, Abridge. How Abridge went from $200M to $5.3B in valuation in 24 months while deploying enterprise AI to 150+ health systems.
- Keith Peiris, CEO & Founder, Lightfield. Building an AI-native CRM from scratch.
- Adam Alfano, EVP Global SMB, Salesforce. 29,000 Agentforce deals in 15 months and $500M+ in AI Agent ARR. What SMBs do differently when they get the same agents as the Fortune 500.
🤖 Can’t Miss Conversations
- Jason Lemkin (SaaStr) + Amjad Masad (Replit). One built the platform where millions of devs ship AI agents; the other replaced his sales team with them. An unfiltered conversation on where agents actually are.
- Arsalan Tavakoli, Co-Founder & SVP Field Engineering, Databricks. Why every AI agent is only as good as the data layer underneath it, from a $5B+ ARR co-founder.
- Eleanor Dorfman, Head of Industries, Anthropic. How the world’s leading enterprises are actually deploying Claude in production today.
- Tom Occhino, CPO, Vercel. Kickoff for the SaaStr Deploy Summit: what’s actually working with AI agents in production, not what’s possible.
- Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, COO, Vercel. The operational realities of running a hyper-growth AI infrastructure company.
- Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, CEO & Co-Founder, Artisan. The next chapter for autonomous AI BDRs.
🛠 SaaStr Deploy Summit: AI Agents in Production
- Anneka Gupta (Rubrik), Rachel Wolan (Webflow), Emrecan Doga (Glean), Anique Drumright (Harvey). The CPO panel: 4 companies, same hard problem. How to take an agentic demo and turn it into a product enterprises actually trust with real work.
- Andrew Bialecki, CEO & Co-Founder, Klaviyo. A candid walkthrough of writing a single prompt and turning it into Composer, Klaviyo’s AI agent now serving 200K customers.
- Anwar Haneef, GM & Head of Ecosystem, Canva. Why Canva built an MCP server instead of a proprietary AI feature, and how to be the tool agents pick.
- Sherif Mansour, Head of AI, Atlassian. Real lessons from deploying AI to 3.5M users: AI isn’t magic, it’s plumbing.
- Venkat Thiruvengadam, CEO & Founder, DuploCloud. Why 67% of eng leaders raised AI investment, and 30% of engineers are still stuck on repetitive infra work anyway.
- Russ Fradin, CEO & Co-Founder, Larridin. Findings from 100 Global 2000 CIO conversations on shadow AI, unused licenses, and measuring real impact.
- John Huehn, Chief Executive, Launchpad.io. Scaling AI-driven customer engagement.
💰 AI for Revenue, Sales & GTM
- Ali Ghotbi, CRO, Reevo. Live demo: replacing your CRM, outbound, and pipeline tools with one AI-native platform.
- Anis Bennaceur, CEO & Founder, Attention. Deploying AI RevOps agents that turn every sales call into pipeline.
- Sarah McConnell, VP Demand Gen, Qualified. How to 3x inbound meetings by deploying an AI SDR agent on your event leads.
- Matt Darrow, CEO & Co-Founder, Vivun. New research showing why “world model” AI sales agents drive 50% larger deals and 33% shorter cycles.
- Jason Eubanks, CEO & Co-Founder, Aurasell. The next-gen AI sales platform.
- Scott Metcalf, VP AI Innovation, People.ai. How they cut agent oversight from 30% of an IC’s week to under 5%.
- Shalin Jain, CEO & Founder, HappyFox. Live walkthrough: how an AI agent surfaced $1M in expansion revenue hidden in unstructured support data.
- James McArthur, VP Product Advocacy, Nue.io. Modern revenue lifecycle management for AI-native businesses.
📣 Marketing & Brand in the Age of AI
- Denise Persson, CMO, Snowflake. How a top enterprise CMO is rebuilding marketing for the AI era.
- Alex London, CMO, G2. How AI is compressing the buyer journey and what B2B teams must do to win AI-driven recommendations.
- Devang Agrawal, CTO & Co-Founder, Glyphic. AI-native customer intelligence for revenue teams.
🛡 Infrastructure, Payments & The Stack Underneath
- Stephanie Cohen, CSO, Cloudflare. Bot or buyer? OpenAI scrapes 1,700 pages for every referral; Anthropic 73,000-to-1. A tactical playbook for protecting B2B revenue from AI crawlers.
- Benjamin Wagner, CEO, Firebolt. Data warehousing built for the speed AI demands.
- Chris Clark, Co-Founder & COO, OpenRouter. The unified gateway powering thousands of AI apps across hundreds of models.
- Daniel Vassilev, Co-CEO & Co-Founder, Relevance.AI. Building and orchestrating the AI workforce.
- Paige Bailey (Google DeepMind) + Scott Barneson (Google). Why 60%+ of GenAI startups build on Google Cloud, and what AI-native founders are doing differently with Gemini, Vertex, and $350K in credits.
- Robert Cothran, Group Product Leader, Worldpay for Platforms. Live demo: how SaaS platforms add lending, banking, and embedded finance revenue streams.
- Joshua Wood, Director, Booking.com for Business. Rebuilding business travel for the AI age.
🎙 SaaStr Hosts
- Jason Lemkin, Founder & CEO, SaaStr AI. Your host across all three days.
- Amelia Lerutte, Chief AI Officer, SaaStr AI. Hosting the Gamma fireside and our AI Networking experience. And building an AI VP of Marketing for you, with you — live! Bring your laptop!!
This is just the first wave. More speakers, workshops, and deep dives are being announced weekly.
🎟️ Tickets jump $400 per tier on May 1. Last Chance pricing ends April 30. Lock in: saastrannual.com/buy-tickets-2026
📅 May 12-14, 2026 · 40+ Indoor / Outdoor Acres at San Mateo County Events Center · SF Bay Area
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Tagged with
#Science and Technology
#founder-led companies
#digital product development
#product strategy
#SaaS design
#AI-enabled systems
#applied artificial intelligence
#AI
#B2B
#ARR
#AI-native
#founders
#enterprise AI
#cold outreach
#$100M-$5B
#data layer
#CXOs
#operators
#sales team
#revenue growth

