2026 Top 100 Worldwide AI Leaders — #57

Adam Lieberman

AI Executive & Builder

Deployed AI agents across 130 countries and 8,100+ financial institutions as Chief AI Officer. Founded a startup — and sold it. Still in the lab, still shipping at the frontier.

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About

Building at the intersection of intelligence and scale

I'm a Chief AI Officer, entrepreneur, and builder with over a decade of experience leading and scaling AI teams, platforms, and products across global organizations. I previously led Finastra's global AI strategy across all business units (Payments, Lending, Universal Banking, and Treasury & Capital Markets) and internal functions, helping shape AI transformation at enterprise scale. Today, I'm focused on building and developing both open-source and proprietary solutions across the AI landscape, with current emphasis on AI agent security, agentic payments protocols, and agentic commerce for merchants and consumers.

Over the course of my career, I've founded a FinTech startup that has been acquired (Cappio), built deep learning vision systems resulting in 15 patents, and led major enterprise AI transformation initiatives at scale. I was also recognized as one of the 2026 Top 100 Worldwide AI Leaders (#57), alongside Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg.

My leadership philosophy is rooted in putting people first. Lasting technology transformation is never just about systems — it's about enabling curious, empowered teams to build meaningful, scalable change.

Atlanta, GA
M.S. Computer Science, Georgia Tech
B.S. Applied Mathematics, Georgia Tech

Technical Expertise

AI StrategyEnterprise TransformationAI Product DevelopmentLeadershipGenerative AILLMsAgentic AIAI PlatformsData EngineeringMLOpsCloud PlatformsAI GovernanceResponsible AIProduction AI SystemsAgent Security

Current Research Interests

  • Agent to Agent (A2A) Protocols
  • Agent Skills
  • Ambient Agents
  • UI/UX for LLM-centric Applications
  • AI-Assisted Developer Productivity
  • Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2)
  • Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)
  • Multi-Factor Authentication & Enhanced Security Protocols for AI Agent Tools
  • Image Models & Image Enhancement Pipelines
  • Generative User Interfaces (GenUI)
Experience

Where I've built

  • Lead the AI, Data Engineering, and Developer Tooling organizations, driving alignment across technology, product, and business to scale data and AI development, tooling, and innovation.
  • Led end-to-end AI, Data, and Security due diligence for $5B+ divestment of 2 business units, delivering robust technology assessments, risk analyses, and transition roadmaps.
  • Formulated key partnerships with Microsoft, Databricks, and Langchain to architect a cloud-agnostic analytics and machine learning platform.
  • Championed enterprise-wide generative AI adoption, launching a global upskilling initiative across 10,000 employees and 4,400 developers in 13+ countries.
  • Directed consolidation of 500+ disparate developer tools into a standardized suite of 35 tools.
  • Scaled GitHub Copilot deployment to 4,500+ developers, achieving 40% productivity improvement through code displacement metrics.
  • Recognized as 1 of 3 Distinguished Engineers; advanced research into Federated Data Networks for secure multi-institution collaboration.
  • Oversaw 100+ agentic AI deployments, both internal and client-facing, across Finastra's core financial services portfolio.
  • Act as a global AI evangelist with keynote appearances at SIBOS, World Economic Forum, Forbes, AI Magazine, Ai4, and DZone.
  • Lead investor supporting the buildout of an AI-native operating model within the luxury streetwear market, integrating AI across design, production, and go-to-market functions.
  • Reduced campaign creation costs by 99.5% through multimodal LLMs and proprietary AI-agent workflows that accelerated creative development and content production.
  • Enabled AI-assisted apparel development, including tech pack creation, measurement workflows, and on-body garment visualization, reducing duplicate sampling costs and shortening design cycles.
  • Introduced advanced creative AI tooling, including Midjourney and other multimodal design platforms, to modernize concept development and reduce reliance on traditional design processes.
  • Automated market and trend research using deep-research models, improving speed and consistency of competitive and consumer insights.
  • Directed internal R&D on AI image enhancement, including texture realism and resolution upscaling, to improve the quality and realism of AI-generated campaign assets.
  • Delivered and led implementation of a mission-critical computer vision platform competing directly with Amazon Go's autonomous store technology.
  • Helped shape product strategy for next-generation autonomous retail experiences, bringing advanced AI capabilities closer to commercial deployment.
  • Led a team of 25+ AI researchers and engineers developing advanced vision models for object recognition, spatial tracking, and retail automation.
  • Designed end-to-end ML pipelines spanning data collection, labeling, model training, evaluation, and deployment.
  • Optimized hardware infrastructure and deployment pipelines to accelerate training and inference of deep neural network models in production environments.
  • Authored and advanced cutting-edge research in computer vision, including object recognition and spatial tracking, resulting in 15 awarded patents.
  • Established strategic partnerships with leading hardware providers, including Intel and NVIDIA, to support development and optimization of AI-driven retail solutions.
  • Successfully led Cappio through acquisition by Simply Wall St, aligning product vision with strategic growth opportunities in retail investment analytics.
  • Built scalable data pipelines and centralized financial data from multiple sources, including price data, financial statements, 13F filings, and quarterly reports.
  • Developed proprietary equity rating algorithms to analyze thousands of public companies at scale.
  • Benchmarked internal equity rating models against analyst recommendations and ratings to validate performance and strengthen research quality.
Projects

Things I've built

Publications & Speaking

Writing & Keynotes

Video & Podcasts

How do you modernize banking apps without rewriting them? At Sibos 2025, Adam Lieberman shares how the team is moving from RAG-style support use cases to product experiences driven by natural language — and why Model Context Protocol (MCP) plus agent-to-agent patterns are key.

VideoFinancial IT · Oct 2025

A discussion on Finastra's Microsoft partnership and Copilot outlook, covering the range of AI agent use cases being deployed across the organization.

VideoCloudwars · May 2025

An exclusive Financial IT interview exploring how Finastra is harnessing Generative AI, the challenges financial institutions face in implementing AI, and the trends on the horizon.

VideoFinancial IT · Jan 2025

Adam Lieberman, Chief AI Officer, and Boaz Krelbaum, CTO of Payments, explore the transformative role of generative AI in modernizing commercial payments and what it means for financial institutions globally.

VideoFinastra TV

Adam Lieberman discusses the innovative advancements in generative AI within the financial services sector, covering practical use cases, adoption patterns, and what sustainable AI practices look like at enterprise scale.

VideoFinastra TV

A technical discussion on the core concepts of algorithmic fairness in lending — covering how bias enters decision models, fairness definitions, and practical approaches to building more equitable AI systems.

VideoAi4 · Apr 2021
Accolades

Recognition

2026 Top 100 Worldwide AI Leaders

Ranked #57 among the world's top 100 AI leaders, recognized alongside Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and Mark Zuckerberg.

AI Magazine2026
Top Chief AI Officers of 2025

Listed as a top Chief AI Officer amongst Fortune 500s, public sector institutions, global banks, healthcare providers, and more.

PixieBrix2025
15 Awarded Patents

Authored and contributed to 15 patents in computer vision, object recognition, and spatial tracking technologies.

USPTO2016 – 2018
Successful Acquisition

Successfully exited start-up company Capp.io to Simply Wall St.

Tech.co2016
Forbes Council Member

Member of the Forbes Technology Council featured in 16 contributions.

Forbes2023 – 2026
Tmrw Magazine Feature

Mind Bowling's AI-native brand featured amongst major fashion houses in Tmrw magazine issue #51.

Tmrw Magazine2025
Contact

Let's connect

I'm always open to thoughtful and fun conversations—whether you're building, investing, hiring, or just exploring AI.

Download Resume

© 2026 Adam Lieberman. All rights reserved.

Atlanta, GA