Philadelphia, PA, May 13, 2026 Innovation moves at the speed of the people building it. Today, Evan Kirstel's We Love Tech Awards announce the winners of the 2026 program, recognizing the individuals, organizations, and products reshaping how the world works, communicates, secures data, serves customers, and puts artificial intelligence into responsible production.
"What inspires me about this year's class is how grounded the work is. These are not slide decks or roadmaps. They are products in production, agents in workflows, platforms protecting real customers and real revenue. The 2026 winners are showing the rest of the industry what mature, responsible, high-velocity innovation actually looks like, and I am proud to put a spotlight on every one of them," said Evan Kirstel, B2B Tech Influencer and Founder of the We Love Tech Awards.
2026 Individual Winners
The Individual category recognizes the leaders driving transformation inside their organizations.
Mary Elizabeth Porray, EY Global Vice Chair — Client Technology and EY Global Growth and Innovation COO (Overall Winner) - Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
Mary Elizabeth is reshaping the professional services industry through AI-first leadership at global scale. As EY's Global Vice Chair for Client Technology and Global Growth and Innovation COO, she leads more than 7,000 professionals delivering AI agents, platforms, and products that position EY as Client Zero for responsible AI adoption. Under her direction, the EY Fabric platform now supports 2 million users, 1.3 million cloud assets, and 9,500 AI services, with 99.9% global product availability. Her relentless focus on trust, governance, and usability has driven 116 million prompts processed across thousands of projects, 281,000 active users, and 81% adoption of EY.ai EYQ. In November 2025, EY was named one of Microsoft's inaugural Frontier Firms, an external validation of the operating model she built.
“This recognition is first and foremost a reflection of our teams and the operating model they’ve built together. AI is no longer about experimentation, it's about trust, governance and delivering real outcomes at scale. I’m proud of how EY has moved from early ambition to responsible execution, embedding AI into real work, real decisions and real client impact. Being recognized alongside EY.ai EYQ underscores that leadership and platforms must evolve together, and that’s exactly what our people have delivered.”
Mary Elizabeth Porray
EY Global Vice Chair — Client Technology and EY Global Growth and Innovation COO
Additional Individual Winners:
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Xiaoxian Long, Autohome Inc. - Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
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Alex Lintner, CEO of Experian Technology, Software Solutions, and Innovation - Enterprise Technology
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Gewei Ling, General Manager of Shenzhen Yuuda Smart Technology - Gadgets
2026 Organization Winners
The Organization category recognizes the companies, agencies, and institutions delivering category-defining work at scale.
a1qa - AI-powered quality assurance (Overall Winner) - Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
a1qa is a global pure-play quality engineering company built for systems that behave unpredictably by design. Its AI-native quality assurance framework treats AI quality as its own discipline, validating outputs against safety rules, stress-testing with adversarial prompts, and governing the handoffs across multi-agent chains. The results show up where they matter most. A healthcare AI platform reached zero defects in production with 875 hours of manual checking eliminated in a single year. A telecom platform cut environment setup from 36 hours to 30 minutes while serving more than 60 operators at full uptime. An iGaming client moved from monthly to weekly releases, saving 31.5 hours per cycle. Backed by 1,000 quality engineering specialists and named a Major Contender in Everest Group's QE Services PEAK Matrix® 2025, a1qa keeps AI safe, stable, and accountable at enterprise speed.
Additional Organization Winners:
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DailyPay
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Lawmatics - SaaS/UCaaS/XaaS
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Ministry of Energy & Infrastructure - Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
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Paysafe - Security/CyberSecurity
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Straive - Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
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Surgere - Enterprise Technology
2026 Product Winners
The Product category recognizes the platforms, applications, and services changing how enterprises operate, innovate, and serve their customers.
EY.ai EYQ, EY's ecosystem of GenAI and agentic capabilities for everyday users (Overall Winner) - Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
EY.ai EYQ is EY's secure, enterprise GenAI and agentic ecosystem, empowering more than 300,000 EY people to deploy domain-specific agents into real workflows. Built on EY Fabric and launched from concept to delivery in just four weeks, EYQ embeds governance, identity controls, data protection, and Responsible AI policies directly into the platform. No-code and low-code agent creation lets practitioners build their own assistants while enforced guardrails keep usage safe. The numbers tell the story: 190 billion tokens consumed since launch, 116 million prompts processed, 81% adoption, 51,500 agents in development, and 17 million AI-generated lines of code accepted. EYQ has accelerated thousands of internal and client-facing projects and made EY one of the first professional services organizations to roll out secure LLM access at global scale.
“EY.ai EYQ was built with a very clear intent – to make AI real, usable, and trusted at enterprise scale. This recognition reflects the engineering discipline and governance‑by‑design approach our teams applied from day one, embedding security, identity, and Responsible AI directly into the platform. In an incredibly competitive AI field, being recognized as the overall product winner reinforces that what differentiates at enterprise scale is execution; platforms that are trusted, governed and embedded into everyday work globally.”
Pablo Cebro
EY Global Head of Technology Platforms, Client Technology
Additional Product Winners:
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4RIVRS, Inc. - SaaS/UCaaS/XaaS
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CxZone by ACTO - Cloud Computing
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Cyara's AI Trust - Customer Experience
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Klearcom Chatbot Testing for Reliable AI Customer Experiences - Customer Experience
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Optery - Security/CyberSecurity
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Protectstar Antivirus AI by Protectstar Inc. - Mobile Apps
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RavenStar™ Ultra-Wideband Massive MIMO Radio Unit - Networking
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Second Nature AI - Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
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Zonar Ignition™ Fleet Management Platform - SaaS/UCaaS/XaaS
Finalists
A group of nominees were also recognized by the judges as finalists. These submissions ranked among the top nominees and the judges deemed them worthy of additional recognition. The Finalists are:
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Aligned Data Centers
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Benchmark Gensuite®
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CallTower Global UCaaS + Operator Connect Platform
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Exclaimer
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Experian
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EY Vitality Index
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MelodyArc
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Paysafe
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VAI S2K Mobile
Why These Awards Matter
The We Love Tech Awards exist to give modern enterprise tech the recognition it has earned and the platform it deserves. Three things set the program apart:
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Social-First Recognition: Winners are amplified across Evan Kirstel's audience of more than 550,000 followers on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, YouTube, and his podcast.
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Inclusive and Diverse Categories: From AI and Cloud to networking, mobile apps, gadgets, and cybersecurity, the program recognizes innovation wherever it shows up.
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A Live Show Experience: A high-energy digital celebration designed for a global, tech-forward audience, hosted by Evan Kirstel and Russ Fordyce.
The 2026 Class By the Numbers
A few patterns emerged as the winners came into focus:
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Approximately 76% of winners explicitly built their winning entry around artificial intelligence, generative AI, agentic systems, or machine learning.
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About 1 in 3 winners (roughly 33%) competed in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, making it the most populated solution category.
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More than half of this year's winners serve highly regulated industries including financial services, government, energy, automotive, life sciences, legal, and telecommunications.
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Almost 400 volunteer judges evaluated entries over a multi-week judging period using the program's domain-specific scoring framework.
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Global footprint: winners and their work span North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
A second pattern is just as important. The work that rose to the top is not only about building AI. It is about governing it, testing it, securing it, and proving it produces results. Quality assurance, responsible AI, customer experience assurance, and cybersecurity all show up disproportionately in this year's class.
Tune In Today: 2026 We Love Tech Awards Online Show
The 2026 We Love Tech Awards Online Show airs LIVE today, Wednesday, May 13, 2026 at 12:00 PM ET, hosted by Evan Kirstel and Russ Fordyce, Chief Recognition Officer of Business Intelligence Group.
Set a reminder so you don't miss it:
Join the show by visiting welovetechawards.com on May 13.
About Evan Kirstel
Evan Kirstel is one of the most influential voices in B2B technology, with a social reach of more than 550,000 followers across his podcast, YouTube, LinkedIn, X, and Instagram. With years of experience working with Fortune 1000 brands, Evan helps companies harness social media for strategic growth, audience engagement, and social selling. Learn more at evankirstel.com.
About Business Intelligence Group
Business Intelligence Group (BIG) is an independent awards organization that has been recognizing outstanding achievement in business since 2012. Now in its 14th awards season, BIG operates more than 10 annual programs spanning innovation, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, customer service, cloud computing, sustainability, sales and marketing, workplace culture, and women's leadership.
Unlike popularity contests, BIG programs use professional judging panels and objective scoring benchmarks to identify organizations, products, and individuals making real, measurable impact. Winners receive a complete promotional toolkit - including blockchain-verified credentials, press release support, social media assets, and featured placement across BIG's global community of more than one million business professionals.
For more information, visit www.bintelligence.com.
Media Contact
Eliana Starbird
Chief Nominations Officer
Business Intelligence Group
+1 909-529-2737
contact@bintelligence.com
