Hi everyone, it's Alex York. Hi, I'm Zoya Hussin and we're the editors of the 30 Under 30 List.

We are here coming to you today to speak about the 2026 Under 30 List, which just launched first week of

December. Zoya, how are you feeling about having officially launched our little project into the world.

I feel awesome. I mean, we've been working on it for months and months,

and it's just been such a big team effort from so many different people and teams at Forbes.

So I'm thrilled.

It's same. I'm excited. It's truly a beast to put together everything from like the summit to the list itself. For those who don't know, we have 20 different categories, 30 people on each category. So as I said, it is a huge team effort to bring this all to fruition, both in the physical magazine, in the online versions. So there's so much that has, yeah, gone into this project over the last couple of months.

Zoya, from your perspective,

what do you think is, like, the biggest takeaway of this year's list?

Yeah, I think every year we kind of spot trends

and, you know, we spot what the big theme is.

And I think now for the past two or three years the big theme really has been AI and I

think this year it's even more prominent so you can just kind of see how that industry

has really grown but it's AI is now part of like every single you know you mentioned

the 20 categories I think in every single

category we're seeing some sort of play on AI and so many of our featured honorees or a call

outs like on science. They're building robots using AI or on the marketing side. They're using

AI to build the apps that people can use to buy tickets to events.

So it's like really penetrated into so many different industries.

And then obviously we have our core AI category too, which I think is responsible for I think

$1.5 billion in funding this year. The total funding on the list this year is somewhere

about 3.5 billion higher than that and AI is responsible for 1.5 of that. So that's a pretty

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