The 2026 award categories.

Five awards

• Innovation: building something new at the frontier
• Scale: taking AI to millions of users or thousands of employees
• Public Sector: ministers, regulators and national strategy leads
• Ecosystem: enablers such as accelerators, communities and convenors
• Frontier: research or technical leadership at the top of the field

Two awards

• Early Stage: pre-Series A
• Growth Stage: Series A and beyond

Three awards

• Consumer
• Enterprise
• Developer Tools & Platforms

Three awards

• Transformation: changed how a whole organisation operates
• Customer Experience: measurably better service for customers
• Operational Excellence: efficiency, cost and safety

Two awards

• Academic
• Industry

Two awards

• Governance & Policy
• Safety, Fairness & Privacy in practice

Two awards

• Arabic AI
• African Languages AI

Two awards

• Venture & Growth
• Sovereign & Strategic

Two awards

• Citizen Experience
• Social Impact

Two awards

• Emerging Founder (under 30)
• Emerging Researcher (under 30)

Two awards

• Consulting & Advisory: strategy, governance and adoption roadmaps
• Implementation & Integration: building and shipping AI for clients

One award

• Any industry: for the leader or organisation that moved an entire industry toward useful AI adoption, judged on industry-wide movement rather than a single deployment