AfroTech Conference News

Dr. Timnit Gebru believes Black people should not be devalued in the pursuit of tech innovations, particularly in AI.

Gebru is the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR) Institute, author of the memoir “Deep Unlearning,” and a co-author of the research paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” The paper, which examined the dangers and implications of large language models, led to her being fired from Google in 2020, where she had co-led its Ethical AI Research Team, according to MIT Technology Review.

X Eyee, a partner at Offline Research, moderated a panel featuring Gebru on the Main Stage at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference. X Eyee noted that the Stochastic Parrots paper was cited 18,000 times and became “one of the most influential papers in computer science.”

Thai Randolph worked with one of the world’s largest creators. Now, she’s building the infrastructure to help more creators scale.

Randolph’s career began in advertising at digital agencies. As a group director in social and emerging media at VML/Y&R, she learned that traditional brand building would be disrupted. Working at Sony, and then Meta, showed her how technology could be either a disruptor or a propellant for “how stories are told and brands are built,” she said at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference.

When she stepped into the CEO role at Hartbeat, the global multi-platform entertainment company Kevin Hart founded, she recognized creators’ growing influence.

Louis Carr is ensuring BET remains at the “cutting edge” of technology and the creator economy.

To those who know him well, Carr’s title doesn’t come to mind first, but rather, who he is at his core: a Black man from Chicago who is “authentically, unapologetically Black” year-round, with a deep appreciation for the Black community. This has informed his leadership as the current president of BET a role he assumed in December 2025. He has been with the company for 39 years.

“For the last four decades, a lot of people said that I have sold advertising. I don’t say that. I said I’ve educated corporations, white people and Black people, on the value of Black consumers,” Carr said at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference . “We have this thing at BET where we say, what Black people do today, the world does tomorrow. And we believe that in our core. That’s what I said I’ve done for the last four decades is make people really feel and understand that whether they are creative, whether they are in technology, understand the impact and the influence that you are having.”

Stacey Abrams , Roy Wood Jr., former Apple executive Denise Young Smith and TikTok storyteller Tareasa “Reesa Teesa” Johnson are among the authors scheduled to speak at the Authors Pavilion during AFROTECH™ Conference 2026 in Houston .

The AFROTECH™ Authors Pavilion, presented by Penguin Random House in collaboration with Storehouse Voices, runs on the expo floor Nov. 3-6. Most sessions are 25-minute moderated talks with a single author, followed by panels that pair speakers from earlier in the day. When authors leave the stage, they go straight to the Book Nook, a pop-up bookstore run by Houston’s Kindred Stories, to sign copies.

Penguin Random House staff will also be on site between sessions. The publisher plans open Q&As, office hours with editors for attendees working on their own books, conversations with its HR team about publishing careers and giveaways of advance copies of titles that aren’t on sale yet.

In 2024, Christine Izuakor spoke at AFROTECH™ Conference for the first time. She also hosted a small dinner on the side.

“I was just scratching the surface of exploring how I could create space for multifaceted professionals to connect through curated conversations,” the founder and CEO of Rauk AI told AFROTECH™. “I hosted a small dinner at one restaurant to test the waters.”

The idea took off. In 2025, the dinners became an official AFROTECH™ Conference event partnership, with gatherings at dozens of restaurants across Houston.

Ten years ago, Dr. Tiffani Bright’s work centered on clinical decision support: rules written by humans and checkable by humans. AI, she said, wasn’t on her radar because it wasn’t in the clinic yet.

That changed fast. By 2018, a machine was allowed to diagnose a patient without a doctor in the loop, Bright told AFROTECH™ . By 2019, she said, it was clear those systems could be biased at scale.

“The shift wasn’t that AI got smarter. It’s that we handed it real decisions before we built a way to check its work,” said Bright , an assistant professor of computational biomedicine and co-director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Research and Education at Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University. She’s speaking at AFROTECH™ Conference 2026 in Houston.

Years ago, a PhD student in Atlanta reached out to Sandra Crespo with a request: Would she speak on mental health and policing?

It was a small ask. Crespo said yes, and it set the tone for the rest of her career as a speaker.

“He likely has no idea that one request opened a door I’ve been walking through ever since,” Crespo, the CEO and founder of Unalome Consulting Group and speaker at this year’s AFROTECH™ Conference , told us. “That’s part of what stays with me, because it means the people who shape us most profoundly often never see the full weight of what they set in motion.”

Dr. Dale Blackstock became a physician at a time when few people who looked like her were welcome in medicine. She died of leukemia at 47.

Her daughter, Dr. Uché Blackstock, told AFROTECH™ that her mother passed “before she could fully understand how profoundly her life would shape mine.”

“My mother, the late Dr. Dale Blackstock, set almost everything in motion for me,” said Blackstock, the founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity and a speaker at AFROTECH™ Conference 2026 in Houston.

When Tanya Sam takes the stage at AFROTECH™ 2026 in Houston, there’s one thing she wants the room to walk away with: “You do not need anyone else’s permission to begin.”

The founder of Elizabeth & Minnie told AFROTECH™ that too many people put off the big moves until they feel fully prepared, and end up waiting far longer than they need to.

“So many of us have been taught to overprepare, overprove, and wait until we are perfectly qualified before we take the opportunity, launch the business, raise the money, change careers, or step into leadership,” Sam said. “But confidence rarely comes before the leap. It is built because you leapt.”

AfroTech Conference runs Nov. 2-6 in Houston, and the Expo floor is where the week gets real. Recruiters, product teams, founders and executives across multiple industries will be on the floor, ready to talk about careers, partnerships and what they’re building next.

This is your guide to the companies at AfroTech this year, sorted by industry. Use it to plan your route, prep your pitch and decide which conversations to prioritize.

Get your AfroTech 2026 ticket , then download the AfroTech Connect app for booth locations, c ompany details and the full Expo floor map.