10 business leaders who spearheaded industry-transforming change in 2024

Innovation and business go hand in hand — and that’s constantly on enterprise leaders’ minds, regardless of their industry.

Executives must understand how technological advancements, systemic barriers, and generational shifts are affecting their growth, then strategize accordingly.

Business Insider’s annual list of people transforming business highlights these leaders who work in media, finance, technology, transportation, and labor.

The WNBA’s first female commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, is spearheading a transformation in the sports sector with her focus on fan engagement and equity among players. In finance, Leon Sinclair is leveraging data and analytics to reshape the world of alternative investments at Preqin, where he’s an executive vice president. Mike Hopkins, the head of Amazon’s Prime Video and MGM Studios, is forging an ad-focused entertainment-business strategy that could redefine how content is made and consumed in the digital age.

Below, in alphabetical order by first name, are the 10 business leaders our reporters and editors credit with shaking up and remolding their industries.

Anna-Lisa Miller, executive director of the KKR-cofounded nonprofit Ownership Works

Employers often say they prefer to hire employees who act like owners. As the executive director of the nonprofit Ownership Works, Miller aims to get employers to act on that ethos.

“It’s not credible to ask employees to feel, think, and act like owners if you don’t give them a financial ownership stake,” Miller said.

Since its founding in 2021, Ownership Works and its corporate partners have shared $570 million in wealth across six companies and worked with more than 160,000 workers at 113 companies.

One way Miller seeks to convince business owners of the merits of employee shareholding is by showing them how it can improve the bottom line. She pointed to a time an employee in an Ownership Works company helped their employer save money by replacing a component costing $100 with a 3D printed part that cost just a few dollars.

“They often know where the company is losing money or making a mistake or where things could be better,” Miller said. “And they often have ideas for how to fix the problem. It’s just nobody ever asked them to.”

Miller’s career in employee ownership grew out of an interest in community development. Early in her career she helped a nonprofit in Hawaii create farming cooperatives, and she worked with another nonprofit to convert small businesses into worker cooperatives.

Miller said she wanted to find scale, so she approached Pete Stavros, KKR’s cohead of private equity. Stavros first experimented with employee ownership at a garage-door manufacturer in 2015, leading to some of KKR’s best results. He was looking to spread that model further.

After announcing the creation of Ownership Works with a $10 million donation, Stavros hired Miller as his first employee. Now it’s her job to help the company’s 25 private-equity partners, including KKR and Apollo, institute plans in their portfolios.

She does this in part by partnering with accountants, lawyers, and professional-services firms to make it easier to create these plans, acting as an employee-ownership consultancy. The organization also collects and shares metrics of success, such as hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to employees and decreasing turnover and higher profits at companies with employee ownership.

She’s helping the nonprofit expand beyond private equity. Ownership Works recently worked with the cold-storage company Lineage to give $100 million in IPO proceeds to its employees and create a stock-ownership plan.

Miller believes that expanding employee ownership could significantly narrow the wealth gap and reduce financial insecurity.

Arthur Sadoun, CEO of Publicis Groupe

Sadoun said he mostly received pushback when, in 2017, he told creative agencies that the future of creativity was commerce and AI.

“It’s funny when you look at what happened now,” Sadoun, the chief executive of the French advertising giant Publicis Groupe, told BI.

Back then, Sadoun faced a daunting task. He had just taken over as the third-ever leader of the 91-year-old company, home to the storied agencies Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi, and Publicis Conseil, which had created iconic advertising like the Marlboro Man, Tony the Tiger, and “Labour Isn’t Working.”

But Publicis was languishing behind its competitors having lost key clients like McDonald’s. Financial growth was anemic.

Sadoun embarked on a plan to turn Publicis from a communications partner to a company that could help clients transform their businesses. He sought to break down silos between Publicis’ various agencies and help them retool around a bet on “personalization at scale,” advanced by the biggest acquisition in its history: the 2019 purchase of the data marketing firm Epsilon for $4.4 billion.

“The financial market did not like that,” Sadoun said.

Neither did many of Publicis’ own employees, particularly the Don Draper-esque creatives who were maddened that an outsize focus on data and programmatic ads meant the Parisian company would lose its je ne sais quoi. Competitors mocked Publicis’ multimillion-dollar investment in creating an AI platform.

Sadoun and Publicis are having the last laugh.

At about $27 billion, Publicis’ market capitalization is the largest of any individual advertising-agency holding company. It’s forecast to end the year with the largest annual revenue, too, with the combination of its data and media offerings representing about half of its sales. While 2024 was a cause for celebration, it faces challenges ahead: This month, its rival Omnicom announced a deal to acquire Interpublic Group that would create the largest ad-agency network.

Sadoun described Publicis’ award-winning campaign for the French telco Orange as a good outward representation of its modernized offering to marketers. The commercial begins with stars from the French men’s national football team flaunting their skills. The reveal — using VFX and deepfake technology — is that the stars of the ad were in fact from Les Bleues, the women’s national team.

Sadoun credits his leadership team and employees for Publicis’ turnaround. He has a more personal hope for his own legacy.

In 2022, Sadoun had an operation to remove a tumor in his neck that turned out to be cancerous. Unusually for the CEO of a public company, he disclosed his diagnosis before he underwent treatment: grueling rounds of chemo and radiotherapy that would affect the jet-setting executive’s ability to travel. He was flooded with messages revealing that many people were hiding their chronic illnesses from their employers and colleagues.

The following year, Sadoun helped launch the Working with Cancer Pledge, which encourages companies to commit to offering more recovery-focused working environments. More than 600 companies have signed up, and the initiative was promoted with a splashy Super Bowl ad bought and created by Publicis last year.

“My one mission in life now, apart from my family, is to erase the stigma of cancer in the workplace,” Sadoun said.

Cathy Engelbert, commissioner of the WNBA

2024 was a transformative year for the WNBA. It said that attendance increased by nearly 50% year over year and that ratings on ESPN were up by 170% from last season, fueled in part by its rookie stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. Sponsorship deals have boomed, bringing in advertisers newer to the sports world like Bumble and Skims.

Presiding over its astronomical growth is Engelbert, a former Deloitte CEO who became the league’s commissioner in 2019.

The league has been planting the seeds of its growth for a while. It gained attention by playing during the pandemic in a bubble. It raised $75 million from investors, allowing it to invest in marketing and fan engagement. And it landed sponsorships on its own, separate from the NBA. External factors like the rise of “name, image, and likeness” deals and social media also helped draw attention to the sport.

“The thing that was overlooked is that Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Engelbert told BI. “We didn’t do this overnight.” One emphasis was on improving the fan experience by meeting spectators where they were, such as updating the app to look more like TikTok, Engelbert said.

The WBNA is a big brand now, and with its growth has come scrutiny. Engelbert took heat when she didn’t directly condemn threatening comments on social media toward players but likened the situation to a rivalry between male players in the 1970s. She later apologized, promising to do better.

“We’ve been debriefing around a lot of things that happened this year,” Engelbert told BI, adding that the league was looking at beefing up security and mental-health resources. “The vitriol our players, me, we all get, we’re going to try to tackle that multidimensionally.”

Engelbert also wants to talk about the flip side.

“There’s a huge negative to all the vitriol, but there’s also people caring about the league like they haven’t before,” she said. “Apathy’s the death of a brand, and there’s no more apathy.”

The WNBA, which is majority-owned by the NBA, remains unprofitable; several outlets described sources as saying it was on track to lose $40 million or more this season. The WNBA declined to comment.

Increased sponsorship and media rights will be crucial to keeping up the W’s momentum and getting in the black. In a big start, the women’s league recently struck an 11-year, $200 million media-rights deal, up from its current deal of $60 million a year. Engelbert also has her sights set on global expansion, starting with the WNBA getting its first Canadian franchise next year. Corporate sponsorships are catching up to the rise of women’s sports. Engelbert is ready to capitalize, with stats to appeal to the bottom line.

“There’s a little scratching and clawing to make sure the old view of the WNBA is not the current view,” she said. “Our fans are actually likely to buy from you. So we say this is a good business decision for you.”

Fei-Fei Li, cofounder and CEO of World Labs

Almost 20 years ago, while she taught at Princeton, Li, known as the “godmother of AI,” tested the hypothesis that everything humans could see could be categorized and labeled.

This idea built off her graduate research focused on object recognition. Li harnessed the power of crowdsourcing to pioneer ImageNet, a database of 15 million images that became the foundation of computer-vision and deep-learning research.

Li has continued advancing this research. This year, she and the leading AI researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall launched World Labs, a startup that aims to take AI beyond large language models. It’s valued at $1 billion.

With $230 million in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, AMD Ventures, and Nvidia’s NVentures, World Labs is seeking to explore AI applications in the two-dimensional plane of pixels and in 3D worlds with spatial intelligence. In December, World Labs dropped its first AI project: a tool designed to turn any image into a 3D model.

Since her initial research breakthroughs, Li has testified before Congress about applying responsible ethics to AI and has advocated the inclusion of more women and people of color in the field.

“Language is important but, as humans, much of our ability to understand and interact with the world is based on what we see,” Li wrote in an op-ed article in The Economist in November.

She believes spatial intelligence — which can help with developing robots that look after older adults, or extra hands for a surgeon — is what truly human-centered AI will look like.

She’s now a codirector of Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI and serves as the Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford. Li has also worked as a vice president and chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia

Huang is becoming the stuff of legend.

He has a reputation as a genius, a visionary, and a workaholic. Bosses everywhere want to know his every theory of management to replicate even a fraction of his success. That’s because Nvidia has gone from a niche tech firm to one of the most valuable companies in the world in a little more than two years.

After decades of toiling out of the limelight, providing the video-gaming industry with graphics chips to render complex, ever-changing imagery but not gaining much name recognition beyond it, Nvidia burst into broader consciousness in 2022, after ChatGPT came to the market. Word quickly spread that the company had for years been buying thousands of Nvidia graphics processing units — it turned out that the kind of computing they’re best at is similar to the demands of artificial intelligence.

Huang actually donated OpenAI’s first eight GPUs, delivering them himself. But Huang anticipated the connection between his chips and AI long before then — he just didn’t know how it would materialize.

Huang, 61, was born in southwestern Taiwan. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Oregon and Stanford. He had a few jobs in the semiconductor industry, including at Nvidia’s major competitor AMD, until he founded Nvidia at 30 with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem.

Despite the recent spotlight on him now, Huang has staying power. He’s one the longest-serving tech CEOs, with more than 30 years at the helm. In a recently published memoir, Morris Chang, the founder of Nvidia’s most important supplier, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, described offering Huang the CEO job at TSMC.

Even now that Nvidia has a market capitalization of more than $3 trillion, Huang sees his work as far from finished.

“I watched Jensen make these kinds of bets that are far-reaching, where there’s a lot of ambiguity as to when it’s going to happen or not,” Rev Lebaredian, a vice president of omniverse and simulation technology at Nvidia, told Business Insider this year. Huang is usually right. The journey to enter 2025 with hundreds of foundation models chasing ChatGPT started for Nvidia in about 2006.

The next big journey may be self-driving cars and robots, or something else entirely.

Some investors still worry that when it comes to Nvidia, what goes up must come down. But investors also believe that if anyone can see or make the future, it’s Huang.

Leon Sinclair, executive vice president of Preqin

Sinclair, who grew up in the market town of Rugby in the middle of England, didn’t picture a career in finance.

“We never really spoke about money around the dinner table or anything like that because there was never any of it,” the 42-year-old told Business Insider in an interview.

Now Sinclair is helping demystify private markets and powering its growth through data.

With civil service in mind, he studied political science at Loughborough University and joined England’s Department of Health shortly after graduating in 2004. But Sinclair, a competitive basketball and track athlete, quickly tired of the bureaucracy and craved a faster-paced work culture.

After six months, he left for a research-analyst position at Intercontinental Exchange, the operator of major stock exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange and clearinghouses. The finance novice was eager to catch up and learn as much as he could about debt products and subprime markets. He left in 2010 for the data provider Markit, well before the firm merged with IHS and was acquired by S&P Global.

Throughout his two-decade career he has maintained a sense of intellectual curiosity, describing himself as one of the most avid readers of industry news among his peers. Drawn to the complexity of private markets, he pivoted away from credit to build IHS Markit’s private-equity and debt division. In 2023, he joined the private-markets-data powerhouse Preqin.

“You see some of the most innovative companies in the world, and you work with some of the most innovative funds in the world who are deploying capital into just really interesting spaces,” he said.

Sinclair oversees how Preqin addresses the needs of fund managers, investment banks, and placement agents, representing some 3,000 front-office teams, trying to navigate the opaque industry of private markets. Preqin says the asset class has more than doubled to $16.8 trillion in assets under management over the past five years. Preqin’s data can be used, for instance, to target limited partners for fundraising or create customized benchmarks to better convey performance to investors.

Private markets are becoming more transparent as providers like Preqin find ways to combine publicly available and proprietary data, Sinclair said. In June, his division launched a data tool to analyze deals across 6,500 funds. This aggregated data can be used to back up valuations in negotiations or identify which financial factors, such as revenue growth or debt pay-down, contributed the most value to a successful deal. The firm’s insights are set to become more widely available, as BlackRock is set to acquire Preqin for $3.2 billion.

Sinclair said it’s easier for individual investors to participate in private markets than ever before, pointing to the growth of data products and favorable regulatory developments. But he added that having options isn’t the same as understanding them.

“There’s a massive amount of education to do. Alternatives have a totally different vocabulary, a different way of thinking about performance, a different way of thinking about risks to the types of products,” he said.

“I think there’s also an obligation of the industry to build the right analytical tools, the right educational tools, datasets to bring the mass affluent along on that journey.”

Marin Gjaja, CEO of Ford Model e

The electric-vehicle market has experienced tremendous upheaval in the past year, and car companies are scrambling to understand today’s EV buyers.

At Ford, Gjaja, the chief operating officer of the Model e electric division, is tasked with navigating the money-losing division through huge changes in demand and customer profiles.

After years of growth in the EV segment driven by wealthy early adopters, car companies face the challenge of selling these expensive and complex vehicles to more-regular customers.

Ford split its gas and electric divisions in 2022 in a bid to speed up EV development. The company’s EV strategy has changed a few times since then, but Ford still breaks out its financial performance: So far in 2024, the Model e division has lost $3.6 billion.

In his operations role, Gjaja is trying to reverse those losses by working with Ford’s dealers to improve customer experiences and perceptions. Before joining Ford in 2022, Gjaja was a senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with clients in retail, technology, and automotive, among other industries.

He’s putting those years of consulting experience to work as Ford tries to bridge the gap between the wealthy early adopters behind the initial success of vehicles like the Mustang Mach-E and the F-150 Lighting and the more-practical customers who more often leave the lot with a hybrid.

While higher prices have turned off some of these new EV shoppers, Gjaja said at an automotive conference in September that this cohort was considering a lot more than sticker price — including their distance from the nearest charger, the cost of charging, battery life, and resale values.

Gjaja argued that simply discounting electric cars wouldn’t be enough to convince shoppers and certainly wouldn’t solve Ford’s profitability problem in its Model e division.

Instead of focusing on “functional economics,” Gjaja said, he examines the “behavioral economics” of EV adoption. He said the journey from what he called an EV denier to a long-term convert could take up to three years.

“My job is to figure out how to sell and market a vehicle that people don’t appreciate its value until they own it for three years,” Gjaja said.

Mike Hopkins, head of Amazon’s Prime Video and MGM Studios

Amazon is a retail and cloud powerhouse, and thanks to Hopkins, it’s become a media powerhouse, too.

Under Hopkins, Amazon now offers not just a wide variety of TV and films but some of the biggest sports franchises like the NFL and the NBA, and even news. Amazon spent $18.9 billion on video and music in 2023, up by 14% from 2022. According to the data firm Ampere Analysis, sports is a growing part of Amazon’s entertainment outlay, accounting for 14.3% in 2024, up from virtually nothing five years ago.

Amazon’s entertainment offerings help keep people subscribing to Prime, the free-delivery service that includes Prime Video and other benefits. But it’s also becoming a moneymaker in its own right.

In January, Amazon shook up the streaming-ads market when it turned on ads in Prime Video, driving down ad prices for competitors like Netflix while giving Amazon a big shot at the $28.8 billion pie that EMARKETER has forecast will be spent on streaming-TV ads this year.

Morgan Stanley has estimated the move could bring in $3.3 billion in revenue this year, on top of Amazon’s existing ad business, worth $47 billion in 2023. And with NFL and other streaming rights, Amazon is muscling in on traditional TV networks’ turf and training viewers that it’s the place to go for live sports. It’s even dipped a toe in news, the last stronghold of traditional TV, with a Brian Williams-hosted election-night special.

Hopkins’ hire in 2020, along with the NBC entertainment vet Jennifer Salke’s two years earlier, was a big signal that Amazon was serious about establishing itself as a key player in entertainment.

Hopkins is a product of legacy and digital entertainment, having been the chairman of Sony Pictures Television and the CEO of Hulu. At Amazon, he oversaw the $8.5 billion acquisition of the film studio MGM and pushed the company’s entertainment studio to expand into broader fare. Prime Video also makes money by fulfilling its promise of being a one-stop shop for viewers by selling subscriptions to other companies’ apps like Max, Starz, and, in its most recent flex, Apple TV+.

“What we’re trying to build is a next-generation entertainment service,” Hopkins recently told Bloomberg.

Prime Video captured just 3.7% of TV viewing in November, well behind Netflix (7.7%) and YouTube (10.8%), per Nielsen. Despite some wins, like the popular show “The Boys” and the buzzy film “Saltburn,” it has a way to go in becoming a consistent hit factory. Still, since most people don’t pay for Prime Video as a stand-alone service, it doesn’t have the churn problem that dogs other streamers.

As part of Amazon, Prime Video is also insulated from some of the financial pressures affecting other entertainment companies. Hopkins is still bringing financial discipline to bear, however.

Amazon cut hundreds of jobs across Prime Video and MGM Studios teams early in 2024. Hopkins recently told Bloomberg that the advertising ramp-up was a factor in pursuing NBA rights and that he expected Prime Video to be profitable “very soon.”

Prathibha Varkey, president of Mayo Clinic Health System

Since 2021, Varkey has been the president of the Mayo Clinic Health System, a network of 16 community hospitals and 45 multispecialty clinics across more than three dozen communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin. The facilities serve rural areas where care can otherwise be difficult to access.

Varkey, who comes from a family of physicians, said her work focused on reaching patients without ready access to the sprawling Mayo Clinic campus in Rochester, Minnesota, and its world-renowned medical expertise.

Varkey told Business Insider that part of her focus was finding new ways to incorporate technology so that more people can obtain care and administrative burdens can be reduced. That includes using artificial intelligence to help with diagnosing conditions and using technology so that clinicians can manage complex chronic conditions virtually.

The efforts also include introducing a mobile clinic that can go where routine and preventive care is needed and even provide wireless internet access so patients can confer with specialists. The clinic, which travels across southern Minnesota, offers virtual or in-person appointments. It has two exam rooms and a laboratory.

“So now you have preventive exams, specialist visits that are occurring in very remote areas,” she said.

Varkey said Mayo Clinic Health System was also trying to bring medical expertise to rural residents through programs that connect small local clinics with specialists from hub sites or from Mayo’s Rochester campus. Small clinics, she said, might have only a single nurse practitioner — nothing like the variety of disciplines a larger facility would have.

“It’s been very exciting to watch, and patients have really appreciated it as well,” Varkey said.

Another effort to meet patients where they are is the organization’s hospital-at-home program. Varkey said remote monitoring technology helped these patients remain with family and be more comfortable than they’d be in a medical facility.

“You get the same Mayo care,” she said, adding that the approach had been popular with patients.

Varkey, who also holds an MBA from the University of Minnesota, returned to Mayo in 2021 after serving as the president and CEO of Yale New Haven Health Northeast Medical Group.

From 2001 to 2013, Varkey held leadership positions at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, including associate chair of the Department of Medicine, medical director of Ask Mayo Clinic, and program director of the Preventive Medicine Fellowship.

Varkey said the expanding capabilities of AI and discoveries in genomics and molecular medicine were “taking healthcare to the next level — and very fast.”

While those developments are exciting, Varkey said, they shouldn’t distract from the primary goal of patient-centered care.

Ranjit Kapila, chief operating officer and copresident of Parametric

Kapila likes to stay ahead of the game.

During the first 10 years of his career, the computer-science graduate completed four certifications each year while working as a tech consultant for firms like Nasdaq and Sallie Mae. While working at the hedge fund Citadel in the mid-2000s, he took MBA classes at night at Northwestern University.

“Everything in this field changes so quickly,” he said. “Things change in finance and things change in tech at an ever increasing pace.”

Now Kapila is a copresident and chief operating officer of Parametric, a pioneer of direct indexing with $570 billion in assets under management. He joined Parametric in 2019 after rising up the ranks at BlackRock, overseeing portfolio construction management for its widely used Aladdin platform. Kapila moved to a much smaller firm to have a bigger impact.

“It was an opportunity to kind of look at what Parametric has done well, think about how to build on the success, but then also take advantage of what’s happening in the technology space and rethink how Parametric could operate, let’s say, five years from that point,” he said.

His move was well timed. There has been a boom in direct indexing, a tax-savvy investing strategy of buying individual securities modeled off an index like the S&P 500. Two years after Kapila joined Parametric, Morgan Stanley acquired Parametric’s parent company, Eaton Vance. Thanks to a wave of similar acquisitions, Parametric faces well-capitalized competitors such as BlackRock’s Aperio and Franklin Templeton’s Canvas. Industry stalwarts like Fidelity and upstarts like Envestnet also want a piece of the action.

Kapila said Parametric, founded in 1987, has experience and scale on its side.

“I will say that given the technology trends, sometimes it’s easy to come in and have a solution. It’s much, much harder to have a scalable solution that will serve clients when the demand spikes,” he said. “We’re managing over 200,000 accounts for our clients. The level of scale, I think, often is a breaking point for some of the newer entrants.”

To stay ahead of the competition, Kapila is pushing Parametric to develop more automated products, such as Radius, which launched this year. Radius constructs fixed-income and equity portfolios and runs simulations to identify the best selections for portfolio managers. Kapila described it as a “turning point” for Parametric.

“This is the first time we’ve had a product that’s really end-to-end running in that automated platform manner with a person reviewing and approving and intervening as necessary,” he said.

He plans to launch more cloud-native tools, which are easier to scale and manage, for other asset classes in 2025 and 2026.

Parametric is also bringing its tax-savvy strategies to active management, launching Custom Active this summer. Rather than modeling portfolios off indexes, clients can pick equities off strategies from its asset-management partner Lazard or sports-league sponsors.

“Those are examples where we can provide a tax overlay and help people get the advantages of direct indexing while managing to an active model,” Kapila said.

“There’s a demand for that, and it’s early days,” he added, “but I think that’s really what’s playing out.”