Call for Speakers

Applications now open to speak at the 2025 Georgia Technology Summit.

2025 Featured Speakers

Bret Taylor

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Sierra

Bret Taylor is the CEO and co-founder of Sierra, a conversational AI platform for businesses. Bret is an acclaimed software engineer and industry leader with a distinguished 20-year history of building widely-used products for businesses and consumers. Most recently, Bret was the Co-CEO of Salesforce, where he served in a variety of executive roles after the company acquired his previous startup, Quip, in 2016. Bret started his career at Google where he co-created Google Maps, and later joined Facebook, serving as its Chief Technology Officer after it acquired his social networking startup, FriendFeed.

Bret serves on the board of OpenAI. Bret graduated from Stanford University in 2003 with a BS and MS in Computer Science.

Dr. Raj Hazra

President & Chief Executive Officer, Quantinuum

Raj has more than three decades of experience in supercomputing, quantum, and technical roles across the globe. Prior to joining Quantinuum, he served as the General Manager, Compute and Networking Business Unit at Micron Technologies, and spent 25 years at Intel Corporation, leading the Enterprise and Government Group, Technical Computing Group, Supercomputer Architecture and Planning, and Systems Technology Research. Before joining Intel, Raj was with the Lockheed Corporation based at NASA’s Langley Research Center. He prides himself on building high-performing teams with a growth mindset and a culture of truth and transparency. Raj has a Ph.D. and Master’s degree in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, U.S., as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India, and holds 16 patents.

Daryl Plummer

Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner

Daryl Plummer is VP, Distinguished Analyst & Gartner Fellow. His research focuses on the strategic issues of cloud computing, digital disruption, and the unfolding of the future through predictions, trends and evolving digital business cycles.

Mr. Plummer is a Chief of Research in the Technology & Service Providers Organization, where he helps oversee research across the four roles of General Manager, Product Managers, Product Marketers, and Tech CEOs. In this role, he is responsible for the advancement of research and the promotion of same to solve the critical problems of, and answer the key questions for, tech providers from engineers all the way up to and including the CEO and board of directors.

Daryl is also Chief of Research for Cloud computing and a primary analyst covering multiple strategic Cloud topics. He focuses his research on the broad cloud service market, including market trends, forecasts, the cloud vendor landscape and cloud sourcing scenarios. He tracks different cloud usage cases, including public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios and is the originator of the topic of Distributed Cloud Computing. Covering cloud strategy and evolution requires one to see how end user scenarios are evolving in the context of technology and service provider strategies that are producing cloud innovations at an ever-increasing speed. Mr. Plummer provides a perspective on the key phenomena which will drive the largest segments of change.

Announcing 2024 Georgia Technology Hall of Fame inductee, Tope Awotona!

Tope Awotona is the founder and CEO of Calendly, the scheduling platform that enables individuals, teams, and organizations globally to automate meetings – helping companies close deals, hire candidates, build relationships, and grow their business faster. He founded Calendly in 2013 with the vision of simplifying scheduling for everyone without the back-and-forth emails. With Tope’s strategic direction, the platform has grown and evolved to over 20 million users.

Prior to Calendly, Tope spent the majority of his career in enterprise software sales, working for companies such as IBM, Perceptive Software, and Dell Technologies, in addition to launching a series of startups. He grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and came to the United States in 1996.

Tope holds a degree in Management Information Systems from the University of Georgia.