AfroTech Conference News

Ryan Wilson and TK Petersen, the founders of The Gathering Spot, spoke about building the club into a decade-old business at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference .

Founded in 2016, The Gathering Spot is celebrating 10 years in business. The founders took the conference main stage in a year when AFROTECH™ is also marking its 10th anniversary.

The panel, moderated by Arielle Clay Poteau, was titled “Third Spaces & Building Real Community with The Gathering Spot.”

Travis Hutchinson’s mission is to keep media and education from being “divorced from one another.”

The Yale University graduate and Brooklyn, NY, native studied behavioral economics to understand how people make decisions and, when technology is added to the equation, how they “decide about what their experience is like overall,” he told AFROTECH™.

In 2019, he began working as a product manager at Instagram, initially focusing on “how do we create representations of human beings,” he said while speaking on a panel at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference. He specifically worked on Explore Relevance and multimodal video understanding for Meta AI. He was also part of the team that launched Reels, which he described as a “phenomenal opportunity.”

Andrew Yang got right to the chase during the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference.

Yang was a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and is co-founder and CEO of Noble Mobile, which provides customers with unlimited data for about $40 per month. The company also returns compensation to customers for unused data at the end of the month, along with 5.5% interest, he confirmed while speaking on a panel moderated by AFROTECH™ Brand Manager Will Lucas .

He told the audience that he was offering them six months of free wireless service as well, redeemable 48 hours after his panel.

SQUIRE President Dave Salvant has advice for founders looking for funding.

Salvant left business school because he was convinced that “barbershops and salons are the linchpin of communities around this country.” This belief led him to co-found SQUIRE, a barbershop management platform. Salvant, a private banker, and Songe LaRon, an attorney, decided to purchase and operate a barbershop located in Manhattan, NY’s Chelsea Market “to learn about the nuances from the owner’s perspective,” he said while speaking at the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference.

“There’s a phrase in Silicon Valley, in tech, more or less, ‘you have to eat your own dog food,’ and what that means is you really have to put yourself in the shoes of the owner and the customer and really walk that path,” Salvant said on stage with Monica Melton, assistant editor, New York Public Radio/WNYC. “The best founders and the best companies come from a place where they’re uniquely positioned to understand that market and thus have operational leverage in building a better product because they come from it, they experience the pain. So I and my co-founder experienced the pain of booking and getting a haircut. But the real unlock and the real opportunity was on the business side.”

As Jay-Z once rapped, numbers don’t lie. But what happens when the data is skewed?

During the HealthStack Conference portion of the 2026 AFROTECH™ Conference , journalist Segun Oduolowu sat down with two health care professionals for a panel titled “Bad Data Is Costing Black Lives” to discuss how flawed data harms Black patients and how to push back on a health care system they say has long practiced systemic racism.

The AFROTECH™ Conference is celebrating its 10th anniversary in Houston. The conference runs through Friday, Nov. 6, and tickets are still available for the rest of the week.

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.