TIME’s 2026 AI 100 places two leaders from the human-data industry among the people it identifies as influential in artificial intelligence. Brendan Foody, co-founder and chief executive of Mercor, appears in the Innovators category. Garrett Lord, co-founder and chief executive of Handshake, appears among the Shapers.
The collection is organised into Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. It contains 95 profile cards representing 100 people; five profiles name multiple honorees. Foody and Lord are included on separate profiles and in separate categories.
Mercor’s place on the list
TIME describes Mercor as a labour marketplace that supplies AI companies with data and experts with work. Its profile says specialists review AI outputs, write model-ready guidance and ideal answers, and increasingly work in simulated environments that turn complex professional workflows into training material.
The profile identifies Foody as Mercor’s 23-year-old co-founder and CEO and reports the company’s own claim that it pays tens of millions of dollars to tens of thousands of experts each week. Those company figures are presented by TIME as part of its profile of Mercor’s growth.
“We are creating the largest new job category in history.”
Brendan Foody, quoted by TIME
Handshake’s AI shift
TIME says Lord announced a strategy shift last October, turning Handshake from a student careers platform into a supplier of human expertise for AI developers. Its profile says Handshake’s AI unit works with eight frontier AI labs and draws on hundreds of thousands of contributors.
According to the profile, those contributors create training data and evaluate complex, long-running tasks in areas including chemistry, cancer therapeutics, finance and education. TIME notes that Handshake’s existing network of users, employers and colleges gives the company a ready pool of specialists.
“A part-time AI tutor.”
Garrett Lord, describing the emerging work to TIME
Why the pair matters to this industry
The two profiles cover different companies and categories, but both describe work at the practical layer of AI development: finding qualified people, capturing professional judgment and turning complex work into material that can train or test models. TIME includes that work alongside the companies, researchers and policymakers featured across its wider 2026 collection.
Foody is included as an Innovator and Lord as a Shaper in TIME’s 2026 AI 100. Their profiles document two different approaches to supplying expert work, training data and evaluation for AI developers.