10 industry leaders transforming business in 2023

The workplace is in flux. Generative AI has exploded into public consciousness. And private credit is reshaping the way money flows to companies. The seismic events of 2023 have, without a doubt, transformed the business world.

As such, it's important to understand the leaders — whether they're well-known or operate behind the scenes — who respond to these changes and make the decisions that affect all of us. From Mira Murati, who's driving the generative-AI revolution at OpenAI, to Vince Toye, a JPMorgan exec who's helping to create affordable housing for American workers, the movement of money, people, and ideas through our systems has fundamentally shifted.

In 2023, Business Insider's annual list of People Transforming Business highlights key players across the advertising, ESG, finance, AI, and labor sectors. Below, in alphabetical order, are the 10 leaders our reporters and editors credit with reshaping their industries.

Eileen Fisher, founder of the brand Eileen Fisher

Eileen Fisher has always cared about using natural materials like wool and cotton in the clothes she designs. But after nearly 40 years as the head of her eponymous label, she's realized that alone isn't enough.

For example, cotton production requires enormous amounts of water, and dyes used for fabrics often contain harmful chemicals. So Fisher, 73, and her team have set out to make the company as sustainable as possible while operating the business profitably. She told Business Insider she doesn't think being fully sustainable is possible — there will always be some price to the environment for making and selling clothes — but she credits the company's commitment to sustainability with remaking the brand she started in 1984 with only $350 in her checking account.

"There was this moment where I realized that I had to actually say, 'We really want to be a 100% sustainable company,'" she said.

The minimalist spirit that long defined the company's clothing — simple cuts, toned-down colors — is now the watchword for almost everything else the company does. The clothes themselves, Fisher said, can't get much simpler, but many aspects of the business can.

"That really changed the company," Fisher said of the brand's sustainability pledge. "Not just my voice, but that idea that we made a commitment."

Janelle Jones, chief economist and policy director at the Service Employees International Union

When Janelle Jones was young, her mother worked at McDonald's, making $10 an hour in management and supporting her family on a tight budget. When her mother switched careers and started working at the local Ford plant, Jones learned firsthand what it meant to have a union job — better pay and more benefits.

Now, she's the chief economist and policy director for the Service Employees International Union, one of the largest labor unions in the country.

Jones grew up in Lorain, Ohio, and many of her family members worked at the local Ford plant and were members of the United Auto Workers Union. She went to Spelman College, a historically Black college in Atlanta, to study mathematics, and her passion for labor economics grew.

At the SEIU, Jones directs economic policy for over 2 million members, including healthcare workers, janitors, and education professionals. Jones' leadership has been marked by a refusal to accept fewer benefits and stagnant pay. She's found strength in advocating for workers often left out of union conversations, particularly Black women.

Before working at the SEIU, Jones was the chief economist at the US Department of Labor, the first Black woman to hold the post. She also worked at the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Jones used her position at the Department of Labor to draw attention to the fact that the wide racial wealth gap had only grown larger during the pandemic. A return to pre-pandemic life was not good enough for Jones.

"I care about all workers, obviously, but I really, really care about Black and brown women," Jones said in an interview with The New York Times. "And to be in a place, where those workers are centered, where it's most of our members — it feels like the perfect place to do the things that make me excited."

Justin Breen, partner at Proskauer

Justin Breen has been working in financial law for over two decades, and he's seen the financial markets change significantly in that time. He started his career advising traditional banks in underwriting corporate loans when that was a larger part of the business for big banks. Now as a partner at the law firm Proskauer, he's one of the leading lawyers working in private credit on a global scale. He said companies no longer rely solely on big banks for financing. Increasingly, they're turning to more opaque private credit markets to borrow money.

The world of private credit sits outside the traditional banking system. Firms like Proskauer facilitate lending in the middle market, which sits somewhere between massive corporations and startups. Traditional banks pulled back from conventional lending after the 2008 financial crisis, a trend that the banking crisis earlier this year exacerbated.

As the leader of the firm's global finance practice, Breen advises influential money managers from firms including Ares Capital and Churchill Asset Management. He's helped companies coordinate deals worth some $100 billion and has coordinated debt for the European football clubs Atlético Madrid and the carmaker and Formula 1 competitor McLaren.

Analysts expect the private credit market to balloon in size — likely keeping lawyers like Breen very busy.

Julie Su, acting US Secretary of Labor

Julie Su, the acting secretary of the Labor Department, has a long record of advocating for workers' rights and protecting union jobs.

Su is the daughter of immigrants and grew up in California. Her parents worked minimum-wage jobs for years until her mother got a union job working for the county. The position gave Su's family a stable paycheck, reliable health benefits, and a pension to rely on during retirement. It also gave Su an impetus to go to law school and fight for people who were being left behind.

After law school, Su became the lead attorney on a case representing Thai garment workers who were enslaved in a factory outside Los Angeles. Su won the case, which prompted a statewide effort to combat human trafficking and granted those garment workers back pay and legal immigration status. She was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" for her efforts.

Su next served as California's labor commissioner and then the state's secretary of labor, where she developed a reputation for advocating for disenfranchised workers. Under her leadership, California established one of the most "aggressive and effective" labor law enforcement divisions in the county, a 2013 report from In These Times said.

As deputy secretary of Labor, Su oversaw some of the department's major achievements, including cracking down on child-labor violations and protecting the rights of professional caregivers. When the former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh left the administration earlier this year, Su was the top choice to lead the department.

Su has used her position to continue to advocate for workers across the country and lend federal support to ongoing labor strikes. Her leadership is representative of a larger shift toward popular support of unions and increased solidarity among workers.

Mira Murati, chief technology officer at OpenAI

Mira Murati, OpenAI's chief technology officer, is behind some of the world's most revolutionary AI technology.

Murati was born in Albania, where she excelled in mathematics at school, before moving to Canada at 16 and continuing her education in mechanical engineering. After graduating from Dartmouth, Murati worked as a product manager and engineer at companies including Tesla. There, Murati had a hand in developing AI-enabled autopilot driving features and worked on emerging generative-AI technology.

In 2018, she joined OpenAI. Most notably, she oversaw the creation of DALL-E, an image-generation system, released in 2021, and ChatGPT, a chatbot released in 2022. The AI tools have been making waves ever since.

In an interview with the Associated Press earlier this year, Murati explained how transformative AI will be for businesses, particularly in increasing economic output and boosting workers' efficiency. Because the tool has such potential to assist workers across many sectors, Murati said figuring out how to integrate AI with human intention is essential.

She is also a strong advocate for the regulation of AI tools and welcomes the input of both users and government officials. Murati believes that setting standards will help ensure that these tools are used responsibly and in alignment with human values.

"The technology that we're building has such a huge effect on society, but also the society can and should shape it," Murati said on "The Daily Show" last year.

Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube

It's been a year of big milestones for YouTube under Neal Mohan, who was promoted to CEO in February.

YouTube isn't just the internet's go-to online video destination — it's now dominating living-room TVs. YouTube has become the No. 1 TV streaming platform in the US, reaching about 150 million people on connected TV sets.

Its new deal with the NFL to exclusively broadcast Sunday Ticket football underscores how YouTube continues to transform the way people watch TV. The NFL said that YouTube's Sunday Ticket package already had more subscribers in September than it did on DirecTV last year, its former home for over 20 years. And YouTube is hosting new types of original NFL programming, like "Game Day All Access," where viewers can listen to miked-up players, and on its vertical-video offering, Shorts.

Looking to 2024, Mohan is betting that newly released tools like Dream Screen, which lets creators add AI-generated backgrounds to Shorts, and its YouTube Create mobile-production app, will encourage more people to create content for YouTube.

"This is where our investment in AI is going to come in, using AI to harness and to enable human creativity," Mohan told Business Insider. "That's a really big part of our vision."

Ramki Muthukrishnan, head of US leveraged finance at S&P Global

Wall Street's new darling is private credit, as companies turn away from traditional banks and to private investors, such as private-equity firms, for more opaque loans. But critics say there's a bubble forming.

Ramki Muthukrishnan has spent his 16-year career at S&P Global analyzing various ways companies access capital. Muthukrishnan is trying to make sense of how risky these private credit loans are by overseeing what is so far the most comprehensive look at vulnerabilities in the industry. Trying to understand a web of loans to privately held companies with few obligations to disclose public information is tricky.

Muthukrishnan said the S&P found a proxy for the market by looking at 2,000 private companies with corporate debt pooled in collateralized loan obligations (a product that's made up of a bundle of bank loans). Portions of these loans are also held by private credit funds.

His team found that only 46% of the companies in the analysis would generate positive cash flow under S&P's mildest stress scenario in which earnings fell by 10% and the Federal Reserve's benchmark rates increased by another 0.5%. In what he called a "worst-case scenario," his team analyzed what would happen if earnings fell by 30% and the base rate rose by 1.5%. They found three-quarters of companies would struggle to generate profits.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

Satya Nadella is among the most influential figures in information technology, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.

Born and raised in Hyderabad, India, Nadella was interested in computers and coding for years before studying electrical engineering at the Manipal Institute of Technology. Though he was reluctant to leave India, Nadella applied to graduate schools in the US, got a master's in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and later earned an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Nadella, who's been with the company since 1992, became the chief executive of Microsoft in 2014, following the departure of Steve Ballmer. Prior to that, Nadella was the executive vice president of Microsoft's cloud and enterprise groups.

Under Nadella's leadership, Microsoft created its successful cloud-services platform, Azure, and he's overseen brand's more recent investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. The repositioning of Microsoft as a "cloud-first" company has paid off for Nadella, as the program is now the brand's most profitable business area.

Nadella's swift adoption of new generative-AI tools and the integration of emerging technology into existing software have put Microsoft at the center of the AI boom. The company is integrating OpenAI's tools into many of its products as a "copilot."

"Sometimes, getting rid of your constraints, or those of others, can help you conceive some new approach, some new technology or new input. I think that's our job, isn't it?" Nadella said in an interview with Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer. "Leadership is about leaning into some of the fear and discomfort."

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple

As the chief executive of Apple, Tim Cook is known as a driver of progress. He's has overseen the launch of some of Apple's most groundbreaking products, like the Apple TV, AirPods, and the Apple Watch.

But Cook's legacy will perhaps rest most on his push for data privacy and security in a transforming digital world.

Cook joined Apple in 1998 after being asked by its founder Steve Jobs to head worldwide operations. Cook was promoted to CEO in 2011 after Jobs left the role to focus on his health. Cook was widely seen as a trusted figure to lead the company forward.

Most recently, Cook is responsible for Apple's push to secure customers' digital privacy, allowing iPhone users to adjust how much of their information is shared with external advertisers and to turn off link tracking. This approach to data privacy is in stark contrast to the company's competitors, like Meta and Google, which use data to serve users optimized advertising content.

For Cook, the fight for privacy is deeply rooted in his own identity; He aligns the issue with his decision to come out publicly as gay in 2014. Despite the loss of his own privacy, Cook told Time magazine that he hoped his decision would help young people.

"The fight to protect privacy is not an easy one, but it is one of the most essential battles of our time," Cook said in a keynote address at the 2022 IAPP Global Privacy Summit.

Vince Toye, head of community-development banking and agency lending at JPMorgan Chase

As the head of community-development banking and agency lending for JPMorgan Chase, Vince Toye leads two lines of business that help middle-income Americans find permanent homes.

Toye grew up in a small town in Virginia as one of six kids raised by a single mother. The family rented single-family homes in a de facto segregated neighborhood until they purchased a home in an area where they were the only Black family. He uses the renter turned homeowner experience — and all its frustrations — to inform his current work.

In the past few years, Toye has worked on projects to finance workforce housing, where employers build affordable-housing units to rent to employees. The project would theoretically allow employees to reduce their commute times and lower rent rates, both of which can lead to higher morale. Before joining JPMorgan Chase, Toye led the community-lending and investment arm of Wells Fargo, and he's a board member of the National Housing Trust.

Toye calls renters who fall within the middle-income bracket — including teachers, healthcare workers, and retail employees — "the missing middle." These workers are often not eligible for government-subsidized homes but are priced out of the housing market, making it difficult to find stability.

As a leader in affordable-housing solutions, Toye leverages his expertise to help renters secure funding to become homeowners.

Credits

Reporters: Bella Sayegh, Rebecca Ungarino, Lara O'Reilly, Juliana Kaplan, Alex Nicoll, Tim Paradis

Editors: Stephanie Hallett, Michelle Abrego, Josée Rose, Ryan Joe, Emily Canal, Kaja Whitehouse

Illustrator: Cha Pornea

Art Direction and Photo Editing: Alyssa Powell, Trenton Almgren-Davis

Copyeditor: Jonann Brady