Corporate Leaders Reflect on Their Careers at Executives of the Year Impact Dinner

Selena Deckelmann, Gary Brantley, David Griffiths —Juan Pablo; Courtesy of Gary Brantley; Courtesy of Citi Three executives at very different companies gathered in New York on Tuesday evening for TIME’s Executives of the Year Impact Dinner: Tech & Data, during which they reflected on their leadership roles in the current technological age.

Giving toasts at the event were David Griffiths, the group head of artificial intelligence at Citi bank; Selena Deckelmann, the chief technology and product officer at Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that houses Wikipedia; and Gary Brantley, senior vice president and chief information officer at the National Football League.

Griffiths acknowledged the uncertainty that comes with rapidly developing tech, but he said that human decision-making will determine the impact of that advancement—for good or ill.

“Many of us have spent our entire careers waiting for this moment.

Technology is finally catching up with our ambition.

The future is so incredibly exciting.

Yet, if we’re honest, it’s also unsettling,” he said.

“Most of the choices about what comes next won’t feel historic when we make them.

They’ll be quiet: who we listen to, what we fund, when we decide to wait, and when we decide to act.

And the people who will live with those choices mostly are not in this room.” Our “accountability,” he said, “that stays with us.” Deckelmann also spoke about the enduring role humans will play as technology continues to affect companies like her own.

“Technology can’t decide how to live a good life or give our lives meaning.

Our people and communities do,” she said.

Deckelmann explained that a typhoon had led her parents to meet, and thanks to Wikipedia allowing users to create, edit, and share public information pages, she was able to reach out to the New York-based musician who had written the page about the storm.

“I was able to do that because this technology that is behind Wikipedia encourages these very human connections,” she said.