The layoff headlines miss the real story, writes recruiter Chris Wasserman. Atlanta's tech market has not frozen. It has grown more intentional, rewarding candidates who can show what they will do next.

Build Day X Innovation Bootcamp hackathon was a true launchpad for Barsa Majidi. After participating in one of the winning teams, Majidi continued to build on the idea. The result for this Georgia teen? He founded SkinTight AI, an AI-powered skin cancer monitoring tool that helps people learn about the signs of skin cancer to watch for, raise awareness of how to protect their skin health, and connect with local dermatologists for an expert review.

For faith-based organizations, technology succeeds when it deepens connection rather than replacing it. Jamshed Patel makes the case for building capacity around the communities these tools are meant to serve.

With over a decade of experience bringing together computer science and marketing technology, Zach Batastini, the Georgia founder of Derail Logic, knew firsthand about the challenges of navigating multiple marketing systems to manage websites, campaigns, and analytics. “Most small mom and pop businesses don’t have the tools or budget for larger marketing campaigns. I built MartechAI to support the growth of businesses that might not have large marketing budgets,” said Batastini.

The best salespeople carry a read on a deal that no CRM can see, a gut sense of whether it is alive or already lost long before the pipeline stage updates. Rishi Patel kept walking out of calls knowing exactly which deals were dead, then opening his CRM to find them all marked 70 percent likely to close by the reps. That gap gnawed at him for years before he did anything about it. Today, it is the founding premise of RevSage.

Small businesses make up 99.9% of US companies and drive 43.5% of the national GDP. Yet modern analytics tools have largely passed them by. Today 68% of Google searches end without a click, and more than half surface AI overviews. For a small business, that means the traffic numbers owners see may look nothing like the customers they actually reach. Few can afford to guess wrong. Teclaz answers the question every owner asks: who is my traffic?

Kavya Mohankumar and Pranavi Gogineni’s startup journey started on an evening bus ride as college students. As they talked, a bigger question emerged: What do you see yourself doing in the future? Today, they are co-founders and CEOs of Kintic, which provides training data for humanoid robots. But Kintic wasn’t what they originally set out to build. Their first stop? Three pivots.

When Thailand's government wrote artificial intelligence into its national roadmap, TSRB researcher Ploypilin Pruekcharoen started reading the news differently. She has spent the past year collecting and analyzing more than 100 Thai news articles about AI in tourism. Her question is simple: when a country stakes part of its economic future on artificial intelligence, how does its press explain that technology to the public, and who gets left out of the story?

When Sylvia Janicki set out to record the noise of Atlanta's data centers, she expected to find it everywhere. News stories described nearby communities living with constant humming, roaring generators and sleepless nights. So she drove to roughly 10 hyperscale facilities around metro Atlanta, the massive campuses built to power artificial intelligence and hit record.

Tech Square is full of people you'd want to know and mostly haven't met yet. Maestro is a new ecosystem connection platform built to help you find and reach the right people across the community, whether that's a co-founder, a collaborator, or just the person who runs your trail every morning.

Anish Cheekati spent years on the pre-med track, gaining experience as a medical assistant and volunteering in clinics. His plans shifted after working with patients who often struggled to manage their various medications without guidance. This inspired him to create Voyage Health, a free AI-powered health guidance platform.

Earlier this year, Hypepotamus covered ATDC’s push to become a launchpad for Georgia-based AI companies. One of the companies building currently inside ATDC isn’t just building AI tools. They are a team ensuring organizations don’t get left behind in the AI Age. 

To help adults with mild cognitive impairment maintain independence, quality of life, and prepare meals, what may seem like an obvious solution of either removing kitchen cabinet doors or labeling may not be the best option. This gap and Ibrahim Bilau’s evidence-based and human-centered research highlight why it is so important to engage with community members living with mild cognitive impairment and their care partners.

Atlanta is described in many ways: a logistics hub, a corporate headquarters city, a university city, a film city, and increasingly, a technology city.

Now there is a new question to answer:

What role should Atlanta play in artificial intelligence infrastructure?

Daniel Beecham switched majors, failed out twice and watched his first startup fold. Now his company Propagent is betting that AI can take the chaos out of proposal work, and ATDC is betting on him.