Adena Friedman

Adena Friedman (born 1969) became CEO of Nasdaq in January 2017 — the first woman to run a major global stock exchange — and added the chair title in 2023. A Nasdaq lifer who joined as an intern in 1993 and rose through data products and corporate strategy (with a stint as CFO of the Carlyle Group), she has spent her tenure turning the exchange operator into a financial-technology company.

Putting AI inside the market itself

Under Friedman, Nasdaq shipped AI into the plumbing of American capital markets. In September 2023 the SEC approved Dynamic M-ELO, the first exchange AI-powered order type, which uses machine learning to adjust holding periods in real time. Nasdaq’s Verafin unit — the anti-financial-crime platform it bought for $2.75 billion — has since added generative-AI features for fraud and money-laundering investigations, and Friedman has said she personally leads the company’s AI strategy, running eight internal hackathons across the global workforce in 2023–24.

At Davos in January 2026 she framed the AI infrastructure boom as a long race that public markets must finance, telling Semafor that “enterprise implementation is going to be the catalyst” and that she wants more AI innovators to list on public exchanges. At Davos 2024 she predicted the next IPO waves would be led by “AI driven companies, AI enabled companies, and AI companies themselves.”

Friedman’s enthusiasm is institutional as much as rhetorical: she has bet Nasdaq’s product roadmap — surveillance, anti-crime, market operations — on machine learning, while cautioning that the capital demands of the buildout are “striking” and will take years to absorb.