In 2019, Technical.ly launched its inaugural RealLIST Engineers, a curated list of influential software developers and technologists in each of our markets.
This year, we’re changing things up.
As technology evolves, so does what we think of as a technologist. For years, we focused primarily on software developers, and devs still have a place on this annual RealLIST. But we are now opening the list up to all kinds of technologists, whether they are in coding, biotech, robotics, data science or other roles we haven’t thought of. With this change, we have renamed the annual roundup RealLIST Innovators.
This year’s list includes 60 Innovators from the Philadelphia, DC, Maryland and Pittsburgh areas. They represent organizations of all sizes, with 28% belonging to organizations with between two and 10 employees, 18% from orgs with over 1,000 employees and 15% sole proprietors.
18% of this year’s honorees come from organizations with an annual budget of $100,000 or less for their team, department or group, while nearly a quarter are working with $1 million and under and about 3% have budgets of $10 million or higher.
We’re taking a closer look at this year’s 60 honorees, using RealLIST data collected by our newsroom. We found some common threads and trends — scroll on and see.
Know someone who’d be great for this list? You can submit nominations for our various RealLIST features all year round.
Innovators’ view of the future
Let’s face it, there are a lot of unknown economic variables for the next few years, and it shows in the RealLIST Innovators data: Just over 50% expressed some kind of uncertainty about the future, with 27% saying they’re OK now but unsure about the future, 15% expressing concerns about the next few years and 9% facing early-stage uncertainty.
Still, almost 40% are optimistic about the future and say they’re in great shape financially.
The remaining 15% of Innovators either had no comment or were unclear.
Of course, AI will play a role in that future — and will change the workforce landscape. We asked the Innovators whether they think there will be more or fewer jobs like theirs in five years.
Of the 50 who provided a response, a clear majority of 36 believe that there will be more jobs like theirs in five years, with only 12 saying they expected there to be fewer jobs like theirs in the near future, and two falling somewhere in between.
Where AI fits
In general, RealLIST Innovators use AI regularly, often integrally, with few expressing a fear of or disinterest in the technology.
On whether they are optimistic about AI, a whopping 80% said they are — though for the majority of those (52%), there are caveats, mainly about how the organization uses AI tools and evaluating when or where it offers value. About 12% are concerned about AI, but still open to using it, while 9% say they are ambivalent about the technology.
As for how much they are actually using AI right now, nearly half (45%) say that it is integral to their work, while another 50% say it’s either key to their work (20%) or useful but not critical to their work (30%). Only 5% say that they use AI sparingly or not at all.
Where Innovators work
There has been a lot of talk over the last couple of years about getting employees back into the office full-time.
Our small dataset of Innovators shows that, for technologists, in-person all the time is still not the norm. Only 8% of respondents work for organizations that are entirely in the office or lab, while more than a quarter (28%) have jobs that are entirely remote. 63% have a work arrangement that is either a hybrid job for everyone (18%) or work for a company where employees have the choice of working remotely, hybrid or in-person full-time (45%).
Overall, the 2025 RealLIST Innovators are highly forward-facing, optimistic and largely unafraid of where technology is taking us.
