n a short time, AI has gone from creating freaky-fingered phony photos to a serious business tool. With that rapid change has come equal parts hype, critique, and alarm. To help small businesses leverage AI’s potential while avoiding the perils of security breaches and “slop,” Alaskan experts have been staying abreast of the march of progress to help businesses stay informed.

“Artificial intelligence is a game changer for a lot of small businesses in Alaska,” says Carlos Machuca, director of the AI resource program at the Alaska Small Business Development Center (SBDC).

While Machuca has been leading nonprofit consultations, the private sector is keeping apace with technology too. “We ourselves are small and growing. We’ve found it to be indispensable,” says Kyle Easterly, co-founder and CEO of the “AI deployment service” Delve Group in Anchorage.

or Alaska Pacific University (APU), being called an Alaska Native university is not a marketing label. It is the organizing principle behind a governance overhaul that is reshaping how the small Anchorage school defines itself, who has a seat at its table, and where its next generation of students will come from.

The founder of Alaska Methodist University, as it was originally called in 1957, was Unangax̂ from the village of Unga in the Aleutian Islands. Peter Gordon Gould envisioned a high-quality university, accessible to all, that would cultivate Indigenous leadership rooted in Alaska. That founding vision resurfaced in 2016, when APU became tribally governed through a partnership with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. It deepened further in 2017, when the university restructured and renewed its focus on Alaska Native students.

nchorage Memorial Park Cemetery, Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church Columbarium, Fort Richardson National Cemetery, and Angelus Memorial Park: the final resting places for residents of Alaska’s largest city are filling up. Roughly 14,000 people are buried at the city-owned Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery, which is almost out of space for its traditional burial plots. While the city races to alleviate an above-ground housing shortage, the dearly departed are also in need of alternative abodes for the hereafter.

“Most of the families we serve are looking at what we call simple cremation, immediate cremation. They’re going to do services on their own, celebrations of life on their own. But we have the ability to do viewings and complete funeral services, followed by cremation,” he says.

laska businesses go above and beyond to make a tangible impact through community support. To strengthen the communities they serve, they contribute via major donations, employee-driven volunteerism, or long-term partnerships.

Alaska has a strong culture of charitable giving and community service, a tradition that’s reflected in both formal and informal volunteerism. For more than a decade, the state has consistently ranked fifth in the nation in volunteerism, according to Laurie Wolf, president and CEO of The Foraker Group, a statewide nonprofit support organization. “I think that really speaks to the generosity of Alaskans—and that’s just the formal volunteerism we have captured,” she says. “When we show up as volunteers, which is a form of giving and community investment, it has a huge impact.”

very company included in this year’s group of Top 49ers excels in their respective sectors. To find a spot on the list, they’d have to. This year, for the first time, eight of those companies make up an elite group, having generated more than $1 billion in gross annual revenue. Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC), Bristol Bay Native Corporation (BBNC), NANA Regional Corporation, Chenega Corporation, Lynden, Calista Corporation, Bering Straits Native Corporation (BSNC), and Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation (UIC) all were in the ten-digit club in 2025.

Some companies surpassed $1 billion years ago and, for the most part, never looked back; for others, the milestone is brand new. And while every company in this elite class has its own priorities and business lines, what each has in common is a focus on disciplined expansion, strategic investments, and diversification in the pursuit of sustainable growth.

aking the Top 49ers list is a sure sign of success: members are part of an elite class of Alaska businesses, all of which were founded within the state and continue to operate their headquarters here. This year’s list includes three new companies—Contango Silver & Gold, Denali Universal Services, and Shee Atiká, Inc.—that arrive on the list by different routes: not just by earning enough revenue but by becoming more Alaskan.

weet or savory, hot or cold, it’s rare to find a dish that isn’t improved with a special sauce. Alaska’s prominent businesses have all refined their own special sauces: culture developed over decades, tried and tested processes and procedures, bespoke approaches to leadership or recruitment, and individual goals and measures of success.

Many of the 2026 Top 49ers shared with Alaska Business a few of the ingredients found in their special sauces that have led to their accomplishments. Their contributions have been edited for length and house style.

oughly 76 million Americans were born between 1946 and 1964, ushering in an unprecedented population wave which became known as the Baby Boom. As the cohort ages, the United States is undergoing one of the most significant economic transitions in its history: the retirement of one fifth of the country’s population.

Aptly called the “silver tsunami,” this demographic shift directly intersects with business ownership. Baby Boomers own an estimated 2.34 million small businesses in the United States, employing more than 25 million people. Even more striking, nearly half of all small business owners are over 55 years old, placing a substantial portion of the nation’s privately held companies on the brink of transition.

n July 2, 2025, New Jersey resident Shane Svorec and her husband Richard attended the New York Stock Exchange closing bell ceremony that marked the debut of The Frontier Economic Fund (AKAF). The symbolic ceremony, led by the fund’s developers and leaders from Alaska, introduced the first state-based exchange-traded fund (ETF).

As the ticker symbol implies, the fund is a basket of Alaska-related investments. Anyone who owns a share of AKAF will prosper along with the hundred or so companies that do business in, and earn profits in, Alaska.

Svorec, an AKAF investor, remembers feeling excited about the opportunity to invest in a state that has come to mean so much to her family. “It felt victorious,” she says. “You can invest in funds, and you can move funds. But to be part of investing in something that has never been seen before felt like an initiative not just for the state but for the people.”

hen one door closed for Megan Militello, another opened.

After seeing a need for manufacturers in the state to connect and share resources, Militello co-founded the Alaska Manufacturing Association (AKMA) in 2025. The overall mission of AKMA is to link manufacturers across the state to enhance freight, workforce, infrastructure, supply chains, and market access.

“I don’t know how much people realize that manufacturing is everything. Everything is made; even agriculture, is manufacturing, right? We are producing something at scale to serve others,” Militello says. “VanderWeele Farm makes carrots, right? They have a whole system. They have equipment that they need to buy. They have bags that they need to buy. They have the different sales channels that they need to get into to survive as a business… We want to try to have the public support those businesses that are actually making things here in Alaska—because how do we recirculate our dollars within the state instead of just giving them to everybody out of the state?”

he August special sessions in Juneau this year involved much talk of volume and contracts, costs and taxes. It’s too soon to say if Alaska LNG will ever break ground. But now is as good a time as any to look at how pipelines get built.

ver had a boss that hovered? Supervised by always being there? Insisted on rewriting submitted reports, sentence-by-sentence and page-by-page? Then congratulations, you’ve experienced micromanagement. This leadership trap may appear as just overly detailed oversight, but it more significantly signals a lack of trust in employees and makes innovating, scaling, and responding to crisis extremely challenging.

In My Way or the Highway: The Micromanagement Survival Guide, Harry E. Chambers indicates that excessive meddling is more common than not, with nearly eight out of ten employees experiencing micromanagement. Researchers Shona Ryan and Christine Rose perhaps described it best as a leader’s excessive control, relentless scrutiny, and constant interventions, severely undermining individual autonomy by dictating every minute detail of daily work. Chambers found that a staggering 91 percent of micromanagers are completely unaware of their behavior and its effect on turnover.

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