How to Win the Globee Awards: Categories, Judging Criteria, and Submission Tips for AI Companies

The Globee Awards deadline is June 30 — 37 days away. Most AI companies either miss it entirely, enter the wrong categories, or submit like they’re writing a press release. Here’s how to do it right.

The Globee Awards run across 15 major programs year-round, with the IT, Cloud, SaaS, AI, Business, and Women-focused awards converging on a June 30 deadline. It’s the third major deadline in Shemvara’s award calendar this cycle — after Stevie (May 29) and Deloitte Fast 500 (June 12) — and it’s the least understood by AI founders.

That’s the opportunity.

What Makes the Globee Different From Stevie and Deloitte

Before choosing categories, understand what you’re entering:

• Stevie Awards are peer-judged by 200+ professionals per category. The rubric is public. The competition is real, but the scoring is subjective across multiple judges. Best for: companies with compelling narrative evidence and measurable customer outcomes.
• Deloitte Fast 500 is a ranking, not a competition. It’s pure revenue growth math. If you qualify, you’re in. If you don’t, you aren’t. Best for: companies with clean financials and 100%+ growth rates.
• Globee Awards use a weighted scoring model (50%+ weighted toward judges’ scores; remaining points based on preliminary ratings). The structure favors technically detailed submissions with specific metrics and documented results. Best for: companies that can tell a precise story about what their technology actually does.

The Globee has a higher proportion of AI and SaaS-specific categories than any other general business awards program. That’s by design — the Globee’s parent organization (Business Awards Group) has progressively expanded tech categories as the industry has grown. The result: AI companies have more specific, winnable home territory in the Globee than anywhere else.

Globee Categories That Matter for AI Companies

The June 30 deadline covers multiple Globee programs. These are the categories most relevant to B2B AI and SaaS companies:

1. SaaS Awards — Best SaaS for AI / Machine Learning

This is the single highest-concentration AI category in the Globee. It’s specific enough to self-select away from general tech companies, which means your competitive pool is smaller and more technical — judges in this category are evaluating product depth, not brand polish.

What judges score on: Technical differentiation (what does your AI do that couldn’t be done before), deployment scale (enterprise customers, users, API calls), measurable accuracy or performance gains, and product maturity evidence. The Globee judging criteria for this category explicitly mention “technical novelty” as a scoring dimension — it’s in the rubric.

Submission structure that wins: Lead with the technical problem you solved, then quantify the before/after state using specific metrics (accuracy %, latency, throughput, error reduction). Avoid narrative about market opportunity or team background. This category judges product, not company.

Who enters here: AI-native SaaS companies, ML infrastructure tools, AI-powered workflow products. The pool skews technical — a well-structured entry from a $5M ARR company will compete well against a $100M company with a generic AI label.

2. IT Cloud Awards — Cloud Infrastructure / Cloud AI

Targeted at companies using cloud infrastructure to deliver AI capabilities. If your product has a meaningful infrastructure component — whether it’s a full cloud platform or an AI feature running on cloud infrastructure — this category has a direct landing spot.

What judges score on: Scalability evidence, architectural innovation, deployment breadth, and operational performance metrics. Judges in this category are looking for technical rigor: not just “we use cloud” but “here’s how our architecture handles scale and why that matters.”

Common mistake: Describing your product in feature terms rather than architectural terms. “We built an AI chatbot” scores low. “Our multi-tenant inference pipeline handles 40M API calls/month with p99 latency under 80ms using a custom batching strategy that reduced GPU cost per request by 34%” scores in the top tier. The category rewards specificity about infrastructure, not product marketing.

3. AI / Machine Learning Awards — AI Platform, AI Solution, AI Innovation

The broadest AI-specific category in the Globee. Submissions include AI platforms, AI-powered products, and AI-driven process improvements. This is the fallback category if your product doesn’t fit neatly into SaaS or Cloud — and it’s also the most competitive within the AI-specific pool.

What judges score on: Business impact from AI deployment, innovation relative to the state of the art, and evidence of real-world adoption. The judging criteria for this category specify both “innovation” and “practical impact” as weighted dimensions — you need both, not just one.

Submission structure that wins: Frame the AI innovation in terms of a problem that existed before and a capability that didn’t. Then back it with deployment evidence: customers, usage, measurable outcomes. The combination of novelty + proof is what this category rewards.

Competitive context: This category has grown significantly as AI companies have proliferated. Win rates are lower than SaaS or Cloud-specific subcategories. If you can fit into a more specific bucket, do that first.

4. Business Awards — Company Growth and Innovation

For companies with strong growth metrics and documented innovation outcomes. If you don’t fit a technical category cleanly, this is the fallback — and it’s broader enough that the competitive pool includes companies from many sectors, which dilutes the tech-specific competition.

What judges score on: Revenue growth, market position, product innovation evidence, and strategic differentiation. The category uses a company-wide lens rather than a product-specific one — good for companies that have multiple AI products or a broader platform story to tell.

Common mistake: Submitting a company overview rather than a targeted narrative on growth and innovation specifically. Judges for this category score on what changed, not on what the company does in general.

5. Women Awards — Women CEO, Women Leadership, Women Tech

For companies led by women in AI and technology. The Globee Women Awards program is among the most prestigious recognition tracks for women-led companies in tech. If you have a woman founder or executive leading your AI company, this is a high-value, lower-competition entry point.

What judges score on: Leadership impact, company growth under leadership, innovation contribution, and organizational influence. The criteria focus on the person, not just the company — so the narrative should connect leadership decisions to measurable outcomes.

Common mistake: Submitting a company profile when the rubric is asking for leadership narrative. The entry should explain what the leader did, not just what the company achieved.

The Globee Judging Process: How Scores Actually Work

Understanding the Globee scoring model matters for how you structure your submission. The Globee uses a three-phase evaluation:

1. Phase 1 — Preliminary scoring: Initial judges review all submissions in a category and assign preliminary scores. These scores determine the shortlist that advances to Phase 2.
2. Phase 2 — Judges’ panel review: Final judging panels (typically 3–5 judges per category) review the shortlist. Judges’ scores carry the highest weight — 50%+ of the final score.
3. Phase 3 — Aggregate ranking: Final scores aggregate preliminary + judges’ scores to produce rankings. The top entries in each category are named Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Award winners.

Implication: your preliminary score matters because it determines whether your submission even reaches the judges. A submission that gets eliminated in Phase 1 never gets a judge’s eyes on it. The preliminary phase favors completeness and metric specificity over narrative polish — the preliminary scorers are screening for compliance with the rubric, not for the most compelling story.

Globee vs. Stevie vs. Deloitte: The Decision Framework

With three major deadlines within six weeks, which ones should your company actually enter? Here’s the decision matrix:

Award	Deadline	Best For	Entry Level
Stevie Awards	May 29 (closed)	Narrative-driven categories, customer outcomes, team recognition	Medium — 2–3 categories recommended
Deloitte Fast 500	June 12 (14 days)	Pure growth metrics, no narrative needed	Low — data submission only
Globee Awards	June 30 (37 days)	Technical depth, AI-specific categories, infrastructure stories	Medium — rubric-compliant submission required

For AI companies specifically: the Globee is the highest-value entry in the current window because it has the most AI-specific category structure and the lowest understanding of how to win among applicants. The combination of technical specificity + rubric compliance = win rates significantly above the Stevie average.

How to Submit a Winning Globee Entry

The Globee submission structure rewards completeness over creativity. Here’s what a winning entry looks like:

Category selection (do this first)

Don’t start writing until you’ve picked your category. The Globee allows multiple entries — and the category determines everything about how your submission is scored. A great entry in the wrong category loses to a mediocre entry in the right one.

Map your company’s strongest evidence to the rubric criteria for each category you’re considering. If you can’t address at least 80% of the scoring criteria with real data, that category isn’t the right target.

The submission structure

Every Globee category asks you to address a set of criteria in a structured response format. The format for most categories follows this pattern:

• Problem / opportunity context: One paragraph on the problem your technology addresses. Be specific. Not “enterprise inefficiency” — “manual contract review averaging 14 hours per agreement in organizations with 500+ employee counts.”
• Solution description: One to two paragraphs on what your AI/technology does. Technical depth matters here — this is where the Globee scoring for technical categories lives.
• Impact evidence: Specific metrics. Quantified before/after. Deployment scale. Accuracy or performance data. Customer count and retention evidence. This is where your score is won or lost.
• Innovation differentiation: What makes this different from what existed before? What couldn’t be done that can now be done? What technical innovation drove the capability?

The submission that wins in AI categories doesn’t lead with “we are the leading AI-powered platform.” It leads with a specific, technical, measurable claim. Everything else follows from that.

The June 30 Deadline: What to Do in the Next 37 Days

Here’s a realistic timeline for a strong Globee submission:

• Days 1–3: Confirm your category picks. Map your evidence to the rubric criteria for each category. Identify gaps in your evidence that you can close with additional data or customer references.
• Days 4–12: Draft the submission. Address each rubric criterion explicitly. Use specific metrics throughout. Don’t write narrative for the judges — write compliance with their scoring sheet.
• Days 13–20: Internal review. Have someone who hasn’t seen the submission read it against the published rubric. Where does it under-address a criterion? Fix those sections.
• Days 21–30: Refine and finalize. Technical review of all metrics. Confirm all customer data is approved for use in public submissions. Double-check your category selection hasn’t shifted based on what the draft revealed.
• Days 31–35: Submit. Not on June 30 — this week. Use the final days for reviewing other category options, not for last-minute rushes on the ones you’ve already committed to.
• Days 36–37: Buffer. Technology issues happen. Portal errors happen. Submit by June 28 at the latest.

The companies that write the best Globee submissions start drafting two to three weeks before the deadline. The ones that submit on June 29 are submitting the same draft they wrote in a single sitting. That’s the field you’re competing against at the aggregate level — and it’s beatable.

Multi-Award Readiness: The Shemvara Angle

Entering multiple awards across the current deadline window — Stevie, Deloitte, Globee — isn’t just about maximizing win probability on any single program. It’s about the compounding effect of credential stacking.

A company that wins a Stevie Award and a Globee Award and appears on the Deloitte Fast 500 within the same 12-month period has a different press release, a different LinkedIn profile, and a different sales narrative than a company with any one of those in isolation. The three together create a category narrative that no single award creates.

For AI companies specifically: the Globee’s technical depth requirements mean that a Globee win signals something different from a Stevie win — more product-specific, more technically validated. The combination demonstrates both market recognition (Stevie) and technical merit (Globee). Companies pursuing both are building a credibility story that holds up across different audiences.