Cognite Strengthens AI Innovation and Global Engineering with Strategic Leadership Appointments
Cognite, a global industrial AI leader, has announced two significant leadership appointments as it sharpens its focus on innovation, scalability, and real-time intelligence delivery. The company has named Co-founder Geir Engdahl as Chief Technology Officer for AI, and industry veteran James Sirota as Global Head of Engineering. These moves signal Cognite‘s commitment to advancing its AI-first strategy while maximizing customer value in a rapidly transforming industrial landscape.
With the industrial sector undergoing a fundamental digital transformation, Cognite continues to lead the charge in reshaping how enterprises harness data. These strategic appointments are aimed at accelerating Cognite’s ability to deploy scalable AI solutions that integrate seamlessly with any cloud provider and leverage any large language model (LLM), transforming the way data is turned into operational insight.
Engdahl to Lead AI Strategy with Focus on Disruption and Real-Time Intelligence
As the newly appointed Chief Technology Officer, AI, Geir Engdahl will guide Cognite’s AI-first technology roadmap. A co-founder of the company and one of its original architects, Engdahl has been instrumental in building Cognite’s core technology platform. His vision has shaped Cognite Data Fusion®, a breakthrough data platform built to handle the volume, variety, and velocity of industrial data.
With this appointment, Engdahl returns to his roots as a disruptor, aiming to push the boundaries of real-time data processing and advanced analytics. His new role will focus on further developing Cognite’s AI stack, empowering customers with the tools they need to draw immediate and actionable insights from their operations, regardless of where the data resides.
Under Engdahl’s leadership, Cognite will intensify its collaboration with hyperscalers and LLM providers, working to deliver scalable, agentic AI capabilities that serve as operational copilots for frontline and back-office teams alike. These capabilities are at the core of Cognite Atlas AI™, the company’s transformative industrial workbench designed to deliver intelligence at every level of operations.
Engdahl brings a rare blend of startup innovation and big-tech experience. Prior to founding Cognite, he launched Snapsale, a classifieds AI startup acquired by Schibsted. He also served as a senior software engineer at Google, where he developed machine learning models for ad targeting and conversion optimization. Engdahl holds a master’s degree in computational science from the University of Oslo and is an International Olympiad in Informatics silver medalist.
James Sirota to Scale Engineering for Global Impact
Joining Cognite as the Global Head of Engineering, James Sirota brings more than two decades of engineering leadership experience to the organization. He is tasked with leading Cognite’s worldwide engineering teams, ensuring the rapid delivery and scaling of innovative AI-powered capabilities across industries including manufacturing, energy, and power generation.
Sirota will play a key role in evolving Cognite’s engineering practices to support a growing portfolio of AI applications that unlock the potential of industrial data. Cognite’s products are designed to liberate operational data from silos, transform it into AI-ready formats, and support agentic AI systems that provide real-time decision support and automation.
Sirota’s background includes senior engineering leadership roles at AWS, Cloudera, and Cisco. His expertise spans enterprise software development, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and the cultivation of high-performance engineering cultures. His work has consistently centered on creating platforms that deliver meaningful impact to large-scale industrial and commercial clients.
“Industrial enterprises generate massive amounts of data, yet unlocking its value remains a challenge,” said Sirota. “What impressed me most about Cognite is how its technology not only solves complex technical problems but also delivers tangible business value across the industrial sector. My goal is to ensure our engineering teams are empowered and aligned to build the tools that define the future of intelligent operations.”
A United Executive Vision
Cognite’s executive leadership sees these appointments as a pivotal step forward in delivering AI-powered transformation at scale. According to Cognite CEO Girish Rishi, the new roles represent a reinforcement of the company’s commitment to building world-class capabilities that bring industrial data to life.
“Cognite is raising the bar for AI-first development to help companies achieve their digital transformation goals,” said Rishi. “With James’ operational excellence and engineering leadership, combined with Geir’s innovation and technical vision—and our CPO Chirayu Shah’s strategic product direction—we are well-positioned to lead the next era of industrial AI.”
Rishi emphasized that the leadership trio will be essential as Cognite continues expanding its global reach and deepening its impact across verticals. The company’s solutions are uniquely designed to integrate heterogeneous data sources, enabling real-time, AI-driven workflows that deliver on both performance and sustainability goals.
Cognite’s Broader Mission and Future Outlook
Founded with the mission to transform industrial data into actionable insight, Cognite has established itself as a pioneer in the industrial AI space. Its flagship platform, Cognite Data Fusion®, is recognized for enabling operational intelligence by contextualizing and organizing data from disparate sources—whether from legacy systems, IoT sensors, or modern cloud applications.
The platform is designed to provide data scientists, engineers, and business users with an intuitive and powerful environment to work with data collaboratively. Paired with Cognite Atlas AI™, the company’s recently launched AI workbench, Cognite is arming industrial professionals with new capabilities that drastically reduce time to insight and increase return on data investments.
As the global industrial sector faces increasing pressure to become more efficient, sustainable, and resilient, is poised to meet these challenges with a renewed focus on innovation and execution. The appointment of Engdahl and Sirota is not just a shift in leadership—it’s a doubling down on mission to make data do more.
Whether it’s optimizing energy consumption, reducing unplanned downtime, or predicting maintenance needs, solutions are designed to turn complexity into clarity and potential into performance. With a strengthened leadership team and a clear AI-first vision,is set to deliver the next wave of industrial transformation.
The additions of Geir Engdahl and James Sirota to executive team mark a transformative moment in the company’s evolution. Together, their expertise and leadership will drive the next phase of AI innovation, ensuring that remains at the forefront of the industrial data revolution.
As industries seek smarter, faster, and more sustainable ways of working, approach to making industrial data intelligent, accessible, and actionable is becoming not just relevant, but essential. With a reinforced commitment to technology excellence and operational scale, the future of industrial AI looks more promising than ever.
