This year’s class honored for superior technical leadership, stellar problem-solving skills, and delivering measurable business impact to customers
PHOENIX – March 17, 2026 – Cognite, the global leader in industrial AI, today announced the appointment of Jan Inge Bergseth, Aleksandra Knödlseder, and Jason Schern as the 2026 class of Cognite Fellows. These appointments celebrate Cognite experts who bridge the gap between complex technology and outside-the-box thinking to bring innovative value to customers’ mission-critical industrial applications. The 2026 class is the second announced by Cognite, which launched the program in 2025 and is already proving instrumental in Cognite’s MoonShot Mission to deliver $100B in customer value by 2035.
As the industrial sector shifts from AI experimentation and pilots to full-scale deployment, these three individuals represent the specialized expertise required to drive measurable ROI in asset-heavy industries like energy, manufacturing, and life sciences. Each has demonstrated exceptional technical leadership, a history of solving "unsolvable" data challenges, and a dedication to mentoring the next generation of industrial digital talent.
"Our 2026 Fellows are at the heart of the industrial AI revolution. Jan Inge, Aleksandra, and Jason have each demonstrated a relentless focus on thinking creatively to solve our customers’ hardest problems and automate complex workflows to realize value at scale,” said Girish Rishi, CEO of Cognite. “Their work enables our customers to move beyond the hype of industrial AI to achieve real-world impact in operational safety, production optimization, and improved sustainability."
The Cognite Fellows Program recognizes individuals who embody more than just deep expertise; it celebrates their personal impact and overall contribution to the organization and its mission. Prospective Fellows are nominated by peers and evaluated based on their deep technology knowledge, innovative thinking, and expertise in delivering quantifiable value to customers. Cognite Fellows must demonstrate the ability to anticipate future trends to develop innovative solutions, while personifying the Cognite values of ownership, impact, and relentlessness, earning high regard across the company:
- Jan Inge Bergseth: A veteran in industrial data architecture, Jan Inge has been instrumental in refining how complex asset hierarchies are contextualized at scale. His work ensures that large enterprises can leverage digital twins to dramatically reduce downtime; in one case, helping a large recycling company add 120 days of production availability on an annual basis.
- Aleksandra Knödlseder: With more than 20 years of experience across the oil and gas value chain, Aleksandra excels at bridging domain subject matter expertise with data and AI to deliver tangible value for the industry. She has distinguished herself through her leadership in applying AI to reliability and maintenance processes, such as development of AI agents for root cause analysis (RCA). Aleksandra's work has helped Cognite customers leverage AI-driven semi-autonomous RCAs, leading to reductions of up to 60% in response and downtime, as well as improved RCA insight quality and potential improvements in equipment reliability. Aleksandra was also recently named to the 10th annual list of Norway’s 50 Top Women in Tech by Abelia and ODA Network.
- Jason Schern: Jason has more than 25 years of experience working with some of the largest manufacturing companies worldwide to dramatically improve their data operations, machine learning analytics, and use of industrial AI to improve business outcomes. As Cognite Field CTO, he is passionate about the value and impact of trusted, accessible contextualized industrial data at scale and removing the complexity of industrial data. His work has helped numerous Cognite clients—including a large, multinational energy company—dramatically reduce the time required to deploy digital tools and solutions across hundreds of facilities from years to mere days.
“Industrial organizations are increasingly prioritizing platforms that can scale AI beyond pilots, unify and contextualize diverse data sources, and embed AI-driven insights directly into operational workflows,” said Malavika Tohani, Research Director at Verdantix. “By continuing to expand its Fellows program, Cognite is demonstrating a strong commitment to technical excellence and its real-world application to drive quantified, significant customer value.”
The Cognite Fellows Program was launched in 2025 as the company approached its tenth year of driving digital transformation for asset-heavy industries worldwide. This year’s class joins Jan Eivind Danielsen, Thorkild Stray, and Torgrim Aas, the inaugural class of Cognite Fellows announced last year. For more information about the Cognite Fellows Program, read the blog.
About Cognite
Cognite makes AI work for industry. Leading energy, manufacturing, and power & renewables enterprises choose Cognite to deliver secure, trustworthy, and real-time AI and data capabilities to transform their asset-heavy operations to be safer, more sustainable, and profitable. Cognite provides a user-friendly, secure, and scalable industrial AI & data platform that makes it easy for all decision-makers, from the field to remote operations centers, to access and understand complex industrial data, collaborate in real-time, and build a better tomorrow. Visit us at www.cognite.com, and follow us on LinkedIn.