PHOENIX, AZ – May 20, 2025 - Cognite, the global leader in industrial AI, today announced two strategic appointments to deliver more innovation with the AI ecosystem and customer value: Co-founder Geir Engdahl, as Chief Technology Officer, AI, and James Sirota as Global Head of Engineering. Engdahl will lead the company's AI First technology strategy. Sirota will spearhead the worldwide engineering functions, driving the rapid delivery of new capabilities and scaling of Cognite’s industrial AI and data platform Cognite Data Fusion® and the transformative industrial workbench Cognite Atlas AI™.
Since the company's founding, Engdahl has been pivotal in creating the only scalable and open AI platform specifically built for the demanding range and volume of industrial data. Cognite's unique architecture and capabilities have enabled customers to reap significant ROI from increasing production, reducing downtime, and accelerating sustainability. In this new role, he will return to his disruptive founder roots to extend Cognite's AI technology to deliver more real-time intelligence from any data, on any hyperscaler, and leveraging any LLM at scale.
Sirota joins Cognite as the company aggressively accelerates its delivery of intelligent, AI-powered applications to unlock the true potential of industrial data for decision-makers and domain experts across manufacturing, energy, and power generation verticals. Cognite's solutions are the key to enabling AI by liberating data from silos and making it AI-ready, forging a path towards real-time, scalable agentic AI-driven operations.
“Cognite is raising the bar on the next generation of AI First technology and development in order to help companies achieve more of their AI transformation goals and business outcomes. We welcome James to our executive team at such a transformative time for both Cognite and the industrial sector,” said Girish Rishi, CEO at Cognite. “James' proven expertise in scaling engineering organizations and delivering AI-powered platforms, combined with Geir’s innovation leadership and our previously announced CPO Chirayu Shah’s product vision, will be vital as we continue to expand our global footprint and help industrial companies realize even more value from agentic AI, their industrial data and operations.”
“I am thrilled to lead the charge for this next phase of AI innovation,” said Geir Engdahl, CTO, AI at Cognite. “Being at the forefront and co-innovating with the global hyperscalers and LLM providers will unlock more value from agentic AI and all industrial data that are uniquely accessible in our platform.”
Engdahl previously founded Snapsale in 2011, a classifieds AI startup. He led the company as CEO and CTO until the company was acquired by Schibsted in 2017. He also served as a senior software engineer for Google where he developed AI capabilities for targeting and conversion optimization in their advertising systems. Engdahl has a master's degree in computational science from the University of Oslo and received a silver medal from the International Olympiad in Informatics.
“Industrial enterprises generate enormous volumes of operational data, but often struggle to extract meaningful insights from it,” said James Sirota, Global Head of Engineering at Cognite. “They need a robust platform to explore this data effectively, combined with powerful AI capabilities to identify trends and insights more efficiently. What drew me to Cognite was how their products address this exact challenge. Cognite is not only solving deeply technical problems—it's solving meaningful ones for the industrial sector. My job is to make sure our engineers are equipped, empowered, and inspired to deliver products that transform how the industrial sector works.”
With over 20 years of leadership in software engineering and AI, Sirota brings a combination of technical depth and global execution excellence to Cognite. Having previously led engineering organizations at AWS, Cloudera, and Cisco, he brings extensive experience scaling enterprise software platforms and high-performing global teams. His passion for building cohesive, empowered engineering teams and high-scale platforms aligns directly with Cognite's vision. As the company continues its rapid global expansion, Sirota's leadership will be central to delivering innovative, AI-driven solutions that power the future of industry.
About Cognite
Cognite makes GenAI work for industry. Leading energy, manufacturing, and power & renewables enterprises choose Cognite to deliver secure, trustworthy, and real-time data to transform their asset-heavy operations to be safer, more sustainable, and profitable. Cognite provides a user-friendly, secure, and scalable 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 and X.
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