Last October on stage at our customer conference in Houston, we introduced Cognite’s Moonshot: a commitment to delivering $100 billion in verifiable, realized customer value by 2035.
It was a bold, ambitious goal, built on a fundamental belief that the legacy enterprise software model is broken. For decades, B2B tech has evaluated success using just supplier-focused metrics: licenses sold, seat adoption, consumption rates, and endless proof-of-concept pilots. We believed it was time to anchor our North Star in the customer experience: tangible impact and ROI for the companies who build, power, and heal the world.
Today, just one year later, we are thrilled to announce a pivotal milestone on this journey: This week, Cognite - together, with its customers - officially crossed $1 billion in verified, realized customer value.
Reaching this threshold confirms that enterprise technology requires an entirely new operating model: moving away from evaluating software solely by what is sold or shipped, and instead anchoring every conversation in what is actually achieved for our customers.
Beyond Software Metrics: What Realized Value Actually Means
In enterprise tech, "value" is too often treated as a theoretical forecast or a slide-deck model. For us, value isn't either of those things. It’s real business impact; verified in partnership with, and signed off by, our customers.
It’s a completely new model built on radical trust. Asking global industrial leaders to open their operational workflows and transparently share internal data takes unprecedented trust. Our customers did so because they saw us not as software vendors selling licenses, but as true value partners accountable for business outcomes.
To us, realized value means concrete results achieved in daily operations using Cognite Industrial AI and Data Platform:
- Increased Operational Uptime: Preventing unplanned shutdowns across complex, critical assets.
- Cost Reduction & Efficiency: Optimizing energy consumption, maintenance workflows, and raw material utilization.
- Accelerated Time-to-Insight: Empowering engineers and frontline workers with instant, context-aware operational data.
The Philosophy: Why “Go-Live” is the Starting Line, Not the Finish Line
In traditional enterprise software, the vendor considers their work largely complete once the implementation finishes and the system "goes live." The customer is left with the burden of justifying the investment, fighting internal adoption friction, and attempting to calculate ROI long after the sales team has moved on.
We reject that model. For those who build, power, and heal the world, “going live” is merely the starting point.
Industrial environments are complex, capital intensive, and risk averse. Plant managers and operational executives do not buy software for the sake of software; they invest in operational transformation. Value tracking is not an administrative afterthought; it is a shared strategic operating system that protects our customers' investments and ensures that transformation actually delivers. It is our way of holding each other mutually accountable to improving our customers’ business in a material way.
Dr. Paula Doyle, Chief Digital Officer at long-time Cognite customer Aker BP shares our perspective: “At Aker BP, our ambition has never been simply to adopt digital tools, but to redefine what is possible in offshore exploration, production, and field operations. Our long-standing partnership with Cognite is built on a shared conviction: technology only matters if it empowers our engineers, drives safer and more sustainable operations, and delivers business impact. From transforming day-to-day operations across our assets to shaping the digital foundation for visionary projects like Yggdrasil, ROI has always been at the center of our work. This milestone reflects what long-term collaboration between industry and technology partners can achieve.”
Inside the Methodology: How We Co-Validate Value
It all starts with an outcome-focused engagement model:
1. Multi-Stakeholder Alignment from Day One
Realized value cannot be validated from a single vantage point. Relying exclusively on IT or project managers tracks deployment milestones, not operational impact. Our process intentionally aligns five distinct stakeholder groups:
- The Frontline End Users: Engineers, maintenance planners, and field operators who provide qualitative proof of usability and confirm whether daily workflows are genuinely faster, safer, and more effective.
- The Project Leaders: Digital transformation leads who aggregate system data and establish baseline performance metrics.
- The Executive Champions: CDOs, VPs of Digital, and Innovation heads who ensure use-case KPIs map directly to overarching corporate strategy.
- Operational Leadership: Plant and asset managers who verify that technical efficiency percentages translate into real-world plant improvements.
- The Economic Buyers: CFOs, CIOs, and executive sponsors who review business impact to assess return on investment and greenlight multi-site scale.
2. Upfront Baselining and Metric Formulation
Before any production deployment expands, we conduct dedicated Value Alignment sessions with operational leaders. We don’t charge for these sessions, as we see them as a required investment in our customers to ensure their success. Together, we establish:
- The Pre-Deployment Baseline: Agreeing on the specific historical window and data that defines pre-deployment performance.
- Leading vs. Lagging Indicators: Tracking both immediate operational signals (e.g., automated alert adoption, search latency, workflow steps eliminated) and lagging balance-sheet returns (e.g., operating hours saved, avoided downtime, reduced energy consumption).
- Transparency and Collaboration: Working with our customers in a transparent and collaborative way allows us to build mutual understanding, which drives trust in the final ROI numbers.
3. A Structured Governance and Verification Rhythm
Value realization does not happen in annual retrospectives; it requires an ongoing, operational cadence:
- Bi-Weekly Usage & Efficiency Checks: Ensuring frontline teams are adopting solutions and capturing the operational KPIs, working with the users to measure the improvements.
- Monthly Operational Reviews: Validating improvements measured and working together collaboratively to solve any potential challenges that have come up.
- Quarterly Business Impact Reviews: Formal, data-driven sessions with executive sponsors to translate operational wins into verified ROI. We track both hard savings (direct cash impact and downtime prevention) and soft savings (recovered engineering capacity).
- Annual ROI Reviews: Auditing cumulative, multi-facility business value to justify expansion across additional assets and business units.
4. Radical Trust and Shared Accountability
Tracking value requires customers to open up sensitive operational data, asset logs, and workflow metrics. That level of transparency only happens when vendors shed transactional sales dynamics and operate as true value partners. Because our teams combine software expertise with deep industrial backgrounds (former plant engineers, domain specialists, and operational leaders), we approach every plant floor with intense curiosity and shared accountability for the outcome.
Adopted Across Every Corner of Cognite
Shifting from traditional software delivery to a value realization model meant re-engineering how we operate internally. Going from zero to $1 billion required embedding this mindset into every department across Cognite:
- Product & Engineering: Every feature and AI capability is prioritized based on its direct potential to unlock measurable customer ROI rather than feature-list parity.
- Customer Value: Value tracking and financial verification frameworks are embedded directly into customer engagement plans from Day 1.
- Sales & Strategy: Executive conversations focus on impact rather than seat counts or software licensing, ensuring shared accountability from the start.
The Future of B2B Tech: From Houston to 2035
When we set the $100B Moonshot in Houston, we knew that hitting that initial $1 billion threshold would be the hardest proving ground. It required proving that heavy industry is ready to scale industrial AI for real financial returns.
Every industrial facility brought online, every data source contextualized, and every AI-supported workflow deployed compounds and accelerates progress toward the next $10 billion, $50 billion, and - ultimately - $100 billion.
Crossing $1 billion is proof of concept, not just for Cognite, but for the entire technology industry. It proves that customer value realization is the definitive way forward for enterprise software. Yet, it represents just 1% of our ultimate goal. So how confident are we that we'll meet the $100 billion milestone? Knowing the enthusiasm and trust we've already built with the subset of customers who have already started on journey with us, there are tens of billions of value out there, just waiting to be verified.
Thank You
This milestone belongs to our customers, partners, and the entire Cognite team:
- To our customers: To the plant managers, reliability engineers, operators, and executive leaders who trusted us to support their operations, thank you.
- To our Cogniters: Thank you for your relentless innovation, ownership, execution, and unwavering commitment to customer outcomes above all else.
Here’s to the next $99 billion.
— Girish & Justin