Cognite appoints AI leaders to drive innovation push

Cognite has appointed Geir Engdahl as Chief Technology Officer of AI and James Sirota as Global Head of Engineering as part of its AI-focused strategy.

Geir Engdahl, a co-founder of Cognite, has been given responsibility for leading the company's AI-First technology strategy. In his new position, Engdahl is set to work with global hyperscalers and large language model (LLM) providers, aiming to maximise the benefits of agentic AI for Cognite's customer base. Engdahl's background includes founding Snapsale, a classifieds AI startup acquired by Schibsted, and time as a senior software engineer at Google working on AI capabilities for advertising systems. He holds a master's degree in computational science from the University of Oslo and has a silver medal from the International Olympiad in Informatics.

James Sirota joins the company as Global Head of Engineering. He has more than two decades of experience in software engineering and artificial intelligence, having held senior positions at AWS, Cloudera, and Cisco. Sirota is responsible for leading Cognite's engineering activities worldwide, focusing on the advancement and scaling of the industrial AI and data platform Cognite Data Fusion, as well as the industrial workbench Cognite Atlas AI.

The appointments come as Cognite pushes forward with efforts to accelerate the development and deployment of AI-powered applications for sectors including manufacturing, energy, and power generation. The company states that Engdahl and Sirota will play key roles in ensuring industrial customers can structure their data for AI usage, with the goal of quickly delivering tangible value from AI solutions.

"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. 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," Girish Rishi, Chief Executive Officer at Cognite, commented on the appointments.

"I am thrilled to lead the charge for this next phase of AI innovation. 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," Geir Engdahl said, expressing his outlook for his new role.

James Sirota outlined the challenges facing industrial enterprises and how Cognite's approach seeks to address them.

"Industrial enterprises generate enormous volumes of operational data, but often struggle to extract meaningful insights from it. 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," Sirota said.

The company's strategy emphasises data accessibility and AI-readiness, aiming to free industrial data from operational silos and support real-time, scalable agentic AI-driven operations. Both new leaders are expected to contribute to Cognite's ongoing expansion and its provision of AI-driven outcomes for customers across various heavy industries.