Cogito
leadership

CEO and Co-Founder
Joshua Feast

CTO and Co-Founder
Dr. Ali Azarbayejani
Ali has 30+ years of experience as a scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, and developer of world-class computational technologies. His pioneering doctoral research at the MIT Media Lab in probabilistic modeling for 3-D vision was the basis for his first startup company Alchemy 3D Technology, which created the market in the film and video post-production industry for camera match-moving software. Before Cogito, he consulted in software development and developed computational algorithms on the research staff at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs. He is a co-founder of Cogito and has served as CTO since 2009, building the engineering, machine learning, and product teams and leading innovation.

President and Chief Customer Officer
David Sudbey
David Sudbey is President and Chief Customer Officer at Cogito, where he is responsible for the complete customer lifecycle from sales and strategic partnerships to implementation and ongoing support. David has more than 30 years of experience in the rapidly growing B2B tech space and was previously an Independent Executive Advisor working with growth stage companies. Prior to that, David spent 22 years at customer service technology company, Genesys, ascending through a number of leadership roles, most recently as Chief Customer Officer. Serving as a key contributor in helping grow Genesys from $10M to $1.5B in revenue, in addition to his operational role, David also helped execute numerous corporate activities including the acquisition of more than 20 companies. Before joining Genesys, David spent 13 years at telecommunications company, Nortel Networks, where he focused on call center and advanced applications for the enterprise business in various sales and operational roles.

SVP of Client Services
Jim Gomez
Jim Gomez is Cogito’s Senior Vice President of Client Services, responsible for implementation, support and client retention. He is a Contact Center Professional, with over 30 years of leadership experience, in a wide range of contact center operational and technical roles. Jim began his career as a college student, at MCI Telecommunications, providing customer service. At MCI Jim quickly learned that smart people, armed with great tools, will deliver amazing results, within a well-led contact center operation. After the purchase of MCI by Verizon Jim went on to work with some of the largest contact center enterprises in the world, leading outstanding teams who designed, sold, delivered, and serviced world-class contact center services offered through Verizon Contact Center Services. From his success at Verizon, Jim accepted a leadership role at the start-up cloud contact center technology company Five9 Inc., where he established Five9 Professional Services as a business differentiator within this space while helping to grow the Five9 dramatically over five years.
Jim Gomez is a proud husband, the father of five amazing daughters and a US Army combat veteran. His college, military and business careers have allowed he and his family the privilege to live across the US and around the world and they never tire of exploration.

VP of People, Office Operations, and Legal
Shawn Hoyt
Shawn has led operational and legal teams at numerous enterprise software and SaaS companies through periods of rapid growth. At Cogito, Shawn is responsible for leading People & Culture, Office Operations, Deal Management, and Legal. Prior to joining Cogito, Shawn led pricing, proposal, contracting, and legal functions for Enterprise B2B SaaS providers SessionM and Optymyze. Shawn also led pricing, deal operations, commercial negotiation, and legal teams on a global basis for enterprise software and SaaS provider Pegasystems over an 11-year period of sustained growth.
Shawn began his career in legal roles at technology integration firm Sapient and the Boston law firm of Choate, Hall & Stewart. Shawn has a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame.

Vice President, Software Development
Konstantinos Kalabokis
Konstantinos Kalabokis serves as Vice President of Software Development. In this role, he is responsible for the effectiveness and efficiency of the engineering function across Cogito. He is accountable for identifying and implementing best practices and ensuring that the right engineering skill sets, processes and tools are in place for designing, integrating, building, testing, delivering and supporting Cogito products.
Konstantinos is a proven leader with over 30 years of experience in building high performing teams that take ownership and accountability in delivering customer value.
Previously, Konstantinos led the Authentication, Authorization and Accounting engineering teams that allow HERE Technologies to control access to all its services, enforce policies, audit usage and provide the necessary information to bill for services across their Automotive, Consumer and Enterprise product lines.
Prior to that position he led a number of Engineering, Program Management, Product Trials and Documentation teams at Nokia. One of which developed Nokia’s first Mobile Browser product line that was subsequently deployed to billions of mobile devices worldwide.
He has a BA in Management Information Systems and Computer Science from the University Of Massachusetts.

SVP of Marketing, Product and Finance
Steve Kraus
Steve brings over twenty years of experience in marketing, selling, and delivering customer engagement solutions to the world’s most customer-centric organizations. Prior to joining Cogito, Steve led product marketing for Pegasystems CRM suite of applications, growing the suite from a niche player into a recognized leader for marketing, sales, and service applications. Steve led go-to-market activities for Verint (formerly KANA Software), serving as the General Manager for Verint’s customer experience management applications, and led product marketing and strategy for Chordiant Software’s CRM applications.
Earlier in his career, Steve managed consulting teams within Ernst & Young. He has a B.A. in Economics and Accounting from The College of The Holy Cross.

VP of IT and Security
Greg Neville
Greg has led global information security and information technology teams in multiple heavily-regulated industries. At Cogito, Greg is responsible for leading the compliance, information security, risk management, disaster recovery, internal applications, technical infrastructure, and support functions. Prior to joining Cogito, Greg led global technology and security teams at Best Doctors, including executing a complete migration to a cloud-based infrastructure.
Greg also led information security and technology teams at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and was a Managing Consultant at PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) where he provided guidance to clients in their CIO Advisory Practice.
Greg has a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Massachusetts.

Chief Sales Officer
Jim Nystrom
For more than 30 years, Jim Nystrom, Chief Sales Officer has helped build and lead high performing sales and customer success teams. At Cogito he is responsible for leading all aspects of sales strategy and execution. Prior to joining Cogito, Jim served as Executive Vice President of Sales at Five9, a leading provider of cloud contact center software. In that role, Jim led teams of sales and customer success professionals, with a focus on sales, adoption, retention, and expansion of Five9 software. During his tenure, Five9’s annual revenue grew from $20M to more than $300M.
Earlier in his career, Jim led sales, sales engineering, and customer service teams within the global enterprise sales division of Verizon. Jim holds a degree in business administration and culinary arts from Johnson and Wales University.
He is a recreational hockey player, former firefighter, and resides in Boston, MA with his family.

Chief Behavioral Science Officer
Dr. Skyler Place
Dr. Skyler Place combines decades of psychological theory with cutting edge behavioral data to drive positive behavior change. He influences product capabilities and provides thought leadership to clients within enterprise sales and service operations. His team of behavioral scientists, analysts and consultants apply best practice principles and novel insights to ensure higher performance for both organizations and individuals.
Skyler has over fifteen years of experience developing and implementing new approaches to better predict and improve human behavior. Prior to Cogito, Skyler led large-scale academic research projects at the intersection of artificial intelligence and behavioral science.
Skyler holds a BA in computer science from Colby College, PhDs in psychology and cognitive science from Indiana University, and completed his post-doctoral work in computational social science at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.

Vice President, Business Development
Martha Sager
Martha brings over twenty years of experience in attracting new clients, seizing new business opportunities, and developing trusted partnerships with top leaders within the Private and Public sectors. Her focus on customer-centric excellence is derived from a combination of entrepreneurial spirit and business acumen allowing her to transform innovative ideas into profits. A skillful communicator, Martha works to define business objectives and articulate the corporate vision in a way that inspires imagination and compels action. Outcome-oriented with a track record of successfully introducing product and service category creators, she thrives in delivering business value and competitive differentiation. What sets her apart is that Martha charted her path through a series of diverse industries – advertising, publishing, communications, film production, physical AI security, and ultimately SaaS technology – while consistently rising to meet revenue generating and operational challenges.
Martha received a B.A. in Public Administration from The American University in Washington, DC. After 20+ years living and working in NYC, she’s moved back to the greater Boston area where she volunteer fund-raises for charities, hikes, bikes and explores as much art, music, theater, and history as time allows for.

Distinguished Scientist, Machine Learning
Dr. John Kane
John Kane is Cogito’s Distinguished Scientist in the area of machine learning and has over a decade of expertise in speech science and technology. At Cogito he leads the research and development of machine learning algorithms to enable real-time processing of audio, speech and other behavioral signals. John is an active member of the speech research community, contributing as a reviewer for leading journals and conferences in the space and as a maintainer of open source speech processing tools.

Scientific Visionary and Co-Founder
Dr. Sandy Pentland
Sandy pioneered reality mining technology and is a leader in pervasive information systems generally. He helped create and direct the MIT Media Laboratory, is a member of the U.S. National Academies, and is one of the most-cited computer scientists in the world. Forbes named Sandy one of the `seven most powerful data scientists in the world,’ along with the founders of Google and the US Chief Technical Officer.