Cognism, the prospecting and lead generation software for the B2B sector, is delighted to announce that James Hodson joined the company as its full-time Chief Science Officer on 20 September 2019.
James Hodson is one of the world’s leading researchers and entrepreneurs in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. In addition to his duties at Cognism, James serves as Senior Researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Department of the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia and as the CEO of the AI for Good Foundation, a UN-backed platform that promotes the beneficial use of AI in business and society.
Before joining Cognism, James built and directed the AI Research group at Bloomberg LP in New York, leading a team of more than 20 in a rich cross-disciplinary research agenda. James was also a researcher at the German National Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and holds several patents across Machine Translation and Network Inference.
James’s association with Cognism dates back to 2014, when he first met the company’s founder and CEO, James Isilay, after giving a lecture on Natural Language Processing at ETH Zurich. After Cognism was incorporated in January 2015, James Hodson joined the company in an advisory capacity. At that time, he focused on helping build out a library of AI and machine learning capabilities to power the Cognism platform.
Recognising Cognism’s potential, James was also an angel investor in the company’s seed round. In 2017, he assisted James Isilay in raising funds and pitching Cognism to several venture capital firms.
As Cognism’s scientific advisor, James Hodson mentored its data science and engineering teams, providing invaluable training, support and advice. Thanks to James’s guidance, Cognism developed a broad set of impressive AI capabilities to make B2B data more accurate and actionable. It’s widely recognised that CRM data is often filled with errors and of poor quality; the Cognism platform focuses on filling in the gaps in B2B data, identifying when data goes out of date and correcting mistakes wherever they are found.
James Hodson’s greatest success at Cognism to date was filing the company’s first patent, which was granted in December 2018. The patent, referred to as the Revenue AI engine, was designed to disambiguate and enrich datasets in a CRM environment. The purpose of this was to improve the interrelation between the company profiles and the individual profiles that exist inside a CRM.
James Hodson has officially joined Cognism at the perfect juncture in the company’s journey. 2019 has been the year when Cognism has passed several significant milestones:
James’s responsibilities as a permanent member of the Cognism team include heading up the data science and engineering divisions and expanding the company’s AI and machine learning product portfolio. Several Cognism patents, based on company structures and the analytics of outbound email campaigns, are pending.
James Hodson says:
James Isilay adds:
Cognism is a sales and marketing acceleration platform that uses patented AI technology to provide B2B sales and marketing teams with a blend of real-time company, people, and event data to streamline prospecting and find and deliver new revenue.