Walmart and Circana veteran joins CogitX AI to grow its sovereign AI platform, focusing on Fortune 500 retailers, brands, and agencies
CogitX AI, a sovereign AI platform company, announced the appointment of Michael Ellgass as President, Retail.
At CogitX, Ellgass will lead go-to-market across the company’s retail offerings, including marketing, supply chain, and merchandising, with a focus on commerce media. The mandate reflects CogitX’s core bet: retailers that own their AI outright, rather than rent it by the token, keep costs flat as adoption grows and build capability that compounds over time. That bet is already in production at one of the world’s largest agency holding companies, where CogitX is rapidly transforming engagements and workflows with AI powered by the platform.
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Ellgass joins CogitX from Circana, where, as EVP of Global Commerce Media, he built and scaled the company’s retail media business from scratch across North America, EMEA, and APAC, working with retailers such as Sam’s Club, Walgreens, Instacart, and Coles. Earlier, Ellgass led category marketing at Walmart, the discipline that evolved into retail media, building marketing plans with more than 200 brands. He began his career in brand marketing roles at Kraft Foods.
“We are excited to have Mike on board,” said Pradeep Parappil, co-founder and CEO of CogitX AI. “Retail is at an inflection point, with new experiences and opportunities powered by AI. Michael has a rare, complete view of how retailers operate and how AI can power what comes next. We look forward to working with him.”
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“The industry sells retailers access to intelligence. CogitX sells ownership of it,” said Ellgass. “This is a model that lives inside a retailer’s own environment and gets smarter with every interaction, without a bill that scales with success. I believe the retailers that come out ahead in this next chapter will be the ones that own their intelligence rather than rent it.”
CogitX AI is a sovereign AI platform company building the intelligence layer for retail. The intelligence is owned by the retailer, improves with every interaction, and is unmetered.
The platform turns a retailer’s disparate data sources into one intelligence layer (Retail Brain), and the retail product suite covers the full span of commerce media, from planning and creation to measurement.
