Executive Summary:

From talking teddy bears to transforming enterprise

customer experiences, Philipp Heltewig's journey is

nothing short of remarkable. As the newly appointed

Chief AI Officer at NICE (a $3 billion customer

experience giant), following their acquisition of his

company Cognigy, Phil reveals the fascinating origin

story of how building AI software for a speaking teddy bear unexpectedly launched a nine-year mission to revolutionize how brands communicate with customers. In this Halloween Eve conversation, he unpacks NICE's latest AI Ops Center that keeps AI agents running flawlessly at enterprise scale, shares hard-won wisdom about startup focus ("say no to everything else"), and paints a compelling vision of a near-future where customers will have genuine, seamless conversations with brands across their entire lifecycle - from discovery to purchase to support. If you're curious about where agentic AI is taking customer experience, or simply want to hear a founder's candid take on pivoting, focus, and what happens when your startup gets acquired by a NASDAQ-traded powerhouse, this episode delivers insights you won't want to miss. Stream it now, and be sure to LIKE, SHARE and COMMENT!

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Transcript:​

Mark Vigoroso (00:01.272)
Greetings all. This is Mark Vigoroso, founder and CEO of the Enterprise Edge coming back to you with the Enterprise Edge podcast. We are very pleased to be with you this Halloween Eve here in the United States. We have a very prestigious guest with us today. We have Phil Heltewig, former founder and CEO of Cognigy G, just recently acquired back in September by Nice. And he is now the chief AI officer.

Philipp Heltewig (00:24.782)
Thank

Mark Vigoroso (00:29.614)
a title that we're seeing more and more at Nice, traded on NASDAQ under the ticker, Nice. The company is a customer service and experience automation provider, and they're on track for roughly $3 billion in 2025 revenue. So they're a significant player in the space. They're making significant investments, investments in agentic AI in the customer experience space. And obviously Phil's appointment to the chief AI officer.

is evidence of that. So before we get into the meat of the conversation, which is sure to be a lively one, let's give Phil a proper welcome. Phil, thanks for being with us.

Philipp Heltewig (01:09.048)
Yeah, thanks. Great to be here.

Mark Vigoroso (01:11.35)
And Phil is joining us from Dusseldorf, Germany. So thanks for making the virtual trip across the pond. This is great. I'm excited. I myself have spent some time in the CX space. used to work at Oracle in the CXM solution portfolio. So I've got some familiarity. I'm passionate about this space and very excited to hear about your journey, Phil, and your vision.

for how AI is really going to deliver value in this area, in all of its flavors as, the world, anticipates the value to materialize. So, but let's get warmed up. Let's get warmed up. Phil, you are a German Australian entrepreneur, if I'm not mistaken, you built a company in Germany, you moved your U.S. headquarters from San Francisco to Texas, and now you work for a New Jersey based company. So when people ask, where are you from?

How do you answer that?

Philipp Heltewig (02:10.85)
Yeah, that's a good question. Well, whilst I spend a lot of time in Australia in my life, I think I would still say that I'm German. I was born in Germany, now I'm based in Germany. So let's go with that.

Mark Vigoroso (02:21.804)
Yep, that's right, that's right. It runs deep, it runs deep. Were you born in Düsseldorf? Is that your home?

Philipp Heltewig (02:26.124)
here. No, it's born in a city close by which is called Wuppertal, which is around maybe 40-45 minutes from Düsseldorf.

Mark Vigoroso (02:35.096)
Got it, got it.

Great. So you spent about, if I'm not mistaken, almost a decade, about nine years as CEO of CognitG from the ground up. And I would imagine that you've got a lot of memories and mementos and reminders from those days. And I'm wondering, are there any objects, any physical things that you have on your desk still today that represent some of your best memories from that part of your career?

Philipp Heltewig (02:47.148)
Hmm.

Philipp Heltewig (03:08.298)
It's actually an interesting question and it's difficult to pick one out because of course founding a company from nothing with no funding whatsoever and then growing into what Cognigy became and now Nice Cognigy. There are a lot of very interesting moments and actually here just behind me I have a lot of these memorabilia. I have a power-up energy drink for example which we handed out at one point I think during the COVID crisis to all our employees actually.

Mark Vigoroso (03:11.458)
Yeah.

Philipp Heltewig (03:37.113)
But the one piece would probably be a teddy bear. originally when we founded the company, not going to go into customer service automation, but we're going to build a speaking teddy bear. That's how it all started. we then, long story short, we built the bear and we tried to find the software to power the brains of the bear, so to have conversations with humans.

very natural conversations and we couldn't find that software. So we built the software ourselves, which became Cognitive and everyone was super excited about the software, but not not as much about the bear. So we pivoted into enterprise software and have since since then, this was very early on in late 2016, have since then embarked on this journey of revolutionizing customer experiences with AI. So I think if I had to pick one piece of memorabilia, it would be would be the teddy bear.

Mark Vigoroso (04:35.128)
That's fascinating. Wow. Wow. Well, boy, there's probably a lot of story behind that as well, but that's a great, that's a great pivot success story. They're not always that successful. That's, that's, that's awesome.

Philipp Heltewig (04:41.293)
Yes.

Philipp Heltewig (04:47.446)
Yeah, well it was very early, I'm not sure I call it a pivot, it was super early, so... But yeah.

Mark Vigoroso (04:50.774)
Yeah. Okay. That's great. That's great. Well, let's, let's get into some, some discussion and feel about, about your, your day to day professional life now. And, and maybe start off with a, with a two part question. You know, you, you, you've got this title of chief AI officer and you're probably the fourth or fifth chief AI officer that I've had on this podcast. And I always like to know

What is that? What, like, what is your, what are your day to day responsibilities? And then more specifically, you guys, think two weeks ago ish, release something called the AI ops center. So maybe you could tell me a little bit about just the gig itself. What does it entail? And then maybe specifically about the significance of the AI ops center.

Philipp Heltewig (05:41.602)
Yeah.

Philipp Heltewig (05:47.033)
So at the moment at I would say I have three roles. One is the role of the founder of the company that NICE has acquired. So I'm spending a lot of time with the teams on integrating the companies, aligning the teams, building up the new structures going forward, etc. etc. So that consumes quite a lot of time at the moment naturally.

Then I have two more roles, my two official roles now, one being the chief AI officer and the other being the general manager of NICE Cognigy, which is the new business unit inside of NICE under which we group all of the AI portfolio that NICE has. And so in these two roles, I'm responsible for NICE's AI strategy from a product perspective. So where are we going with AI? Which products are we AI enabling? Which native AI products are we bringing out? How are we going to market with these products, et cetera?

And then as the GM of NICE Cognigy I obviously carry the number for these products. So I'm responsible for the growth and I lead the sales teams globally when it comes to the AI portfolio.

Mark Vigoroso (06:52.814)
That's great. That's awesome. So then.

Philipp Heltewig (06:53.762)
Yes, and sorry, you asked about the the Ops Center.

Mark Vigoroso (06:56.504)
the op center, which is probably you're probably very close to that, right?

Philipp Heltewig (07:01.036)
Yeah, I mean, Cognigy in general, Cognigy AI or the whole nice portfolio is an enterprise-focused CXAI portfolio, right? We have a lot of crazy, amazing features in the product to build super high-class, supernaturals, naturally speaking, AI agents. But it's really not just about building AI agents. You need to run those AI agents, and you need to operate them at scale. And AI agents...

unbeknownst to some maybe, AI agents are not a singular technical construct, but they're actually a combination of many technologies. Speech technologies such as converting audio into text or vice versa, the large language models, the APIs that you're calling, other third party tools that you may have integrated in the stack, et cetera, et cetera. And you need to make sure that all of these things are working in order to have a great customer experience. So if only one of them fails,

then your, let's say your voice AI agents or your chat agents will no longer be able to help your customers. And so what we saw throughout the years, a lot of our customers spent a lot of time on analyzing logs when something went wrong. So it's like a customer calls the hotline and the AI agent is not responding. Now, what is it? Is it the speech services failing? Is it some APIs failing that are being called? Are the LLMs being slow, et cetera, et cetera?

Now, if you don't know, you have to check all of these things until you find the answer. Now, what the AI Ops Center does, it gives you a bird's eye view of all these components and how they're operating. And it proactively alerts customers via email or via phone calls or via SMS if something is going wrong in their AI agent stack so that they can fix it and get the services back up so that their customers can be helped. And I think it...

It's a product that really shows our focus on enterprise. Because in large enterprise, where you're getting thousands of calls, tenth of thousands of calls, sometimes an hour, if you're only down for 30 minutes, this has a major impact. And so that's why we've learned from lot of the experiences that we've gathered throughout the years. And that's our newest product that we have just brought out.

Mark Vigoroso (09:22.83)
Got it, got it. No, it's the operational reality, right? It's, you know, I think that people are still learning, you know, around governance, transparency, measurement, risk management around specifically agentic or somewhat autonomous AI use cases, which we'll get to in a little bit, but that's exciting. That's a great, milestone. So you're in the midst of something, this integration, it's a huge challenge for any company. I've been personally on the side of the acquirer, the acquiree.

Philipp Heltewig (09:42.168)
Yes.

Mark Vigoroso (09:52.774)
And it's, I don't think I've ever had the ideal experience of integrating two companies. And I'm curious, I think it's still only about two months old since the transaction closed, but I'm curious what, how has that journey been? Honestly speaking, are there tensions that you didn't anticipate? How do you preserve what made Cognizant great? You know, in the context of, of, of your new parent organization. Talk, talk to me a little bit about that.

Philipp Heltewig (10:06.05)
Yeah.

Philipp Heltewig (10:24.492)
Yes, so quite honestly, mean, of course, when you go through the acquisition process and then you have fears that it might be a very bumpy road after the acquisition, etc. But what I have to honestly say is that it's been a very pleasant experience. Of course, there are challenges, but there are also challenges if you don't get acquired. It's just business, right? I mean, always say business people are in the business of fixing challenges, right? That's what we do. Now, of course, integrating into

such a large organization comes with some change. All of a sudden there are different travel policies, there are different ways of how certain processes work etc. But overall I think what makes the whole thing very enjoyable is that everyone at NICE is on board with the vision and the vision is that we are going AI first. This is what it is. No one's looking back and going oh yeah but we used to do this and that and why don't we continue that? No.

Everyone knows AI is the future and everyone is on board with that. we are what we have met at at Nice. There are thousands of extremely smart people that have built extremely good products. I mean, look at it. Nice is a market leader in pretty much any any analyst report that's out there, as is Cognizant. So it was a bit of a meeting of the minds where two leaders got together.

It was funny when during the acquisition, NICE came to Düsseldorf, so a couple of senior NICE directors came to Düsseldorf and presented their vision for the future. And we had also prepared a presentation where we wanted to present our vision of the future. Now halfway through their presentation, one of my guys went over to me and said, Phil, we don't even have to show our presentation anymore. It's literally the same.

Right. And so that was a moment where I felt I think we're doing the exact right thing here because what this acquisition does, it gives cognitive scale. I mean, we are a market leader in this space, but this one gives us scale that we simply didn't have before. And we get to do it with a whole bunch of people that are as driven as us. So long story short, it was and is actually a very positive experience for us.

Philipp Heltewig (12:47.02)
And sure, there are little mumps here and there, but I guess that's just normal.

Mark Vigoroso (12:51.298)
Yeah, No, that's great. mean, it sounds like, it's in this, to be honest, it's in the group of what unfortunately are the rarer cases where there's more synergy and realization of those synergies versus the evaporation of those synergies. So that's, yeah.

Philipp Heltewig (13:08.92)
Yes.

Philipp Heltewig (13:14.562)
Well, totally. I think it's what you would expect as a large company buys a smaller company, the larger company wants to absorb the smaller company. Now, what we're seeing here is that there's equally as much, OK, please adopt our processes as can we please adopt your processes the way that you've been doing things. Like Cognitive, for example, is extremely strong in the partner area, right, or in the customer success area.

Nice is extremely strong in sales, extremely strong in engineering. coming together, I think we can learn a lot from one another. And this is the nice thing here. Well, no pun intended. That we actually feel heard and that we feel that our experiences and the way that we are doing things is really valued. And so we are feeling very welcome. And I think that makes everything a lot easier.

Mark Vigoroso (14:13.432)
Yeah, and people matter, right? mean, if I'm correct, I think just in the recent, I don't know, matter of months, I think Jeff Comstock has joined from Microsoft and Michelle Cooper from SAP and obviously yourself. And it feels like this sort of confluence of, know, injection of talent, injection of capabilities, obviously from Cognitive G and, you know, kind of teeing up for.

Philipp Heltewig (14:27.246)
Yeah.

Philipp Heltewig (14:41.378)
Yeah.

Mark Vigoroso (14:41.592)
quite an acceleration, right? I mean, the financials look really good anyway, right? In terms of year over year growth from the last earnings report, but it seems like it's a strength on strength strategy, which is really exciting to see. I don't know if you have an observation on that, but that seems like a good positioning going into 2026.

Philipp Heltewig (15:03.778)
No, again, think it, well, firstly, you have to say the prior leadership is to be given a lot of credit because they brought the company into this position, right? Into this position where there is enough cash in the bank to actually drive this transformation. And then there was a clear realization that, okay, we can't continue as we have been doing for the past 10 years.

and then bringing in all this talent to drive this change. And I have to say the people that have been brought in have been excellent to work with. I mean, I'm reporting directly into Jeff. comes from Microsoft. Super great guy, extremely, extremely smart when it comes to product, et cetera, et cetera. And as is Michel in the marketing area and Scott. You didn't mention Scott. mean, Scott is also new. it has been...

Mark Vigoroso (15:52.908)
Yeah, that's right. Yep.

Philipp Heltewig (15:58.189)
Very cohesive though and I think that is great. It almost feels like we've been working together for a much longer time than we actually have.

Mark Vigoroso (16:06.712)
That's great. That's great to hear. It's great to hear. Well, let's talk about agentic for a moment or two. It's obviously where a lot of us are focused and anticipating the real transformation to be based. And I'd like what you said earlier, know, AI is a is multiple technologies. It's not just one thing. And I think, you know, you could you could say, you know, conversational AI.

Philipp Heltewig (16:12.749)
Yeah.

Mark Vigoroso (16:33.366)
is different from agentic AI, which is different from generative and predictive and a lot of different capabilities. But some of the data that I've seen with regards to some of the existing capabilities from NICE, the CXone Mpower Autopilot, I think last year, just enormous growth in interactions, hundreds of percentages of growth, 400 % increase year over year in the area of conversational AI.

you know, where there's, there's hope and, passion and vision for a gentic AI, there's still not a whole lot of bulletproof use cases at scale that show demonstrable, sustainable outcomes operationally and financially speaking, right? There are some, but they're not everywhere. They're not, you know, commonplace, but I believe they will be.

Philipp Heltewig (17:26.637)
Yeah.

Mark Vigoroso (17:30.712)
But I'm curious, as you think about the CX space, customer experience, and you think about your vision and your remit for AI at NICE, where are we on this journey? are we like in the, to use a baseball analogy, since it's the world series right now in the U S are we still at sort of the top of the first inning here with regards to

the maturation of agentic AI or where are we in the journey for realizing the value from the sort of autonomous or partially autonomous workflow model in the enterprise.

Philipp Heltewig (18:16.174)
So I think to answer that, we firstly have to agree on the definition of what most people mean by agentic. I think most people equate agentic with large language model powered customer experience. That's not strictly correct, because agentic does not just mean that the answers are generated by generative AI.

Mark Vigoroso (18:24.312)
Okay.

Philipp Heltewig (18:43.244)
in a scientific or technological sense. But it means that instead of telling an AI agent, this is how you solve it, you go through step A, step B, step C, we're just giving the AI agent so-called tools and knowledge, and then the agent will figure out the solution themselves based on the tools. So I'll give you an example. So let's say you need to update your address.

In the past, you would have said, well, if a customer wants to update their address, ask them for their email address. And then with the email address, you go into the CRM system, you get their record, then you tell them what their current address is. And then you ask them for the new address and then you update it. Now in the new world, what you would do, you would have an AI agent and you would tell it, well, you can update addresses using the CRM. That's all you would tell them like a human.

And then you would say, this is how you retrieve a record from CRM and this is how you update a record in CRM. And then you go like, okay, just go do it. And in the agentic world, the LLMs, the AI behind this is smart enough to then create a plan, which is if a customer says, update my address, need to get a record from the CRM, but I know in order to do that, I need an email address. I'm going to ask the customer for an email address. But we never instructed the LLM.

specifically to ask for that email address. So it's more modeling it on a human model where you give certain capabilities and then the human slash the agent will just figure it out. there are two aspects to this, think, on where are we at and where are we going. The first one is around additional capabilities and speed to market.

And the second one is about customer expectation. So on the technical capabilities, in the old world where we didn't have agentic behavior or LLMs, you encountered one thing quite a lot when you interacted with chatbots or voicebots. And that was, sorry, I didn't understand that. This no longer exists. Back in the days, you'd say, if someone wants to change their adverse,

Philipp Heltewig (21:02.306)
They could say, I want to change my address, or they could say, I have moved, or they could say, my street name has changed, or whatever. So you would need to give it all these examples. Now, in the new world, you no longer need to do that. So you just go like, people can change their address, and that's good enough. And so you don't get stuck anymore. So that will drive up containment rates, or the rates at which an AI agent can handle a customer issue without having to refer to a

So that is the technological side. So there is a clear benefit in using agentic capabilities because the rate at which customer issues can be resolved is just so much higher. But even if it weren't, and that's the interesting part, now that we're all used to talking to the Geminis, the chat GPTs of this world, speaking to a static chat bot feels ancient.

And customers are not going to accept that. And it's going to reflect badly on your brand if you have a chatbot or a voice bot that's from this old world. It will make your brand look old and stale. So you need to, I think enterprises have no choice but to move into this new agentic world from a conversation and a capabilities perspective because customers will simply expect it. And so,

I mean, we have a lot of customers live with agentic use cases. And I think every single customer is working on it. We recently had a hackathon at the Düsseldorf office where we had, think, 50 customers join and they all built prototypes of things that were interesting for them. And then we had a little award ceremony and things like that. And of course, every single prototype that was built was an agentic prototype. No one built a prototype in the old way. So that's over.

And so, yes, it's not extremely common yet, but some of the largest brands in the world that we are servicing have a Gentic Solutions Live already, and everyone else is following suit very quickly.

Mark Vigoroso (23:11.65)
Yeah, no doubt. yeah, I mean the pace, the speed at which innovation is happening, at least in my lifetime, feels unprecedented. It doesn't feel like, you know, the previous rounds of disruption, major disruption with cloud computing and .com and right, and it's just, the pace of AI and particularly agentic AI.

feels unprecedented. And what I like about it in the CX space is that it benefits both sides, right? So if you think about the provider of the customer experience and then the receiver of the customer experience to use generic terms, right? In both cases with an agentic enabled solution theoretically and in practice more and more, you have a more efficient

and more accurate, more precise operation from the provider side, and you have a faster, more satisfactory experience on the receiver side. So it's almost like this, and I see this playing out in so many other use cases, not just in CX, but with speed and precision and quality and efficiency, it's...

Philipp Heltewig (24:22.872)
Yes.

Mark Vigoroso (24:37.226)
it's potentially financially game changing for the provider, not just on the bottom line, but in terms of retention and expansion of the customer, right? So if you're delivering consistent, high quality, sticky, differentiated customer experiences, you're gonna see that on your top line pretty quick, right? In terms of things like net revenue retention and things like that, right? And so it's...

Philipp Heltewig (24:48.75)
you

Philipp Heltewig (25:01.665)
on.

Mark Vigoroso (25:06.158)
And I'm stating the obvious, I guess the question is, when you think about quantifying the implications of what you just described, is, am I on the right track in terms of thinking about it as a, as a win for you, a win for, for, obviously for your company, for your customers and for your customers, customers. mean, is that how you're thinking, thinking about it?

Philipp Heltewig (25:28.056)
Yes. Yeah. And that's the beauty of it. Right. And that's that that makes implementing such technology a no brainer on like, of course, not a no brainer rolling it out. It's still it's still a very involved project. But in the in justifying the necessity for such a technology. And it's really interesting that when you look at the business value that we're driving, obviously we're driving containment. Right. Which means we don't have to have human human agents answer everything. But that's only in customer service.

But the lines between customer service and sales or upsell are actually blurring completely. Say you have an AI agent that helps you throughout your customer journey for traveling on an airline. The day you book, you get a message on WhatsApp or iMessage or whatever it may be. Going like, hey, I'm your AI assistant for airline, blah, blah, blah. If you have any questions, please let me know. Thanks for booking the trip to Dusseldorf.

Now maybe two weeks before they give they ping you again and said hey and your trips coming up We have a business class upgrade for you if you want Right, and then maybe a day before you get information. Okay, the weather and disorder is blah blah blah. Make sure to bring a Bring an umbrella or whatever and so you can you can really do so much more than just reactive customer service it can be proactive customer service and then

What is customer service? Does it actually become revenue generating? And so the lines are blurring and the lines are blurring between service marketing and sales, but the lines are also blurring in terms of modality. in the past, you, I mean, we've all had these experiences, like you talk to a chat bot and then the chat bot at one point goes like, can't really help you. And then it follows you to a human, but the human has no clue what you already discussed.

Of course, if you call into the contact center, then the human has no clue at all what you've already discussed. But the lines with AI are blurring where you have multimodal interactions that can span voice, chat, but also other device capabilities. We have customers that on voice calls then use the device capability such as your device's camera or your device's GPS to create a much better customer experience. And so it's actually a really interesting time to be thinking about

Philipp Heltewig (27:55.331)
holistic customer experience. And it's no longer, let's deflect calls in the call center. That's still a big part of it. But that's really not how you should approach it. You should think about your customer experience much more holistically with the capabilities that such technology now gives you.

Mark Vigoroso (28:13.964)
No, it's exciting times. mean, you know, it's technology is just a piece of it, right? I mean, at end of the day, it's it truly is it's overused, but it's a transformation and it encompasses business process, organizational strategy, talent and skill development, role definition, right? It obviously technology selection and deployment and integration is important, but it's just a, it's just a piece of the transformation that's going on.

which is, it could be a key enabler, in fact it is, but it's not the only thing, right? So let me ask Phil, this is great stuff. mean, like we started off and we talked a little bit about your multifaceted role. And one of the things that I'm curious about as this market matures, you know, it's hard to predict too much farther than, you know, 12 months these days, but.

Philipp Heltewig (28:45.39)
Yes.

Mark Vigoroso (29:09.726)
over time as AI in all of its flavors becomes more and more embedded in the enterprise in the various functions across finance and customer experience and sales and marketing and manufacturing and procurement and HR and all the different functions. Do you think that the chief AI officer role will sort of fade and will no longer be, it'll just be so embedded that you're not going to have a CAIO anymore or will it become

Philipp Heltewig (29:29.72)
Hmm.

Mark Vigoroso (29:38.9)
even more pronounced or will it just sort of plateau and continue to be visible on in the c-suite what any any thoughts on that

Philipp Heltewig (29:47.587)
Yeah, it's a really interesting question and one that I've been thinking about a lot. It's kind of the same question like, should we have AI salespeople that work with salespeople or should all salespeople be AI salespeople, right? So it's a little bit similar to that. Now, I think I'm not a really great person to answer this question though, because I think I'm a little bit of a special chief AI in a bit of a special role because...

Mark Vigoroso (29:56.237)
Yeah.

Philipp Heltewig (30:15.15)
I am both the chief AI officer, which means I own the parts of the AI strategy together with Jeff and Scott. But I also own the execution because I'm also the GM of Nice Cognitive. So I have a dual role. Now, but to your question, so let's just imagine a chief officer that's not me. That is just a chief officer in a more, let's say, traditional enterprise, for example.

I think this is going to be an interim kind of role that exists because in the end marketing will be driven by AI, engineering will be driven by AI. And what is AI? In the end AI is software. It's a different type of software but it's software and we also don't have a chief software officer that works with everyone, right? We have a chief information officer and we have a chief product officer, etc. So it may be a transient role.

Mark Vigoroso (30:48.846)
Hmm.

Philipp Heltewig (31:12.098)
But we'll see. think what it also serves at the moment for lot of enterprises, it's a signal to the market we are taking AI very serious. so if I look at how would I consider myself successful as a chief AI officer, I think if we manage to continue to drive our AI first initiatives, the strategy,

the advance, understanding in the market, which is also a big piece, get our teams internally to adopt AI at scale everywhere in every business function and deliver world class and market leading AI products at scale. I think then I would consider myself very successful in that role. And of course, it's a high bar, but that's what we're here to achieve.

Mark Vigoroso (32:06.412)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's, hard. mean, I kind of see, well, I guess the chief AI officer is like a, I agree with you. I think is what I'm saying. I agree that I think it's going to be a like a very important launching and shepherding type function. And then once it's sort of mainstream in all of its forms, it kind of folds into the CIO or CTO organization, depending on how you're organized and like your point, like your point, it's software.

Right. And it's a, it's a system of systems. It's code that's enabling your business, right? That normally falls underneath the CIO in one form or another. So I agree with you. It's kind of like a much, it's, it's a matter. It's a function of maturation. And I think it will fade, into the role of the, the CIO and maybe there's somebody underneath the CIO that is responsible, maybe you're a specialist in the various, agents or what happened. So.

Philipp Heltewig (33:03.854)
Yeah, I think it's different from a company like us that produces AI software and a company that is not producing AI software. I think in those second type of companies, a chief AI officer is being named because the leaders of the traditional business functions, finance, marketing, sales, et cetera, are not well versed enough in AI.

Mark Vigoroso (33:09.243)
yes, true, true. Yes, yes, yes.

Philipp Heltewig (33:30.328)
to really make the best use of AI. So that's why they nominated a chief AI officer to drive that into the business. Now with us, that's obviously a little bit different.

Mark Vigoroso (33:39.244)
That's a fair point. That's a fair point. We're talking about a tech company or you're talking about an end user corporation that's like a manufacturer that's trying to figure it all out. But yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right, Phil, this is great. I'm disappointed that we're coming to an end, but we're gonna have to let you go here. But I, we do have a bit of a fun speed round here to get to know a little bit more about you as a as an individual. And then we'll, we'll adjourn until next time.

Philipp Heltewig (33:49.102)
Yeah.

Philipp Heltewig (34:07.044)
Yep.

Mark Vigoroso (34:07.948)
So let's say, let's talk about your morning routine. And obviously you probably do a ton of traveling, but I guess it probably depends on whether you're home or not. But do you, tell me just a little bit about like, what's one thing that you do every morning to get yourself going? I mean, are you a coffee guy, a workout guy? You read the paper, do you have a routine or is it vary from morning to morning?

Philipp Heltewig (34:33.711)
I'm a tea guy. I'm heavily addicted to black tea. So tons of black tea. I mean, you saw me sipping tea throughout this interview here. So it's tea. I actually don't eat until midday and I work out in the evenings. So morning is tea.

Mark Vigoroso (34:35.224)
Tee-Gai.

Okay.

Mark Vigoroso (34:46.115)
Got it.

Good for you.

Got it. Got it. Now let's talk a little bit about your German roots. you know, I don't want to make generalizations, but you know, Germans are known for efficiency and precision and quality. And I'm curious, as you go about your professional job and historically, and then now going forward, how does your cultural heritage as a German manifest in how you

conduct your days as an exec. Is that a, yeah, I'll leave it there.

Philipp Heltewig (35:28.707)
Yeah.

I'm actually going to quote someone but I don't know who it is but I read it somewhere and they said Germans lack the capability for subtext so everything is very direct because that makes everything very efficient so I think that describes me quite well I think there's nothing I hate more than wasted waste of time where you sit in like a three-hour meeting

Mark Vigoroso (35:33.826)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Vigoroso (35:41.834)
Yep. Yep.

Philipp Heltewig (35:57.882)
Within 10 minutes you figure out it could have been a 10 minute meeting but you still have to sit there for 3 hours. So I think that German efficiency is very ingrained in me.

Mark Vigoroso (36:00.589)
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Vigoroso (36:09.208)
Well, you realize that time is more valuable than money. So you don't like it when people waste it. Okay. Talk to me. And this one, I might be able to benefit from personally given where I'm at as a, as a founder, but you're, you were a founder 10 years ago and you went through a, you could say a very early pivot and live to tell the tale. Do you have any advice that you would have for a first time founder of any kind on, how to make it through that first year and beyond.

Philipp Heltewig (36:14.841)
That's right.

Philipp Heltewig (36:40.687)
depends on what you're founding. But if you're founding a business, you need to found something that people want to pay for. And this sounds silly, but there are so many startups that I encounter that have business ideas and they sound cool and fun, but no one's going to pay for them. And then it's not a business, that's a hobby, right? So find something that excites you, find something that people are willing to pay for.

Mark Vigoroso (36:42.275)
Yeah.

Mark Vigoroso (37:00.248)
Yeah.

Philipp Heltewig (37:07.287)
and then say no to everything else. This is so important. When we founded Cargengy, we actually didn't do that very well. So we started off with a bear, right? And then we did projects in virtual reality and we did projects in robotics and in car entertainment and in customer service, et cetera, et cetera. Because we said, well, why limit ourselves? And that is the fallacy. You need to limit yourself.

You need to focus on one thing and do that thing really good. You can branch out later when you're a bigger company. But at the beginning, focus on the one value that you deliver and excel in that. That is really absolute key.

Mark Vigoroso (37:47.722)
I love that. Easier said than done, like you like you said, yep.

Philipp Heltewig (37:51.716)
Yes, because all of these ideas of what you can do with your main idea sounds so great. And they are. Take the teddy bear. We could have done the teddy bear as well. It's a valid idea, especially now in the LLM world, But we could not succeed in becoming a major player in CX and building that teddy bear. That doesn't work. You need to do either or. And so focus is really important.

Mark Vigoroso (37:59.373)
Yeah.

Mark Vigoroso (38:20.782)
Yeah, and most founders that I've met are naturally very curious and it's hard to put a filter or a cap on that curiosity. So, interesting. Okay, so you told me a little bit about the journey so far has been quite positive in terms of post-acquisition. Have you had to make any adjustments at all in terms of how you were conducting yourself or your teams as CognitG?

Philipp Heltewig (38:24.43)
Hmm.

Philipp Heltewig (38:30.936)
Yeah, exactly.

Philipp Heltewig (38:42.639)
Yeah.

Mark Vigoroso (38:50.19)
Have you had to make any substantive adjustments?

Philipp Heltewig (38:54.959)
Well, think for me, there's this one answer I can give for me personally, and then there's the other one that I can give for the whole company. So I think in a larger organization, there's a much bigger need for meetings and discussing things, etc. Whereas we just made decisions in groups of two, and that was it. that was fine. So a lot more meetings now. of course, for me, I was the founder.

I was the CEO, I was like, what I said would be done, that's it. And now that's different, but that's also okay, as you get more experienced as a founder, of course, you bring people in and everything. I think this is a change, but it's a welcome change.

Mark Vigoroso (39:28.77)
Yep. Yep.

Mark Vigoroso (39:43.544)
great. That's great. And then last one, Phil, and then we'll let you go is, you know, start to put on your, your crystal ball, look in your crystal ball, look out maybe five years. And if you look at the customer experience space, I won't I won't make it be you know, like boiling the ocean, just look at customer experience. What

what statement do you think will be true in five years with regards to customer experience that will be sort of a summation of the transformative impact of agentic AI? If you get my drift, like what, what do you think will be, I mean, there's probably a lot of different step function improvements in productivity and efficiency and quality and to your point about revenue driving, but is there like a statement that you think will summarize?

Like what are people going to remember about the years 2025 to 2030 with regards to agentic AI in the CX space?

Philipp Heltewig (40:48.781)
I think what people might remember is that this is the area in which we started to having actual conversations with brands. In the past, you did not have conversations with brands and in many cases you still don't have. But if it's really true that marketing, so the phase where you are investigating products,

sales, the phase where you're purchasing a product and services, the phase where you are using a product and you need help with it. If they are all merging and you're having a conversation with a brand across this whole life cycle, then that is something that has not existed in the past, but it's something that I think in the future will be very commonplace. And then the brand perception will really be based on the quality of that conversation and not just the product itself.

So we're all saying this, yeah, CX is the differentiator, and it is, but I think in the future it will be even more true, and I think that's something we're gonna see play out over the next five years in a major way.

Mark Vigoroso (41:55.426)
that's exciting times. Exciting times for sure. It's a great time to be in this space. Phil, that is all the time we have. In fact, I might have overstayed our welcome here, but I thank you for being generous with your time and your insights. Phil, you've got your plate full with three jobs. You probably have more like 10 jobs, but you only told me three of them. But I enjoyed our conversation. Thank you for sharing a bit of your day and your experience and your insights. I know I benefited from them very much. Hope everybody else did too. Thank you for tuning in.

Philipp Heltewig (42:02.499)
Yeah.

Mark Vigoroso (42:25.006)
We will catch you next time on the Enterprise Edge podcast. Until then, have a great day in the US, have a great Halloween, and we'll catch you next time. Take care, everybody.

Philipp Heltewig (42:36.464)
Thank you.