In this episode of the Achieve Podcast, host Taylor Baker interviews Praveen Challa, founder and CEO of Cogniv, about the launch of the company’s AI consulting platform built for ServiceNow. Praveen explains how his background in ServiceNow workflow automation since 2009 led to the creation of Cogniv, a platform that discovers, decodes, transforms, and helps enterprises thrive with AI‑enabled workflows. He outlines the current six‑person team, ambitious plans to scale to 100+ employees, and a market opportunity of $250 billion in the workforce AI space, expanding to a $400‑$450 billion TAM by 2028. The conversation covers the platform’s value proposition—accelerating consulting engagements from weeks to days through human‑in‑the‑loop AI, the immediate constraint of removing ServiceNow customizations, and a roadmap to extend the technology to other SaaS and ERP systems such as Salesforce and SAP. Praveen describes the ideal customer profile (large enterprises with >$1 billion revenue, multi‑platform legacy workflows) and targets 5‑6 customers in year 1, scaling to 20 by 2027, each with hundreds of critical workflows. He shares lessons learned about convincing enterprises, the importance of rapid MVP/POC delivery, and the three‑to‑four pillars needed for success: technology, creative integration, the right customer, and mindset. The episode ends with a call to action for listeners to learn more via cogniv.com and LinkedIn.
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Welcome to another episode of the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs, those who are building meaningful businesses, shaping their industries, and having an impact. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and excited today to be joined by Praveen Challa, the CEO and founder of Cogniv, and you can find them at cogniv.com. That's C-O-G-N-I-V. So Praveen, first, thank you for joining us today.
Thank you, Taylor Baker Baker. I'm honored to be part of this podcast.
I appreciate you coming on and sharing your wisdom. So I know you have some good news with what just happened recently, but give us the backstory on how you got into the space and who you're currently serving.
Sure. I think it's the right timing to talk about the launch of Cogniv. So today we launched Cogniv. I came out of stealth mode for the past 3 months. We've been building Cogniv as a platform. So Cogniv is the first AI consulting platform for ServiceNow. And today we went live. It's, it's an amazing journey for me. Yeah. And where and how, why did I think about Cogniv? Where did I get started? So my journey in the AI and the workflow automation and ServiceNow started way back in 2009. Of course, AI was not there at the time. We talk about machine learning, we talk about some automation, but AI was really not there. But then we, the journey was when I started working in ServiceNow, I've been digitizing those workflows for customers and we call it as the automation, automating workflows, digitizing workflows, whether it's business processes or IT or employee workflows. Eventually with the advent of AI, everything opened up and everything changed. We are at the inflection point where things are happening much faster and we are unearthing some of the capabilities that we were not able to do in the past. I thought this is the right time that Cogniv, of course, is that platform that I should launch serving customers, any organization, whether it's a healthcare organization or a banking or an insurance customer, and unearthing those workflows that have been legacy workflows, which have been customized to the core using Cogniv It's an opportunity to kind of make them more AI-enabled, make them seamless, provide much greater experience to their employees and customers. Wow.
And so how big is the teaming organization right now?
So right now, so Cogniv is a startup, um, as I said, and then the team we have, we are like 6 people. We have an offshore team at the same time we have an on-site team. I'm the founder and the CEO. I have a CTO who is sitting in India, and then we have a few architects, ServiceNow architects. Right now they're working on looking at each and every workflow. We are at the verge of signing up a contract with a customer, transforming their workflows, business workflows. So the team is more busy, but the plan is to grow to a 100-member team by end of this year.
Wow, that is massive growth. So what do you anticipate driving that growth?
Mainly the— so there is $250 billion TAM, total addressable market, right now in that workforce space. Yeah. AI, the overall AI TAM is more than a trillion-dollar market. And with industry solutions, it's going to be around like $400 to $450 billion market by 2028, 2029. I think we are just scratching the surface. And with AI, I think there's so much opportunity across all the SaaS platforms. All the ERPs and the business workflow. So I think that opportunity is helping the growth, I believe. And I believe even 100-member team by end of this year is like very conservative. If I go a little aggressive, it could be more than that for sure. Wow.
So what would you say, looking back for you, what turning points have had the greatest impact on how you think about and run the organization?
The impact, I would say I've been working in the— for large partners for large companies in the past, like Cognizant and IBM. I was a, I was a CTO for IBM in the GBS space, so for the ServiceNow practice. I was the global business head for ServiceNow business with Cognizant. You know, the way large partners approaching to solve this problem is a little different than the startups. Nobody— startups have more agility, nimbleness. They can pivot much faster than these large large organizations, uh, not naming all those large organizations, right? I think I feel that that opportunity is going to create some new companies or new transformation projects as well. And then I feel that opportunity has to be addressed by all the startups, and that's how it started.
Hmm, that's a good distinction there. So when you think about your messaging, your outreach, your marketing systems, what's been working well, or what has worked well in the past to attract and keep good clients?
I think the clients haven't been seen, haven't seen something like a consulting platform yet. So we talk consulting in a team manner, in a bunch of parties sitting at the customer site and then trying to help customer transform those workflows. It worked in the past, but now the AI help, like with the help of AI, That is, the, the, the number of people that you need, the number of resources that you need have been shrinking, and then the usage of AI platform has been increasing a lot day by day. Yeah. And then, yeah, and we can approach the consulting in a much faster manner compared to, uh, like if, let's say, if a team takes almost a month to perform a job, with AI you should be able to do it in less than a week, right? So this Cognizant AI consulting platform would is like an accelerator. It works in human-in-loop, of course. Human uses it, but it makes things much faster. It discovers the ServiceNow and other instances much faster. In, in within an hour, it should be able to bring all the workflows, complex workflows that a customer is running, and then identify the heat map saying that, oh, some of these workflows need to be automated. So that approach is not there in the past, and I think Cogniva is That's the IP of Cogni at this point.
Wow. Wow. So with all the, the opportunity on the table, where do you see the most opportunity available?
The most opportunity available is in the technology workflows. That's the low-hanging fruit, I would say, right now, where AI is just automating every part of the technology workflows. The next would be the employee workflows. I would say combined technology and employee workflows is something that Right now, we're able to automate at least 95% of it. That's a huge opportunity. The other big opportunity is in the industry workflows, whether it's a supply chain, whether it's procurement workflows, or a B2B in the automotive dealer, dealership workflow, B2B dealer management workflows, or the healthcare claims exception, claims workflows. Some of those workflows would We should be able to use, using AI, we should be able to make it more automated, more AI-enabled. I think that would be my next phase too, but I'm just attacking the low-hanging thing right now.
Wow, that makes sense.
Yeah.
So if you had to pick one constraint to focus on and solve for the next 90 days, what would it be?
That's a very good question. So one constraint to focus and solve in the next 90 days. The constraints of removing the customizations in ServiceNow SaaS platform and make every customer move to out-of-the-box or use AI to automate their workflows. I would say that's the number one constraint that I'm focusing right now for the next 90 days.
Yeah, I could see that. It's just removing that friction in the process. Wow. So when you look at your own journey, the wins, the mistakes, what lessons stand out to you and which ones do you feel like maybe took longer to learn than they should have?
In the startup or in general, in the whole life?
I guess both.
I would say the longer is convincing a customer to, you know, identify those opportunities because the change for the customer to make a change is very, very important. But at the same time, it's very difficult. It's longer to convince any large enterprise to have the change. And then it took, it took sometimes it took multiple sessions, workshops, roadshows, you know, to kind of convince the customer, show the value of it. And by showing the value, like by running some MVPs, POCs to convince that, that's, that's the longer part that I see. And then I think with I believe with AI that is getting, um, um, I think that the gap is getting shrunk right now with AI. Uh, AI is able to bridge it by showing the MVP in days, not weeks or months. So that's what I feel. Yeah, we're able to solve that problem so much faster.
It's unreal, the speed at which things just come. It's like a fire hose sometimes.
Exactly.
So when you look at the business, where— I mean, growth-wise, you want to be 100 employees. Where do you want the business to be in a year, 18 months from now?
From a revenue standpoint, you mean? Correct.
Yeah. Or client base, how many clients?
Okay, I'll talk about the number of clients. So year 1, I'm looking at, um, close to 5 to 6 customers, 5 to 6 customers in year 1. Year 2, I'm looking at close to 20 customers by end of 2027. And these are all recurring customers, recurring revenue, and then transforming every workflow. My, my vision is discover, decode, transform, and thrive. So for customer, if I can discover those workflows and identify those workflows, transform those workflows, right, and then decode them before I transform, Then once we transform, thriving is most important. How do they thrive in the AI? So making them AI-enabled. My thing is workflow by workflow is my target. So for customers, on an average, every customer runs close to 300 to 400 workflows minimum day to day. Some large enterprises run thousands of workflows, but those are the critical workflows I would like to transform, help them move faster, think faster, and reimagine themselves. Wow.
Discover, decode, transfer, and thrive. I like that. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So when you think about the next stages of the business, what are you most excited about?
I'm most excited about the platform itself. The initial, the, the version 1 of this platform is able to identify some of the complex workflows in, in ServiceNow. The next set of platform is to move across other SaaS platforms, whether it's Salesforce or SAP or other legacy ERP solutions or in-house solutions that customer host. Love to identify, like, have those hooks into those platforms, identify those legacy workflows running across cross-platforms, and then create that roadmap of transforming them to be AI-enabled. If I solve that problem, I think that's, that's the magic wand I'll be having. I think that's a— that would be the game changer.
Yeah. And what do you feel like has to go right for that to actually happen?
I think that it's not the technology. The technology is there. It needs a lot more A lot more thinking, a lot more creativity in integrations. And then that's what I'm working right now and the team is working right now. And then the right customer that is needed to kind of integrate into multiple systems. And then of course, the right mindset from a customer standpoint to make that change. All these 3 or 4 pillars have to come together for that to happen. Yeah.
That makes sense. And who would you say is the right customer or the ICP?
The right customer could be any large enterprise. I would say any customer with minimum billion-dollar revenue kind of a customer having multiple platforms running and then who have been in the operations for more than 20 years, you know, implementing lots of workflows for their employees and customers and now struggling because if for them to serve, if a particular workflow is our business process taking weeks or days to serve a particular customer, that's an opportunity. So how can we do it much faster? How can we do it in hours or days and not weeks or months? Whether it's in the supply chain or in the shipment or in e-commerce, you name a customer, every customer has a problem of serving back to their end customer. So yeah, any large enterprise here. Wow.
I love that. So Praveen, For those who want to learn more, who want to reach out, LinkedIn obviously is a good spot, then cogniv.com, anywhere else you want to send them?
Yeah, cogniv.com is the best. Always can learn and I would love to— they can send me a personal email through cogniv.com and then I'm happy to set up some time, walk them through the platform. Awesome.
Any final thoughts for our listeners or others on a similar journey?
Yeah, change is a big thing. We are all ready for the change and we should be ready for the change and reimagine yourself and reimagine your enterprise and how you want to run your enterprise. That's the final thought.
I love that. And you touched on that earlier where it's like change is— making change is very difficult, but it's also very crucial.
Yeah, that's critical.
You can help navigate that, remove some of that friction. So thank you for coming on. Sharing your story and insight.
Oh, thank you, Taylor. Appreciate it.
And thank you to our sponsors of today's episode, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executive leadership for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed the episode, share it with a friend, with a colleague. If you're wondering with your organization how to maximize some of the efficiency, you're not sure where to start, reach out to the team, to Praveen, and go on the website. Just, just start the process, start the conversation.
Yep, absolutely.
Reach out and we'll see you all in the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.
