Cogna appoints former McKinsey Partner Ali Korotana as Managing Director, Strategic Industries
Cogna, the AI platform for critical work, today announced the appointment of Ali Korotana as Managing Director, Strategic Industries. Korotana joins from McKinsey & Company, where he spent more than a decade advising executives and investors across some of the most operationally complex industries in the world.
Korotana brings nearly two decades of experience working on the hardest problems in energy, chemicals, construction, manufacturing, logistics, and engineering. At McKinsey, where he was elected Partner in 2021, his work alongside leadership teams ranged from cutting costs in multi-billion-pound infrastructure programmes, to expanding a US$10 billion logistics business into new verticals including defence and pharmaceuticals; from launching a digital platform for one of the world's largest building materials companies, to executing industrial and energy M&A transactions from $50 million to $50 billion. His work has taken him to more than 20 countries, from North America to South East Asia, and from Scandinavia to the Gulf.
Before McKinsey, Korotana spent six years as an engineer with the Maersk Group in oil & gas. He worked in some of the toughest operational environments in the industry — offshore in the North Sea and onshore in remote Kazakhstan — and on the engineering and commercial work behind some of the largest capex investments in oil & gas across Europe and the Middle East.
At Cogna, Korotana will partner directly with CEOs, senior leaders and investors at strategic accounts to drive transformation programmes through the Cogna platform that change how these businesses operate. He will also build Cogna's relationships with private equity.
"Ali has spent his career inside the boardrooms of the world's most operationally complex industries — the exact businesses Cogna is built to transform. He'll help our customers move from isolated AI experiments to programmes that change how their companies run," said Ben Peters, CEO and Co-founder of Cogna.
Korotana's appointment comes as Cogna responds to growing demand from customers across industrial sectors for deeper, transformational partnerships in both existing and new verticals.
