The North Sea announces itself before you see it. The smell of cold salt, the gusting wind and the rhythmic sound of waves. Growing up on the Norwegian coast, Stig Martin Fiskå learned the sea the way his family and generations of fishermen did. It was not a backdrop. It was the first and most persistent fact of his life.
When the internet arrived in the late nineties, it felt similar—another vast and mostly uncharted space, full of untapped opportunities. Something clicked then.
I was sixteen when I started developing interest in programming and learned to build websites and reverse-engineer them. As I gained more exposure, I began supporting small businesses and founded my first company.
“The most important lesson that I learned early—it’s about the value you deliver and the value perceived by the client.”
What followed was two decades of building eight companies, through the dotcom boom and later, each one an attempt at delivering value through technology.
By 2020, I was looking to start a new venture when the Covid pandemic hit. Investors disappeared, my daughters were young (one and three years old) and I felt it wasn’t the right time. So, for the first time in my career, I started looking for a job.
One day, a recruiter from Amsterdam called me. She was warm and enthusiastic in explaining the role, and she made me feel comfortable while explaining all details. I was little nervous as I had never worked for a big company before, but she talked me through it, showed me the larger picture and it wasn’t long before I joined Cognizant as an AI change agent.
A work trip to San Francisco put me in the same room as a former colleague, who was working at Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory. We caught up, and the conversation turned to oceans—to the industries built on them and the damage being done to them. He asked if I wanted to collaborate and I said yes. That conversation became Cognizant Ocean.
We began with the salmon farming industry, where AI could help reduce the carbon footprint of fish feed—the single largest source of emissions in aquaculture. From there we moved to shipping, which carries eighty percent of the world's trade and burns fuel at a scale that demands attention. The work kept expanding as the problems kept expanding.
In the UK, we collaborated with a client to build a consortium of water companies, securing 6.5 million pounds in funding and using AI to detect the multiple sources of pollution degrading their systems. The models are now working—open-sourced and freely available, with agencies like the UN helping to take them further.
Then came the whales. Vessel strikes along migration routes have been increasing at 18 percent year-on-year. We are now building a system to track whale movement and alert shipping operators before a collision happens.
Last year, I transitioned into a new role—Global Head of AI for Good at Cognizant's AI Lab. While Cognizant Ocean applies AI to specific industries like shipping, water, aquaculture, etc., AI for Good asks the larger question—how do we make sure this technology works for everyone, not just the clients who can afford it?
I love collecting wines and shooting photography at night in near-total darkness. But the thing that grounds me the most is spending time with my daughters beside the North Sea or hiking through nature. They are seven and nine now, almost the same age when the ocean made an everlasting impact on me.
Looking back, I can connect all the dots. A childhood beside the North Sea, curiosity to build cities of Legos, reverse-engineering things and the entrepreneurial spirit, all found its place at Cognizant. First through Cognizant Ocean, where we applied AI to improve the health of oceans, and now through AI for Good where the ambition is even bigger. The ocean taught me to think at scale. Cognizant gave me the place to act on it.
From her early fascination for machines to shaping the future of responsible AI, Kathrin’s career shows how embracing change and innovation can transform careers—and the world.
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