Dilip Ittyera
Dilip Ittyera is the Founder and CEO of CogniSwitch, where he leads the company's technical vision and product strategy. He founded CogniSwitch on a conviction that has been building for four decades: as organizations go hybrid — bringing AI agents into their workplaces alongside human workers — they need a digital twin of their enterprise knowledge to successfully onboard and activate those agents. Without it, AI beings cannot be given first-class treatment.
That conviction has deep roots. Dilip began his AI career in the late 1980s, building expert systems at a time when symbolic AI held real promise. When the AI winter followed, he carried the lessons of that failure into a 35-year career spanning startups and large organizations — including NIIT, Hexaware, and Zensar, where he served Fortune 100 customers. Throughout, his thread was knowledge management: how organizations capture, structure, and make their institutional knowledge usable. His tenure as CTO at Zensar became a Harvard Business School case study in enterprise transformation.
When BERT arrived, the dots connected. Neural language models had finally crossed a threshold — but Dilip recognized immediately what they lacked: the structural rigor of symbolic systems. The probabilistic nature of LLMs, powerful as it is, is insufficient for regulated environments where outputs must be traceable, verifiable, and defensible to auditors. Enterprise AI needed a formal verification layer. CogniSwitch is the answer to that gap.
By combining neuro-symbolic AI — symbolic reasoning over structured knowledge graphs — with the fluency of modern language models, CogniSwitch validates AI agent outputs against an enterprise's actual knowledge base, producing audit trails that are deterministic, not probabilistic. A 3X founder and 4X CTO, Dilip brings what few AI company founders can: firsthand experience with both the promise and the failure of symbolic AI, decades of building knowledge systems in the enterprise, and the hard-won perspective of someone who has seen every AI hype cycle from the inside.