Leadership Spotlight: Mark Wise on Building the Future of Industrial AI

Startup Instincts, Enterprise Scale

Mark's career arc reads like a masterclass in how to build compounding advantage. Chapter one: raw, scrappy, building from scratch. Chapter two: lead and build it to scale. Together, they form the kind of foundation that's rare in any industry.

Right out of college, he joined a small software startup serving the energy sector. As employee 77, he wore many hats - inside sales & marketing  customer training, implementation services , partner development, solution engineering etc. When the company began expanding internationally, he raised his hand. 

"I was kind of the first guy they put into a new region to go figure it out — whatever that meant," he recalls. Over the next several years, that meant opening markets across the Middle East, Australia, and Asia Pacific, developing an almost cellular understanding of how industrial customers adopt and extract value from software.

"You get intimate with a lot of different functions in a business when you're in startup mode," he says. "I failed probably more than I care to talk about, but there was a lot of learning and growth in that. I was fortunate to have an amazing leadership team who encouraged, coached and supported me throughout that journey”.

Chapter two began when that startup was acquired by GE. Suddenly, the question wasn't how to build something — it was how to move something enormous. Mark was selected for GE's executive leadership program, spending time at Crotonville alongside some of the industry's sharpest emerging leaders. The curriculum was less about tactics and more about transformation: how to drive meaningful change inside a company with 300,000 employees, how to lead through ambiguity, and perhaps most importantly, how to understand yourself as the primary instrument of leadership.

"Leadership boils down to working on yourself…..a lot," he says. "Understanding where you need to focus, how you motivate, and how you actually affect change in a really large company."

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Slow Down to Go Fast

Ask Mark about his leadership philosophy and he doesn't reach for a framework or a catchy acronym. He reaches for a pattern he's watched play out across organizations for decades.

"I saw a lot of leaders come and go in the last 10 years," he says. "They came in with an agenda on day one and wrote a charter on day two and didn't read the history book — and I saw a lot of them falter."

The lesson he drew from watching those leaders struggle isn't that ambition is dangerous. It's that speed without context is. "They're sort of doomed to repeat the sins of the past," he says. "A big company is a big ship. You can work really hard on a lot of different things, but  it’s hard to feel the ship turning day to day.  In such an environment, clarity, persistence and ruthless prioritization is key….. A great learning from my time at GE.” 

His alternative: soak first. Understand how things got to where they are before charting where they should go next. Build relationships. Listen more than you speak. Map what's working before you try to fix what isn't.

"Everybody knows where the gaps are," he says. "The challenge in a smaller company is that when everybody's doing a lot of things, it's hard to get them to sit down and realize they could go faster if they took a step back and built a process that makes things more repeatable."

It's a philosophy that sounds patient,  but it's ultimately about velocity. You slow down to go fast.

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Why This Moment, Why CrossnoKaye

After six months of reflection, Mark had a clear picture of what he was looking for: a smaller company where he could make an outsized impact, in a space he knew deeply, with technology that felt genuinely disruptive. He wasn't interested in going back to big enterprise software. He wanted to find something that felt like the early days of Meridium — the startup where his career began — but with the benefit of everything he'd learned since.

"CK literally could not have checked more boxes for me," he says.

The product was a significant part of the pull. Seeing the technology in action — watching what's possible when AI is applied to real industrial environments — stopped him in his tracks.

"Once inside, when I saw the tech do its thing, I was taken aback," he says. "The tech is there, the people are there, the passion is there. The foundation is strong and the opportunity is real".

What also stood out was timing. The confluence of forces shaping industrial operations right now — rising energy costs, mounting decarbonization pressure, the maturation of AI — has created a window that won't stay open indefinitely.

"AI and agentic automation are ready to explode," he says. "The technology now exists to do what people have been talking about for a long time: have AI actually control the plant floor. I've not seen anybody do it yet — except here. And others are talking about it and tiptoeing there. So the race is on."

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The Competitive Edge No One Is Talking About

Mark's read on the market is direct: the companies that move first on AI-enabled industrial automation won't just reduce costs. They'll compete differently.

"Decarbonization and energy costs spiking create immense pressure on people to actually take action," he says. "They can no longer just talk about it and tiptoe into it. People are going to have to take leaps and bounds. And those that do in industry today are going to create separation from their competitors — which will allow them to compete in the marketplace in a completely different way."

That competitive edge, he argues, is what makes early adopters more than customers. They become co-builders of the next generation of the technology.

"We want to find those companies that believe in technology as a competitive edge," he says. "They will be quick to adopt and they will help us build what comes next."

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A Culture Built to Move

One of the most striking things about Mark's perspective on culture is what he doesn't say. He doesn't talk about building culture from scratch. He doesn't talk about instilling values or writing mission statements. He talks about protecting something that already exists.

"Culturally, I think CrossnoKaye’s got it," he says. "It's almost: how do you keep the culture in check? It's super positive. There's a lot of energy, a lot of moving parts. The challenge is maintaining that passionate, innovative culture as we scale”.

The real leadership task, as he sees it, is channeling that energy into a coherent direction — building what he calls "right-to-left thinking." Start with where you want to be in three to five years. Work backward. Define the specific tasks and actions that create line of sight to that destination. And don't let the next shiny thing pull you off course.

"The culture to innovate here is amazing," he says. "So I don't worry so much about the culture. What I'm focused on is making sure we can point all that energy in a common direction and build something that lasts.”

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What Comes Next

The willingness to be a learner — even at the CRO level — is, itself, a form of leadership. After 25 years of building and scaling, Mark Wise isn't slowing down. He's pointing the ship - toward a market that's ready to move, a technology that's already leading, and a team that's built to win. 

We're thrilled to have him leading the charge.

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