SEATTLE & LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 17, 2026--
CogitX AI, a sovereign AI platform company, today announced the appointment of Michael Ellgass as President, Retail.
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At CogitX, Ellgass will lead go-to-market across the company's retail offerings, including marketing, supply chain, and merchandising, with a focus on commerce media. The mandate reflects CogitX's core bet: retailers that own their AI outright, rather than rent it by the token, keep costs flat as adoption grows and build capability that compounds over time. That bet is already in production at one of the world's largest agency holding companies, where CogitX is rapidly transforming engagements and workflows with AI powered by the platform.
Ellgass joins CogitX from Circana, where, as EVP of Global Commerce Media, he built and scaled the company's retail media business from scratch across North America, EMEA, and APAC, working with retailers such as Sam's Club, Walgreens, Instacart, and Coles. Earlier, Ellgass led category marketing at Walmart, the discipline that evolved into retail media, building marketing plans with more than 200 brands. He began his career in brand marketing roles at Kraft Foods.
"We are excited to have Mike on board," said Pradeep Parappil, co-founder and CEO of CogitX AI. "Retail is at an inflection point, with new experiences and opportunities powered by AI. Michael has a rare, complete view of how retailers operate and how AI can power what comes next. We look forward to working with him."
"The industry sells retailers access to intelligence. CogitX sells ownership of it," said Ellgass. "This is a model that lives inside a retailer's own environment and gets smarter with every interaction, without a bill that scales with success. I believe the retailers that come out ahead in this next chapter will be the ones that own their intelligence rather than rent it."
CogitX AI is a sovereign AI platform company building the intelligence layer for retail. The intelligence is owned by the retailer, improves with every interaction, and is unmetered.
The platform turns a retailer's disparate data sources into one intelligence layer (Retail Brain), and the retail product suite covers the full span of commerce media, from planning and creation to measurement.
Learn more at www.cogitx.ai.
Walmart and Circana veteran Michael Ellgass appointed President, Retail at CogitX AI for market expansion.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The unprecedented spate of mid-decade redistricting for the U.S. House has changed the congressional districts for one-tenth of Americans and significantly altered the makeup of at least one-fifth of districts, according to a new study.
A report by Protect Democracy found that 34.8 million people — about one in 10 Americans — now live in a different district than they did during the 2024 election cycle. And about one-fifth of all Americans now live in a district where more than a quarter of voters are new to the district compared with the last election cycle.
The findings display the stark overhaul that partisan redistricting fights kicked off by President Donald Trump last year have caused for Americans across the country. The new congressional maps are increasingly drawn in ways that favor partisan politics over factors like geography and shared communities. That raises concerns among scholars about how the country's hyperpolarized politics are affecting American democracy.
“If this trend continues, it really brings into question whether or not elected officials are really representing their constituents anymore, or if the voters are being randomly picked by mapmakers to squeeze out partisan advantage," said Ben Raderstorf, a policy advocate at Protect Democracy and one of the paper’s co-authors.
The bare-knuckled partisan redistricting battle for the House began when Trump urged the Republican-controlled legislature in Texas, the second most populous state, to redraw its congressional map to help the party. The highly unusual plan prompted an immediate response from California, the most populous state, which held a successful referendum to tilt its map toward Democrats.
Other states followed, and Republicans are positioned to potentially gain nine seats because of redistricting.
The Protect Democracy report warns that such partisan tactics reduce faith in American elections generally and insulate incumbent lawmakers from public opinion. That can make political organizing more difficult, the report cautioned, potentially worsening the country's already highly polarized politics. Both parties may also enter a “doom loop” where they embrace more aggressive and frequent redistricting efforts to avoid ceding any ground to their rivals.
In some states such as Missouri, the mid-decade redistricting has created confusion for voters about which district they live in and which candidates will appear on their November ballot. After conflicting lower court rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court last week blocked new Missouri districts backed by Trump that had been used in the primary, leaving the state to revert to its previous districts for the general election.
The report concludes with a call for new electoral structures the authors believe would eliminate the potential downsides of partisan redistricting, like proportional representation or a formal truce between the parties to implement nonpartisan districting plans.
Nine states already use nonpartisan commissions to draw congressional district lines but those provisions have limits. California, for instance, suspended its nonpartisan maps with a referendum last year in response to Texas' redistricting measures.
Such remedies would face long odds in Congress and statehouses, but scholars believe there are few other avenues to turn down the temperature in the partisan redistricting fights.
“This is only going to get worse until somebody stops it,” Raderstorf said. “The logic of gerrymandering points inevitably towards maximalist partisan advantage on both sides. There is no off-ramp other than reform. It is the only way to break the cycle.”
This photo taken with a smartphone shows Steve Perry, of Kansas City, holding a sign in opposition to Missouri’s congressional redistricting plan on Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026, outside the state Capitol, in Jefferson City, Mo. (AP Photo/David A. Lieb)
