Former Global CTO of Banco Santander, former Group CIO of Currys, former CEO of IBPAP, and former Microsoft CVP and CTO of AI join the advisory community
Advisors will provide guidance on AAVA platform innovation, AI strategy, C-suite alignment, and enterprise adoption across Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, and the UK
The growing community of advisors will bring practitioner perspective closer to Ascendion as enterprises move AI from experimentation to governed, production-scale outcomes
BASKING RIDGE, N.J., Oct. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Ascendion, an AI-native software engineering company, today announced the appointment of four global business and technology leaders to its AI Advisory Community: Andy Gamble, Jack Madrid, Julieta Ross, Ph.D., and Joseph Sirosh, Ph.D.
The advisors bring perspectives rarely found in one group: executives who answered to Boards, regulators, and C-suites for what technology actually delivered; a builder of AI and data platforms at global scale; and a leader who shaped one of the world's largest technology-services and talent ecosystems. Their experience spans banking, high-tech, media, and retail. Each will work directly with Ascendion's regional and engineering leaders, so their counsel reaches the decisions it is meant to shape.
"We are changing how software gets built. Enterprise leaders have moved past experiments. They want AI that delivers outcomes boards can measure and risk they can manage. Andy, Jack, Julieta, and Joseph have the experience and know where transformation succeeds. They will challenge our thinking, raise our ambition, and help us navigate a period of intense — and exciting — change," said Karthik Krishnamurthy, CEO, Ascendion.
Each advisor will map to a different part of the business, strengthening Ascendion's alignment with leadership communities across the globe.
- Julieta Ross, Ph.D., former Global CTO of Banco Santander, brings two decades of leading technology inside global banks, along with public-company board experience. She will work with Ascendion's leadership on executive relationships, go-to-market strategy, and growth, and will help the company meet the governance, regulatory, and risk expectations that banking and financial services leaders place on AI.
- Andy Gamble, former Group CIO of Currys plc, has spent nearly three decades as a technology buyer and transformation leader across consumer electronics, industrial, and retail businesses. He will advise Ascendion's work across Europe and the UK, with a focus on consumer goods, manufacturing, and retail, and will share what executive teams and Boards expect from a technology partner.
- Joseph Sirosh, Ph.D., former Microsoft CVP and CTO of AI, has spent his career building and scaling machine learning platforms in the high-tech industry. He will advise Ascendion's engineering leadership on the evolution of AAVA and its broader platform strategy as AAVA becomes an orchestration and harness layer for enterprise AI.
- Jack Madrid, former President and CEO of IBPAP, spent five years leading the industry association behind one of the world's largest technology and business-services ecosystems, centered in the Philippines. He brings robust experience working across industries, including banking, high-tech, and media, and will advise Ascendion on Asia-Pacific markets and on how AI is reshaping global delivery, skills, and workforce models.
Together, the advisors give Ascendion an outside perspective on the full spectrum of enterprise AI, from agentic platform strategy and product engineering to industry alignment and delivery. They will add capacity to Ascendion's ongoing work on AI governance, helping ensure trusted impact from AI-native software engineering, and their practice-based insight will inform how Ascendion applies its Engineering to the Power of AI™ approach to commercial models, platform design, service execution, and workforce development.
About Ascendion
Ascendion is a global AI-native software engineering company delivering trusted business outcomes – capital unlock, innovation velocity, lower risk – to 250+ enterprise clients. The company delivers business outcomes at scale by combining expert engineers, AI agents, and AAVA, Ascendion's agentic AI platform. Together, they design, engineer, and operate production-ready software that improves everyday work and life. Learn more at www.ascendion.com.
Engineering to the Power of AI™, Engineering to Elevate Life™, and AAVA™ are trademarks or service marks of Ascendion. AAVA™ is pending registration. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
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Ascendion Expands AI Advisory Community with Four Global Business and Technology Leaders
GUIYANG, China, Oct. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- A news report from CNS: On the evening of October 15, a delegation of journalists from 17 countries and regions drove into Renhuai, in southwest China's Guizhou Province. Through the windows, distilleries and traditional northern-Guizhou houses were scattered across the mountainsides on both sides of the valley; when the doors opened, the mountain air carried a faint scent of grain and of sauce aroma. Over the next four days they followed the Chishui River downstream — Maotai Town in Renhuai, the ancient town of Tucheng in Xishui, the Chishui Danxia tourism area, and then back to Wujiang Village in Bozhou — measuring with their own steps a valley known as the heartland of China's sauce-aroma baijiu, and watching how a place slowly turns a bottle of liquor into a way of life.
The first evening's program waited on a hilltop above Maotai Town. "Tianniang," a walk-through stage show, has no fixed seats: for about sixty minutes, the audience moves through six themed spaces, following the life story of a first-generation liquor blending master as a single grain of sorghum becomes a drop of liquor. Lights, sound, projections and stage sets rise and fall on all sides; at the end, everyone gathers around long tables for a small taste of the local spirit. Wang Ping, a reporter with France-based Faguo Qiaobao, wrote that the show "tells, with quiet patience, the long transformation from a grain of sorghum to a drop of sauce-aroma liquor." Created eight years ago by members of the production team behind the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games ceremonies, it is now listed as a national demonstration case of immersive cultural tourism — and it is the liveliest invitation Maotai Town sends out into its own night.
The daytime itinerary revolved around liquor too, but not around display boards. At the Chinese Liquor Culture City, the journalists lingered longest before a replica of the gold medal certificate won at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition — the medal that first carried the name of Maotai overseas, more than a century ago. In the Hengchang Shaofang estate, also in Maotai Town, 77 fermentation pits inside rebuilt century-old workshops are still in production, and the underground cellar holds thousand-jin clay jars sealed with red silk. Around the corner stand a gallery hung with contemporary painting and a resort hotel. One detail caught the visitors' attention: every tour route in this valley is built around real production sites — travelers watch liquor actually being made, rather than sets put up for tourism.
On October 17 the delegation moved downriver to Tucheng, an ancient town with two thousand years of history. Ming-and-Qing-era flagstone streets follow the contours of the hill; on the mottled brick walls of old salt warehouses, traces can still be read of the days when "salt boats crowded the shore." The Songjiao Museum stands on the remains of Song Dynasty fermentation pits, where more than 3,000 bottles of liquor collected along the river sit quietly on display. In small riverside eateries, some owners now mix sauce-aroma baijiu into cocktails — tradition here does not refuse a new way of drinking.
Following the Chishui River through the Danxia hills, the delegation reached the Chishui Great Waterfall. It lies in the core zone of the "China Danxia - Chishui" World Natural Heritage site — in 2010, Chishui Danxia was inscribed on the World Heritage List as part of "China Danxia." Water drops 76 meters down a crimson cliff, its 80-meter curtain raising white mist in the gorge; locals call it the "First Waterfall of Danxia." Quite a few journalists posted photos and videos of the falls on their usual social platforms the same day — this valley, evidently, sells more than liquor.
The next day's Wujiang Village felt younger: the journalists pressed flower petals into wet paper pulp at the Wuzhi paper workshop, painted patterns and filled in colour on rabbit-shaped lanterns, watched in the daytime as a bamboo-drifting performer walked the water beside a rowing boat, and at night as drone formations lit up the valley.
The logic of change is written in policy. In June 2026, Guizhou Province issued a special action plan to extend the baijiu industry from product sales to lifestyle experiences — adding chateaux, upgrading liquor-tourism attractions and building food-and-wine districts. Zunyi now has 27 star-rated liquor chateaux and 14 liquor-tourism scenic areas; in the first ten months of 2025, Renhuai alone received more than 10 million visits and generated 12.79 billion yuan (about 1.8 billion U.S. dollars) in tourism revenue. The vision of "brewing a better life" is moving from a slogan into one concrete itinerary after another.
Chen Lin, president of Canada-based Souluo Magazine, said at the launch of the event that Zunyi's liquor-and-tourism theme "has special appeal." By the time the trip ended, reports from the delegation were already appearing on their own platforms: some wrote about the valley's liquor, some about its towns at night, and some recommended "staying in the scenery" to readers back home. For Zunyi, this was an arrival it had been waiting for — the aroma of its liquor has long since left the Chishui River; this time, travel routes, hotel bookings and the daily life of an entire valley are going out with it.
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Four Days in the Chishui River Valley
