IBM Veteran Previously Oversaw Partnerships within the Watson Ecosystem
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – November 15, 2016 – Equals 3, the entrepreneurial team behind cognitive companion Lucy, has hired IBM’s Jodie Sasse as Managing Director, Partners & Alliances. In this newly created position, one of Sasse’s responsibilities will be to oversee Equals 3’s collaboration with IBM as an authorized Watson partner.
Reporting to managing partner, Scott Litman, Sasse will collaborate with IBM partners and internal teams to further expand partnership opportunities for Lucy, as well as guide Equals 3 on how to deliver on overall partner satisfaction. Recently, the company was named the 2016 IBM Worldwide Watson Innovative ISV Business Partner of the Year at last month’s World of Watson conference.
“Six months ago, we launched Lucy at the Gartner Digital Conference with IBM. On top of being honored as a standout IBM business partner, we’re experiencing rapid adoption of Lucy across many top agencies and Fortune 1000 brand marketers,” said Litman. “We’re excited to bring Jodie aboard what we hope will continue to be an incredible journey.”
Sasse, who joined IBM in 2000, spent the last three years working specifically on the Watson Ecosystem, leading the go-to-market strategy for partnerships with a network of startups, systems integrators and other technology companies. During that time, Sasse was responsible for recruiting partners to leverage Watson’s cognitive capabilities and drove significant growth of IBM partners with commercially available applications built with Watson.
“I’m fascinated by cognitive systems and their ability to augment human intelligence,” said Sasse. “Lucy was built by a seasoned leadership team with a strong track record of delivering results and I’m really looking forward to contributing to Equals 3’s ultimate success in the market.”
Prior to Watson, Sasse held a variety of sales-focused leadership positions within IBM. She created and led the internal Blue Spark Sales Enablement program, designed to hone sales fundamentals, industry and buyer insight and solution expertise. Sasse also oversaw software sales across the retail, CPG, travel and tourism and computer services sectors, and oversaw hardware, software and services relationships for the Life Science industry in the New England region. She began her career at IBM managing IBM Storage Solutions across the retail, healthcare, state & local government, energy and Industrial sectors.
Sasse holds an MBA in Accounting from Sayer Business School at Suffolk University and earned her BS in Finance/Economics from the Martin J. Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University.
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About Equals 3
Founded in 2015, Equals 3 creates advertising and marketing solutions leveraging the cognitive computing power of IBM’s Watson. An IBM Watson developer partner, Equals 3 is part of a community of developers who have created novel apps and businesses by embedding services available on the open Watson Developer Cloud platform. Today, Watson solutions are being built, used and deployed in more than 45 countries and across 20 different industries.
Equals 3 believes the best results occur through “Human-Machine Symbiosis” – the idea that an individual can benefit from the power of technology to be stronger than the individual, and stronger than the technology, alone. Its latest product, Lucy, is a cloud-based supercomputer designed to help Fortune 1000 brands and the agencies that serve them solve today’s biggest marketing problems across research, segmentation and planning. For more information on Lucy, visit http://www.equals3.ai/faq.
Press Contact
Sara Ajemian, DiGennaro Communications
