Dr. John Ennis - AI, Mathematics, and Sensory & Consumer Science. Founder & CEO of Aigora

I've spent 32 years in sensory and consumer science, starting at 17 writing Fortran code at my father's company. I got a PhD in math. Did a postdoc in computational neuroscience. Then years building AI systems for research teams. Most people pick one of those lanes. I kept crossing them because the problems I cared about sat at the intersections.

Here's why that matters. Anyone can build a dashboard or a chatbot. But if you don't understand how people actually perceive products, the psychophysics, the statistics, the domain, you're fitting curves to noise. The tools I build at Aigora work because they're built on real science and 32 years of doing this work. That's what I set out to do when I founded the company in 2019.

I also spent three-plus years away from sensory, as CEO of NeoSwap/Tulle, an AI startup. It failed. They were difficult years, and they taught me things I could not have learned here: how to lead a software company, and what AI actually does once you're betting payroll on it. They introduced me to people I'd never have met otherwise. And they taught me how much I missed this community.

Aigora drifted while I was gone. I came back, refocused it, and it's stronger now than it has ever been. Those aren't years I'd want to repeat, but I'd be a worse founder without them. I'm here on purpose.

AI is going to change how we work. The gap between "AI exists" and "AI helps me" is a knowledge gap. I want to help close it, with tools and teaching built on actual science, not buzzwords.