SAN JOSE, Calif., 2026 – Today we’re proud to share that Kognitos has been named “Natural Language Understanding Solution of the Year” in the 2026 AI Breakthrough Awards, one of the longest-running and most respected independent recognition programs in the AI industry.
This year’s program drew over 5,000 nominations. The 2026 winners list reads like a roll call of the companies shaping where AI is going: NVIDIA, Snowflake, Intuit, Zapier, Dell, AMD, Qualcomm, Okta, Inflection AI, and Kognitos. It is, to put it mildly, pretty incredible company to be in.
Why this category, and why this win
Natural Language Understanding is a crowded field in 2026. Every AI company claims it. Most are doing some version of the same thing: routing language through a large model, extracting intent, and hoping the output is close enough.
We built Kognitos to do something fundamentally different.
For us, NLU isn’t a chatbot feature or a sentiment classifier. It’s the interface to the enterprise itself. When a finance lead at one of our customers describes a three-way match process in plain English, our platform doesn’t just understand what they meant. It compiles that description into governed, deterministic, production-grade execution. The same English that briefs a colleague briefs the platform. The same words that document the process run the process.
That’s the bet behind “English as code.” That’s what the AI Breakthrough judges saw. And that’s what earned us Solution of the Year in a category most of the AI industry is competing in.
What the AI Breakthrough Awards recognize
The AI Breakthrough Awards are now in their ninth year, making them one of the longest-running independent honors in the technology industry. Winners are selected by an independent panel of industry experts evaluating originality, technical depth, real-world impact, and the degree to which a product genuinely breaks through in a crowded market.
A few things about this recognition that we don’t take for granted:
- Over 5,000 nominations across categories this year. Competition for each category is fierce.
- Independent panel review, not popularity voting. The judging is exactly the kind of scrutiny we want.
- Past winners include NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Perplexity, Mistral AI, Sony, Meta, Cursor, Microsoft, HeyGen, Cohere, and Databricks. The bar is high.
Being named Solution of the Year in Natural Language Understanding, in a year this competitive, in this peer set, means the architectural decision we made years ago is now the one the market is converging toward.
From our founder
“Natural language understanding is no longer a feature. For enterprises that want to actually deploy AI in production, it’s the entire interface. We built Kognitos so the people who run the business can describe what they need in the language they already speak, and trust that the platform will execute deterministically, with full governance. Being recognized as the Natural Language Understanding Solution of the Year by the AI Breakthrough Awards, alongside companies like NVIDIA, Snowflake, and Intuit, tells us the market sees what we’ve seen all along. The future of enterprise automation is English, governed by architecture, not by prompts.”
Binny Gill, CEO and Co-founder, Kognitos
This one is for the team
Recognition for Natural Language Understanding lands a little differently than other awards. NLU is the layer of the platform every other capability sits on top of. If our English-as-code interface doesn’t understand what a business user actually meant, nothing downstream matters.
So a Solution of the Year in this category isn’t a single team’s win. It’s:
- Every engineer who has built and refined the symbolic reasoning layer that grounds language in deterministic execution.
- Every linguist, ML researcher, and product engineer who has fought to make the platform understand finance the way a finance lead does, supply chain the way a supply chain operator does, and procurement the way procurement actually works.
- Every customer success leader and solutions architect who has carried real-world language patterns back into the platform.
- Every GTM, ops, and customer team member who has carried the message into the market and back.
Thank you. This one is yours.
The bigger picture
The 2026 AI Breakthrough Award for Natural Language Understanding Solution of the Year now sits alongside:
- Gold Globee® Award and Best in Category for Neuro-Symbolic AI Platform, 2026 Globee Awards for Artificial Intelligence
- #1 overall and Exemplary Provider in the 2026 ISG Buyers Guide for Automation and Orchestration
- Most Innovative AI Product at SiliconANGLE Media’s 2026 Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards
- Sample Vendor in the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for AI in Finance, 2025
- Hot Tech Vendor 2025 by HFS Research
- MIT Sloan Innovation Winner
- Ventana Research Digital Innovation Award
Seven different recognition bodies, seven different evaluation lenses, one consistent answer: governed, deterministic, English-driven automation has moved from contrarian thesis to category-defining standard.
If you’re navigating the gap between AI pilots and AI in production, we’d love to show you the Natural Language Understanding solution that just won Solution of the Year.
Book a Demo → Or try it free →
About the AI Breakthrough Awards
The AI Breakthrough Awards is a leading independent market intelligence organization recognizing the top companies, technologies, and products in the global AI industry today. The 9th annual program received more than 5,000 nominations from over 18 different countries throughout the world. Awards are determined through a rigorous evaluation process conducted by an independent panel of industry experts, ensuring that every winner represents a genuine breakthrough. For more information, visit AIBreakthroughAwards.com.
About Kognitos
Kognitos automates business operations with the first neurosymbolic AI platform engineered for robust governance and tool consolidation. Winner of the 2026 AI Breakthrough Award for Natural Language Understanding Solution of the Year, the 2026 Globee® Gold for Neuro-Symbolic AI Platform, SiliconANGLE Media’s 2026 Tech Innovation CUBEd Award for Most Innovative AI Product, and named #1 Exemplary Provider in the 2026 ISG Buyers Guide for Automation and Orchestration, Kognitos uniquely turns tribal and system knowledge into documented, AI-refined automations using English as code, creating a dynamic system of record for enhanced productivity and decision-making. Its unified platform supports hundreds of use cases, free from the risks of brittle bots or black-box AI. With a patented Process Refinement Engine, Kognitos delivers faster ROI, lower costs, and empowered teams. Kognitos was named a Sample Vendor in the Hyperautomation in Finance category in the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for AI in Finance, 2025 (Alex Levine, Ash Mehta, 1 August 2025). Headquartered in San Jose, California, Kognitos is backed by leading investors including Prosperity7 Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Wipro Ventures.
AI Breakthrough Awards is a trademark of Tech Breakthrough LLC. Globee® Awards is a registered trademark of Globee Awards LLC. Gartner® and Hype Cycle™ are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Media contact: PR@kognitos.com
