Interview with Benjamin Oghene, The Cozm
Benjamin Oghene, a computer scientist turned tech executive, has reimagine the future of work and has created a company that is helping to reshape it.
2 June 2025
His career began in the Big Four, working at EY, Deloitte, and PwC in roles focused on technology, automation, and innovation. He had all the trappings of success: a fast-track role and, by his own admission, “a bit of geekiness” when it came to data and systems.However, it wasn’t until a secondment to a major multinational client where he witnessed first-hand the challenges faced by in-house global mobility specialists - that he began to see the opportunity to integrate and streamline the systems governing work and mobility. Benjamin will be our panellist expert on Technology & AI: disruption or advantage in global strategy in London on June 4 for our Global Leaders Forum: Forging a Path in Our Fragile World. This event offers a rare opportunity to pause, connect, and engage in meaningful conversation with global changemakers from across international mobility, leadership, HR, and education.Benjamin’s experience in the mobility team opened his eyes to a number of processes and policies which he would later choose to address when he set up his own company, The Cozm, named after the cosmos, (κόσμος) the Greek word for the world.“It was my first exposure to what clients actually do, some processes were repetitive, highly automatable, and were lacking in data driven decisions,” he explains. He then noticed that at some organisations, the number of male employees sent on international assignments far outweighed female employees..“The figures were completely skewed,” he says, “and it was obvious to me that we could use more data to address that. Secondly, the people we were sending to various parts of the world, especially Eastern Europe, would outgrow their roles, and so the company would not have a role for them to come back to. Then they would leave and go to work at a rival firms. So, we were training up people to leave.”Then, when he returned from his secondment and was back working in central London, Benjamin reflected on his experiences working with a major Oil & Gas company that regularly sent assignees from Houston to Lagos. As someone with deep ties to Lagos—his parents were born there—he noticed that local talent with the same skills often went unconsidered. “But I had a lot of data which showed that there were people who had the same skills however were not being considered.”As he ruminated on this, Benjamin realised that the global mobility industry had a lot of repetitive work that could be automated, and that a lot of decisions were being made around moving talent which should be based on data, not intuition.As a result, the idea for The Cozm was born, and Benjamin’s ultimate aim was that anyone, regardless of gender, ethnicity, country of origin or religion, should, if they have the right skills, be able to fill a role globally.“Our mission is to remove two big blockers,” he says. “One is to take away the very onerous compliance and operational activities. Secondly, to improve collaboration between departments and ensure that the decisions that are made about who to send are backed by data. Within large organisations, there is usually a talent acquisition function, and a completely different mobility function, and these departments hardly ever work together because of a lack of tools. Our mission is to change that and facilitate collaboration and cooperation for better decision making.”The Cozm works with companies to streamline and automate global mobility and business travel functions cutting costs and time taken by a significant margin. As the world continues to change as a result of developments in technology, globalisation, demographics, and regulation, many companies are finding it tougher to source, manage, motivate and retain talent while controlling costs.
By augmenting human and artificial intelligence as part of an integrated business strategy, The Cozm offers organisations the ability to find the right people whilst mitigating human bias. It uses advanced technology to address effective talent deployment and mobility, gain value from evolving and virtual workforces, and manage the changing role of HR. The Cozm is focussed on transforming global talent management and providing opportunities for technologists of disadvantaged backgrounds. The team that Benjamin has recruited is deliberately diverse.
New demands on global mobility teams
Overall, global mobility teams are being asked to take on broader talent and operational roles, while facing tighter budgets.Just as governments are erecting more administrative barriers—like the EU’s Posting of Workers Directive, or new immigration restrictions in the United States, companies are either cutting the staff needed to navigate them. They are giving the HR and mobility teams a much wider remit without the accompanying budget needed to do the job effectively.In addition, governments are demanding greater oversight, and corporations are asking global mobility teams to do a bigger job with fewer resources.At the same time, the global mobility function is now expected to manage not just assignments, but business travellers, remote workers, and international hires too.While this might seem like a perfect storm, technology can help integrate the different aspects of the mobility role and reduce the time taken to fill in forms, work out payroll quotas and carry out due diligence.For decades, mobility professionals have been viewed as compliance gatekeepers—charged with managing tax, immigration, and relocation services while saying “no” more often than “yes.” According to Benjamin, this stereotype is outdated and self-limiting.“Instead, they can play a vital role in talent strategy—but only if they are equipped with tools that help them make decisions, not just enforce policies.” In other words, when empowered with data and automation, the mobility function becomes a bridge between talent acquisition, HR, and the business—offering solutions, not roadblocks.Read related articles
- Staying ahead: Future-proofing the global mobility function
- Getting global mobility partnerships right
- The future of workforce management
- AI in global recruitment and HR: overcoming legal problems and built-in bias
Does AI improve talent strategy outcomes, or reinforce bias?
One of the criticisms of AI and automated decision making is that it reinforces bias. This is because the AI programmes are trained on data that already exists, and programmes are written by humans with their own in-built bias. Benjamin acknowledges this dilemma, but explains that in some cases, AI can show less bias than humans.“It is highly likely that digital intelligence will have similar biases to humans,” he says. “The difference being that one human can cause a little bit of damage, for example one police officer near Liverpool Street can cause a little bit of damage. However, a digital model with bias can cause a lot of damage at scale.”In other words, the risk of Artificial Intelligence is not that it will replace all jobs, but that it will amplify the biases of those who build and train it. “Digital intelligence is biased for two big reasons. First of all, it's usually developed by people from a very narrow demographic group and a certain gender. If you look at the pictures of the leadership teams of any of these technology companies, that is clear.The second source of bias is training data. When a programme is developing a digital model that is predicting attrition, predicting who is going to be successful in an international role, predicting which immigration application should be accepted or declined, if the data set that is used to train a model is not diverse enough, that model is going to have a lot of bias.”He believes that in 12 to 18 months from now Global Mobility teams and teams managing talent will be heavily reliant on digital intelligence. The transactional work, once done by humans, will be fulfilled by AI instead.“The transactional role will migrate from the human specialist to AI, and a new role will be created which is more closely aligned to talent mobility,” he says. “The questions will be, are we moving the right people? Where do we have talent gaps coming up in future? How can we fill those? How can we increase the speed of deployment?In other words, the human role will be augmented by digital intelligence. In our world, when we say AI, we don't mean artificial intelligence, we mean augmented intelligence. We make a human and digital intelligence model that works together, giving a much better outcome than if you went 100 per cent digital.”AI can also have positive outcomes, and Benjamin points to an example from his time at Unilever, where an AI interview tool was piloted for a leadership development programme. In one year, gender diversity in selections increased by 14 per cent, and recruitment costs dropped by over £1 million. The implication is clear: in some cases, the right use of AI can reduce bias — or at least expose it, but only if organisations are measuring the outcomes, questioning the assumptions, and prioritising fairness in design.
The rise of Augmented Intelligence
The Cozm’s philosophy is that “augmented intelligence”, a human-machine partnership where each compensates for the other’s limitations, can bring equity and data clarity to global talent movement and can:- Automate the repetitive and compliance-heavy operations that often take valuable time from HR and mobility teams.
- Enable data-driven, fairer decisions around where talent is moved and why.
A new world of working
So what does this mean for workers — particularly those just entering the job market? This leaner, tech-augmented model of working will demand new skills, new tools, and a very different kind of professional. Using what Benjamin calls “digital agents,” tasks that once took hours, like securing a certificate for work in a European country, can now be done in under a minute.In a striking example, The Cozm worked with Cisco Systems during preparations for the Paris Olympics. Just two weeks before the event, the company was informed that it would need official “EU Posted worker” notifications and A1 social security certificates completed for its team.Rather than the usual six-week turnaround, which would have been too late, The Cozm’s automated system completed the task in seconds, and for a fraction of the cost.As machines take over the repetitive tasks, the nature of human work will evolve, he says. Many people will find that the actual job they do today will not exist in five years. But this doesn’t spell doom, instead, new roles and specialisms will develop in their place.Benjamin says humans will be doing the roles machines can’t do—relationship building, ethical decision-making, stakeholder alignment. Nevertheless, the transition will not be easy for everyone. Professionals will need to reskill continuously to stay relevant, and the most important skill to acquire will be to learn continuously.
The people most likely to adapt in the AI age, he says, are not those with the most experience, but those with the most agile minds.“Owning property, land, or even a small stake in an AI company will be more valuable than ever,” he predicts.But perhaps most valuable of all, he says, will be self-investment in learning. “If you know how to learn, adapt, and pivot, you’ll always have value. Meta-learning (the ability of humans to improve the way they learn with experience) is the best asset anyone can own in the AI economy.”
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