The work of a business-software marketer begins in a mildly hostile environment: nobody woke up wanting a new enterprise platform. They wanted the budget closed, the construction job tracked, the safety rules followed, or the hospital shift finished before dinner. The software is the thing in the middle. Abe Cohen has spent more than 25 years trying to make that middle feel useful.
His route to Instinct Science, where he became chief marketing officer in 2025, reads like a tour of the places where software meets professional anxiety. There was business analytics at IBM, performance management at Axiom EPM and Kaufman Hall, construction technology at Viewpoint, and workplace safety and compliance at KPA. Now there are veterinary records, treatment plans, clinical references, billing workflows, client messages, and artificial intelligence. The nouns change. The job beneath them is remarkably stable.
Cohen's specialty is not making simple products sound exciting. It is making complicated products sound consequential without pretending they are simple. That distinction matters in B2B technology, a field that can turn a useful feature into a fog bank before lunch.
Software no one applauds
Cohen studied business management at Willamette University, graduating in 1997, then earned an MBA in marketing from Boston University's Questrom School of Business in 2001. His public profile notes that he finished the MBA with high honors and a 3.84 GPA. By 2006, he was managing go-to-market programs at IBM. He then worked on the integration of Cognos, the business-intelligence company IBM acquired, before moving into global marketing for IBM's business analytics software.
It was a fitting apprenticeship. Analytics software does not sell a moment of delight. It sells a better decision, usually several steps after the demo. The marketer must understand both the machinery and the organizational embarrassment it is meant to cure: scattered numbers, slow reports, dueling spreadsheets, too much time spent reconciling the past.
That same concern surfaced publicly during Cohen's years at Kaufman Hall. Discussing a survey of finance executives in 2016, he noted that finance leaders wanted a larger role in operations, but were still constrained by slow planning cycles and old processes. “A lot can change in a quarter of a year,” he observed. It is a tidy line about rolling forecasts, but also a fair summary of enterprise life. The business has already moved while the spreadsheet is clearing its throat.
One career, five kinds of operational complexity
Trust as operating infrastructure
Cohen's most revealing public comments are not about campaigns. They are about colleagues. During his time as KPA's CMO, he described what happened when sales, marketing, product, and engineering believed the other groups would deliver. “Having trust that other departments are going to execute with high quality is a really good feeling,” he said.
“It starts with good communication, collaboration and holding each other accountable.”Abe Cohen on cross-functional work at KPA
The sentence is almost suspiciously sensible. It also explains why Cohen belongs as much in the operator category as the marketer one. Enterprise growth rarely comes from a single dazzling advertisement. It comes from promises surviving the trip across departments. Marketing describes a capability. Sales puts a date beside it. Product decides what can be built. Customer teams discover whether the description was honest. Trust is what keeps that relay race from becoming an exchange of alibis.
Former colleagues make the same point from the outside. One public recommendation credits Cohen with building Axiom EPM's marketing team from scratch and describes him as candid and thoughtful in executive discussions. Another praises the combination of strategy, execution, care for people, and humor. These are testimonials, not audited findings, but the pattern is consistent with Cohen's own language: he seems to value the connective tissue of a company.
Growth by partnership, not ornament
The measurable result arrived at KPA. Cohen joined the compliance software company in 2019 and remained CMO for more than six years. Instinct's account of his tenure says he helped triple annual recurring revenue growth. It also credits him with developing a channel strategy that brought in more than 50 new industry partnerships.
Partnerships are a revealing growth lever for Cohen. They require the opposite of marketing theater. A channel works only when another organization is willing to carry your reputation beside its own. The positioning has to travel. The economics have to make sense. The customer experience has to survive a second set of hands.
In 2021, Cohen appeared on the PDX Executive Podcast for a conversation about the evolution of B2B marketing. The episode ran a little over 32 minutes, an appropriately practical format for a career spent in categories where buyers have questions that cannot be answered by a billboard. His record suggests an idea of marketing that keeps widening until it includes product, partnerships, culture, and the customer's working day.
A new animal in the room
When Cohen announced his move to Instinct, he wrote that the mission had immediately resonated with him. He was energized, he said, by the chance to tell the company's story and work alongside veterinary professionals and technologists committed to the people who care for animals. The language matters. He did not present himself as the clinical expert entering the room. He presented himself as the storyteller joining those experts.
Instinct was founded by emergency veterinarian Caleb Frankel after his frustration with outdated hospital software. Its portfolio now stretches beyond a conventional practice-management system. Instinct EMR handles hospital workflow and records. Plumb's and Standards of Care provide clinical decision support. Clinician's Brief supplies professional content. ScribbleVet, acquired in January 2026, adds AI-supported documentation.
Workflow + records + clinical references + AI documentation. Cohen's task is to make the combination coherent without losing the people doing the work.
That acquisition gave Cohen a useful opening act in his new role. Instinct described a platform combining workflow, clinical intelligence, and AI scribing. Cohen shared the news as a step toward clinical intelligence rather than mere record keeping. In July, Tuskegee University's College of Veterinary Medicine adopted ScribbleVet for its teaching hospital, with Cohen listed as a media contact. The CMO's work now sits near a particularly live question: how do you discuss AI in a professional setting where trust, judgment, and workflow matter more than novelty?
The answer may draw on his earlier categories. Construction teams do not buy software because disruption is fashionable. Compliance leaders do not admire risk in the abstract. Finance executives do not replace a planning process for the thrill of migration. Veterinary teams will judge AI and practice software by similarly stubborn standards: accuracy, time, fit, and whether the system helps rather than interrupts.
The future, edited for Monday morning
Cohen's off-hours biography offers three small clues about his temperament. He coaches youth basketball. He invests through Oregon Venture Fund. He is usually midway through a science-fiction novel. Coaching, early-stage investing, and speculative fiction are all exercises in seeing what something might become. Only coaching makes you explain the plan to a group that may be thinking about snacks.
The basketball detail fits his professional emphasis on coordination. A play is a promise made by five people at speed. Its elegance depends on everyone arriving where they said they would. The venture investing fits too. Oregon Venture Fund places him in a Pacific Northwest network of operators and founders, close to the uncertain beginnings that large-company career histories tend to smooth over.
Science fiction supplies the longest horizon. Enterprise marketing supplies the shortest. A company may promise to transform an industry, but someone still needs a clear message for the next sales call, conference booth, partner meeting, or product launch. Cohen's career lives in that compression: the future, edited for Monday morning.
Portland is a suitable home base for that combination of scale and specificity. Cohen has held national and global roles while remaining tied to Oregon through Willamette University, the local venture community, and the city's executive network. His 2021 podcast appearance was framed as a Portland leadership conversation, even though the customers and categories in his work stretched far beyond the Northwest. The geography adds a quiet continuity to a career full of corporate name changes. Companies were acquired, products were integrated, and industries shifted. Cohen kept returning to the same regional ecosystem, now as both an executive and an investor.
There is an appealing lack of costume change in his move to animal-health technology. He did not need to become a futurist mascot or borrow a white coat. He brought a practiced concern with systems, partners, measurable growth, and trust between teams. Instinct brought the veterinary expertise and the complicated portfolio. The fit is not mysterious.
For 25 years, Cohen has marketed products that sit in the middle of serious work. The middle can be an awkward place. It is also where a good operator earns the right to tell the story. Not by shouting over the work, but by noticing exactly what becomes easier when the software does its job.