Katie, you spent almost a decade at ExxonMobil before becoming Chief Revenue Officer at Uncountable. How has that experience shaped your approach to innovation, customer relationships, and commercial strategy today?
I spent almost a decade at ExxonMobil selling lubricants and petroleum specialties into the commercial and passenger vehicle markets: Delvac, Mobil 1, the full portfolio. I didn’t work in the lab, but my entire job depended on what came out of it.
I was selling the value of extended oil drain intervals, additive performance, and fuel economy improvements. To do that credibly, I had to understand the innovation behind the products. If the R&D team developed a formulation that extended drain intervals by 20%, that was my competitive edge in the field. If a company couldn’t keep pace with what fleets and OEMs were demanding, it had nothing to differentiate on.
That gave me a real appreciation for how directly R&D output translates into commercial success, and for how much it matters that the people developing products have the tools and data to move fast. It is a big part of why I am at Uncountable now. I have seen from the commercial side what happens when R&D is firing on all cylinders, and what happens when it is not. The companies that innovate faster, reformulate faster, and get products to market ahead of the competition are the ones that win, and that starts with how they manage their data and their development process.
Uncountable talks about putting decades of operational data to work so customers can make better decisions. What makes this historical data so valuable, and how is it being turned into practical insight for the lubricants industry?
Most lubricant companies have 10, 20, 30 years of formulation and testing data. The problem is that it is trapped in spreadsheets, in paper notebooks, in retired scientists’ heads, and in legacy systems that do not talk to each other.
That data is valuable because it represents millions of dollars of R&D investment and thousands of experiments that already answered questions your team is asking again today. What we do is structure it so it is searchable, connected, and ready for AI. A formulator can ask “show me every base oil blend we have tested above this viscosity index with this additive package” and get an answer in seconds instead of days. Our ML models can then predict outcomes before you run the experiment, which means fewer trials, less waste, and faster time to market.
For lubricants specifically, where formulation complexity is high and raw material costs are significant, even small gains in formulation efficiency have a real impact on margins.
The lubricants sector is becoming increasingly data-driven, with customers looking for greater efficiency, reliability, and sustainability. How do you see digital technologies and data analytics changing the way lubricant manufacturers and end users operate over the next few years?
I think we are at an inflection point. The companies that structure their R&D and manufacturing data now will be two to three years ahead of everyone else, and that gap will only widen as AI capabilities accelerate.
In the near term I see three shifts. First, formulation optimization moves from intuition-driven to data-driven. The best formulators will still be essential, but they will have tools that let them explore the design space faster and find solutions they would not have found manually.
Second, sustainability pressure will force companies to reformulate at a pace they have never had to before: bio-based alternatives, lower carbon footprints, regulatory change. The companies that can iterate quickly will win.
Third, the connection between R&D and manufacturing will tighten. Right now there is often a wall between the lab and the plant. The companies that close that gap, so a formulation moves from development to production spec to quality control without being re-entered along the way, will have a significant advantage.
Your team will be exhibiting at Lubricant Expo Europe 2026. What conversations are you most looking forward to, and what challenges do you think are top of mind for the industry right now?
The ones where somebody walks up and says “we have this problem and we do not know how to solve it.” That is where the real discussion happens, not in the scripted booth pitch.
From what I am hearing across the industry, three questions keep coming up. How do we do more with the same size R&D team? How do we reformulate faster as regulation and sustainability requirements change? And how do we stop losing institutional knowledge every time a senior scientist retires?
There is also a growing conversation around AI. Everyone knows they need to be doing something with it, but most companies do not have the data foundation to make it work. Their data is unstructured, scattered across systems, and not in a form any model can use. That is the gap we close, and I expect it to be a big topic at the show.
For those planning to attend, what can they expect to learn from your team, and why is the event such an important opportunity for sharing knowledge and building partnerships across the global lubricants industry?
If you stop by the booth, we will show you what it looks like when decades of formulation data becomes searchable and usable. Not in theory, but as a live demo with real workflows. We will walk through how companies like Lubrizol and Repsol are using the platform today, and we will have our technical team there to go deep on whatever is relevant to your operation, whether that is formulation management, QC, product lifecycle, or AI-driven optimization.
As for the event, Lubricant Expo Europe is one of the few places you get the full value chain in one room: additive suppliers, base oil producers, formulators, OEMs, and end users. The conversations between sessions and at the booths are where real partnerships start. Some of our best customer relationships began at events like this, and I expect this year to be no different.
Meet Katie and the Uncountable team on stand 221 at Lubricant Expo Europe 2026
