Meet Sarah Cox, a mastermind in the "experience economy." Currently the chief commercial officer at Stage Precision, Cox is also the founder of Neutral Human—and while she loves to immerse herself in technology, she is driven by helping move creative storytelling forward.
Young Sarah Cox was always a tinkerer. With a neurodivergent brain, she had to learn through figuring out the puzzle of all things. "I think that's what drew me to technology," she said. "To try and pick it apart, put it back together, and make something so I understood the process."
Cox grew up loving to sing, so she never shied from the stage and spotlight. As she moved up the high school ladder, something else grabbed her attention: lights.
"There was a guy up in the booth and he was playing with the lights," Cox recollected. "I went up to have a look and it was literally love at first sight. He was pressing these buttons on this little board and color changing the school stage. I was just drawn to the power that this guy had with this little tech board."
Those lights led Cox, who enjoyed DJing in her spare time (she had a regular gig on New Year's Eve at the Comedy Store for years), to the world of video at the inflection point of 2D video playback. Then, she was off to Disguise, immediately immersing herself in the 3D and real-time visual experiences aspect of the industry.
It was an old co-founder of Disguise, then D3, that created the spark that led to Neutral Human. Cox had done so much for D3/Disguise when it was a startup, her old colleague said she should do the same for other startups.
"I left with a little seed in the back of my head," Cox said. "There are a lot of technologies out there that come out of creative applications that are made by artists and creative technologists, made by people who don't have any productization experience. They don't know how to get connected to users. They don't know if it's any good. But they're sitting on something that's absolute dynamite."
Through Neutral Human, Cox helps artists and tech creatives find the missing links in workflow gaps, find the right people for them to talk to, and explore commercial routes where they move their technologies forward. That's what led her to Stage Precision, one of her early clients with Neutral Human.
“There’s a massive gap in our experiential future,” Cox explained. “We've done audio, we've done lighting, we went into media, we went into advanced media, we went into real-time generative content. That is literally the career path that I followed. Now, we’re into this next gap, which is data and management of 3D data and spatial intelligence. How can we use technology and tie it all together to create truly interactive spatial experiences?"
Though she has yet to be inside the Vegas Sphere, there was a eureka moment for her: ABBA Voyage, the virtual concert residency in London. "Immersive viewing is here and it’s a shared experience,” she noted. “I felt a defining moment for shared immersive entertainment happening in that digital theater experience, a format that we will see more and more.”
Cox's journey is far from over, and that's mainly because she will keep tinkering. "Keep being curious," Cox advised. "We get to something truly innovative by playfulness. I know so many artists create their greatest work in the moment when they're just playing and tinkering and something really beautiful and extraordinary comes out of that playful moment. I want to think about what comes next in a way that is different to what has been done before.”
