Oren Butansky and the art of starting at the bottom

Oren Cohen Butansky remembers arriving at El Al and encountering a closed gate. In his telling, the guard wanted to know what he was doing there. Butansky explained that he was the new executive responsible for customers and service. The reply questioned the very premise: what customers, and what service? It is a wonderfully awkward welcome for someone whose job title depends on both.

He tells the story looking back on 2021. The attraction of the anecdote is its lack of ceremony. There is no reception line, no reassuring introduction. There is an executive, a guard and an immediate disagreement about whether the job has anything to work with. Whatever the organization chart said, the work would have to begin somewhere more basic.

By June 2026, Butansky had a different appointment: deputy CEO and head of the Private Customers Division at AIG Israel. His responsibilities cover sales, service and claims. He had crossed into another industry, carrying a long career in dealing with customers and a willingness to become a beginner again. He would need that willingness. Insurance, he wrote, came with lessons and exams.

The view from the service desk

His earlier career moves through businesses that people tend to contact when something needs doing. Mobile communications. Internet connections. Credit cards. Banking. These are familiar services until a transaction fails or an answer becomes difficult to obtain. Then the organization behind the product becomes suddenly, intensely interesting to its customer.

At MIRS Communications’ sales company, SDM, he held a sales leadership role. At 012, he led internet support centers. By June 2011, he had joined Isracard’s management as head of customer service. The sequence matters because sales and support expose different parts of the same relationship: the expectation created before purchase and the experience that follows it.

His education brought another pair of perspectives together. He studied economics and social sciences at Bar-Ilan University, psychology at the Open University, and business and marketing at master’s level. A balance sheet and a conversation require different kinds of attention. His published academic background gives him a foot in each room.

During his Isracard years, he offered an observation about digital channels that has aged rather well. A chief executive might see efficiency; a marketing chief might see innovation and positioning; a service chief might see a better customer experience. One initiative, several reasons for approving it. A project can receive unanimous support while its sponsors quietly expect different things.

That observation helps explain why service work so often involves translation. The customer describes a problem. Each department recognizes the piece it owns. Someone has to connect the pieces before the customer is asked to describe the problem for a third time.

An airline, learned from the ground

At El Al, Butansky approached the business through practical work. He flew alongside flight attendants, cleaned the lounge and helped load supplies onto aircraft. These activities supplied something that a presentation about the passenger journey could only approximate: an encounter with the tasks that make the journey possible.

There is a useful indignity in learning work performed by people you will later help manage. The executive’s vocabulary has to meet the employee’s actual sequence of actions. Time has a different texture when a task must be completed before the next person can begin. A process diagram rarely looks hurried. Its human participants sometimes do.

The changes during his airline tenure included crew training, service tools and investments in the passenger experience. An airline’s service extends well beyond the seat. It includes the conversation before departure and the help needed afterward. Connecting those encounters requires departments that can recognize the same customer across different settings.

In a 2022 interview, Butansky described the importance of being present wherever customers were: overseas stations, service centers, social networks and the aircraft itself. The ambition was broad, but the practical implication was plain. A customer should be able to find the company at the point where a question arises.

By 2025, his account of the work placed employee experience beside customer experience. Giving cabin crews better tools and stronger backing was part of improving what passengers received. A service instruction becomes more useful when the person expected to follow it has the means to carry it out.

The person at the other end

In September 2025, Butansky described a sharp change in demand during wartime disruption. His usual volume of approximately 300,000 monthly inquiries had risen to two or three million. Those were figures he gave for El Al’s service operation at that time, and their scale makes the organizational challenge unusually clear.

He also described a change in what people wanted from the conversation. Self-service had its place. During uncertainty, many customers wanted an actual person. The contrast was visible in their behavior, rather than in a debate about whether a particular technology was fashionable.

“But when [the war started], people wanted to speak with people.”

Oren Cohen Butansky, September 2025

His response included senior executives answering customer messages and more flexible arrangements for changing plans. He was describing decisions that connected service to authority. A sympathetic answer has limited value if the person giving it cannot help alter the customer’s next step.

As 2026 began, he publicly set out a position on AI: it should improve processes and precision while employees supplied empathy and judgment. That leaves plenty of room for technology. It also asks a more exacting question of a service organization: what happens when the customer’s circumstances require a decision?

The useful distinction lies between a task that can be completed consistently and a situation that needs interpretation. A company needs both capacities. The difficulty is arranging them so that the customer does not become responsible for discovering where one ends and the other begins.

Thirty minutes and almond milk

Away from the service operation, Butansky’s public writing returns to a smaller encounter: someone asking him for coffee. Often, he says, the request comes from an experienced person reconsidering a career. The proposed half-hour carries the hope that another person might help them see a way forward.

He argues for making the time, partly because the roles can reverse. Today’s person with the crowded diary may eventually be the one asking for a conversation. His invitation even includes a preference: coffee with almond milk. Executive networking briefly acquires the reassuring specificity of an actual drinks order.

One of his recollections concerns Tomer Cohen. During Butansky’s time leading direct banking at Bank Hapoalim, Cohen approached him with questions about recruiting good people, keeping them and building service. Butansky later described visiting Cohen at Wolt’s offices and remembering that earlier conversation.

The interest in the story lies in its continuity. A conversation that begins before someone’s later appointments can remain memorable years afterward. Butansky’s account gives the questions about people and service the starring role. They survive the change in company names.

He has also written about the adults who believed in him while he was growing up. Despite later completing three degrees, he said he doubted he would have finished high school without that encouragement. It is a personal account of help received, and it gives his interest in offering time to others a particular resonance.

His professional conversations also extend beyond his own employers. In 2023, he joined an FTE Global panel on how customer experience should evolve for passengers by 2030. In 2026, Unistream listed him among the judges for its entrepreneurship competition. These are different settings from an airline service operation, but both put him in rooms where people are considering what to build next.

There is a modest connection between those public appearances and the coffee invitation: experience can be made available to other people. It can enter a formal discussion, a judging session or a conversation across a table.

The next set of exams

When he announced the AIG move, Butansky wrote that he had expected to take a few months after leaving El Al to pause and think. Opportunities arrived sooner. He chose insurance and thanked AIG Israel CEO Yfat Reiter, the board and global management for their confidence. The planned interval between chapters became rather shorter.

His new responsibilities join the beginning and the testing point of the customer relationship. Sales brings people in. Service helps them navigate the product. Claims is where a request meets the terms of a promise. Putting those responsibilities in one brief makes their connections difficult to ignore.

Butansky’s stated introduction to insurance was to take the training followed by new employees. He wrote about study materials, presentations and certification exams. His experience could help him ask questions, but it did not exempt him from learning the answers specific to this business.

In an account of his first month, he described beginning by listening, learning, asking questions and spending time with the people doing the work. He would form his opinions afterward. The order is revealing. A senior appointment can create pressure to sound certain before the new arrival has learned which questions matter.

The career began this story at a gate, with someone questioning the practical meaning of a title. At AIG, it arrives in a classroom. The setting has changed, and so has the product. Butansky is again giving himself work that a title cannot complete for him: learn what the organization asks of its people, then decide how to lead them.