contact-center
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Bruno Bertini Wants B2B Software to Make You Feel Something
His route to the C-suite began beside contact-center agents, not in a brand studio. Two decades later, the 8x8 CMO is still listening for the human signal inside the technical noise.
Kelly Maiden Wants Marketing to Give You Goosebumps
The Aspect CMO has a simple test for creative work: it should make somebody feel something. Her route from a teenage auditorium to a global technology rebrand explains why she still steps away from the laptop to find the idea.
Jay Lee Wants Marketing and Revenue to Speak the Same Language
The Five9 growth chief trained as an engineer, learned marketing inside payments giants, and now runs a job that most companies keep in two separate offices.
Juan Jaysingh
Juan Jaysingh is the CEO and Board Director of Zingtree, a Palo Alto-based B2B SaaS company that turns complex, regulated business processes into clear, guided actions for customer support and contact center teams. Since taking the top job in January 2020, he has grown Zingtree into a profitable platform serving 700+ enterprise customers across roughly 50 countries, with a focus on AI-driven CX in highly regulated industries like healthcare, insurance and consumer products. A former competitive tennis player who immigrated to the U.S. alone from India at 14 on tennis scholarships, Jaysingh previously founded the college-community app ZeeMee (CNBC Upstart 25, 2017) and led go-to-market at Universal Tennis. He argues that AI in customer service only works when built on solid processes, structure and human accountability.
Brian Schiff
Brian Schiff is the co-founder and CEO of Flip CX, a New York voice AI company that automates customer service phone calls for retail, ecommerce, healthcare and transportation brands. He and Sam Krut started the company at Cornell in 2015 as a campus ride-hailing app called RedRoute, then pivoted to voice automation after seeing how broken phone support was. Today Flip has processed more than 300 million automated calls for around 250 global brands, automating up to 90% of inbound volume. In January 2026 the company raised a $20M Series A co-led by Next Coast Ventures and Ridge Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $31M.
Alvin Nicolas
Alvin Nicolas is a technology professional at Webex, Cisco's enterprise collaboration platform headquartered in San Jose, California. With a career spanning telecommunications giants including MCI WorldCom, Microsoft, and Yipes Enterprise Services, Nicolas brings deep networking expertise to one of the world's leading collaboration and video conferencing platforms. He is associated with the AI Titans initiative at Webex, reflecting the company's aggressive push into AI-powered communications and collaboration tools.
Alexey Aylarov
Alexey Aylarov is the CEO and co-founder of Voximplant, a Voice AI orchestration and cloud communications platform (CPaaS) powering 30,000+ customers and 2+ billion calls annually. A VoIP engineer turned serial entrepreneur, he spent 20+ years in telecommunications before building Voximplant into an enterprise-grade platform combining serverless infrastructure with AI-driven voice and video communications. Based in Sunnyvale, California, he co-founded the company in 2013 alongside Sergey Poroshin and Andrey Kovalenko, guiding it to profitability in under two years and through a $30M Series C raise in 2021.
Gadi Shamia
Gadi Shamia is the CEO and co-founder of Replicant, a voice AI platform that automates customer service calls at enterprise scale. A serial entrepreneur who sold his first company (TopManage) to SAP, helped EchoSign sell to Adobe for $400M, and scaled Talkdesk from seed to unicorn as COO, he brings two decades of building and scaling B2B software companies to the challenge of replacing traditional IVR systems with natural-sounding, AI-driven conversations. Under his leadership, Replicant has automated over 1 billion minutes of customer interactions and raised $113M in funding.
Marty Sarim
Marty Massih Sarim is the President of Sanas, a real-time speech AI platform that modulates accents and eliminates background noise for contact center agents globally. An Afghan refugee who came to the US in the early 1980s and started his career at 18 as a call center agent, Sarim brings over 25 years of BPO and contact center industry expertise to Sanas. He is also Co-Founder and General Partner at Carya Venture Partners, a $20M micro-fund focused on deep tech and enterprise AI, and founder of the Moe123 Scholarship Fund, which has awarded $125,000+ to high school seniors in the Minneapolis area.
Maxim Serebryakov
Maxim Serebryakov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Sanas, a Palo Alto-based AI company building the world's first real-time Speech Understanding Platform. Born in New York and raised in Russia, Serebryakov co-founded Sanas at Stanford with two fellow international students after witnessing a friend face accent discrimination in a contact center. The company's AI modulates accents in real time while preserving a speaker's voice, tone, and emotion - serving 150,000+ live agents across 39 countries. Sanas has raised $149.2M in total funding, including a $65M Series B led by Quadrille Capital in February 2025.
Nikola Mrkšić
Nikola Mrkšić is the co-founder and CEO of PolyAI, a voice AI company building enterprise-grade conversational agents that handle customer service calls so naturally that callers sometimes apologize mid-sentence for being rude to what they assume is a person. Born in Belgrade in 1991, Mrkšić earned a full scholarship to Cambridge, completed a PhD on spoken dialogue systems, co-built VocalIQ before Apple acquired it, and then founded PolyAI in 2017 with two Cambridge lab colleagues. The company has raised $206M across four rounds - most recently an $86M Series D in December 2025 at a $750M valuation - and its voice agents now handle calls for Marriott, FedEx, Caesars Entertainment, and over 200 enterprise customers across 45+ languages in 25+ countries.
Raghu Ravinutala
Raghu Ravinutala is the co-founder and CEO of Yellow.ai, an enterprise-grade conversational AI platform that automates customer and employee experiences at scale. A former IC design engineer turned AI entrepreneur, he built Yellow.ai into a $500M-valued company serving 1,300+ enterprises across 85+ countries, with $79.5M in annual revenue and over $102M raised. Under his leadership, Yellow.ai developed proprietary LLM technology and a multi-LLM architecture trained on 16 billion conversations annually, processing support in 135+ languages across 35+ channels.
Ryan Wang
Ryan Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Assembled, the AI-powered customer support platform trusted by Stripe, Robinhood, and Etsy. A former machine learning engineer at Stripe (employee #80), he co-founded Assembled in 2018 with his brother John Wang and Brian Sze after observing how hard it was to run exceptional support at scale. Assembled has raised $70.7M, including a $51M Series B led by NEA, and now manages contact centers with up to 20,000 agents across chat, email, voice, and workforce management.
Tiago Paiva
Tiago Paiva is the founder and CEO of Talkdesk, the AI-powered cloud contact center platform he built from a 10-day hackathon project in 2011 into a $10 billion enterprise unicorn. Born in Portugal and trained as an engineer at Instituto Superior Técnico, he packed his bags for San Francisco two weeks after winning a Twilio hackathon and never looked back. Under his leadership, Talkdesk has grown to over 2,000 employees in 16 countries, posting $420M in ARR, and pioneering agentic AI across the entire contact center stack.
Tim Shi
Tim Shi is the co-founder and former CTO of Cresta, the AI platform for contact centers that grew to over $100M ARR and raised $401M from Sequoia, a16z, and Greylock. A Tsinghua CS graduate who did early AI research at OpenAI alongside Andrej Karpathy — including the 'World of Bits' paper on web-based reinforcement learning agents — he co-founded Cresta in 2017 with Zayd Enam after both dropped out of Stanford's AI PhD program. In 2025, he co-founded Recursive Superintelligence, which emerged from stealth with $650M at a $4.65B valuation to build self-improving AI systems.
Vasili Triant
Vasili Triant is the CEO of UJET, an AI-powered cloud contact center platform backed by $183M in funding and built on Google Cloud. With over 20 years spanning Cisco, Serenova, LiveOps, and ShoreTel, he has navigated virtually every inflection point in enterprise communications - from on-premise PBX to cloud-native AI. Appointed sole CEO in April 2025 after serving as CBO, COO, and Co-CEO, Triant now leads UJET's push to reshape customer experience with agentic AI orchestration, deep CRM integration, and a mobile-first architecture that treats the smartphone as the default CX channel.
Vickram Saigal
Vickram Saigal is a seasoned product leader and co-founder with over a decade of experience at the intersection of technology, business strategy, and emerging markets. After stints at Bain & Company, the Gates Foundation in Ethiopia, IDEO.org, and Adobe - where he built low-latency identity and privacy systems for Adobe Advertising Cloud - he went on to serve as Head of Product at SaaS Labs (makers of JustCall), leading a 20+ person product and design team as the company scaled to a $42M Series B. In November 2024, he joined Fundamento as Co-Founder to drive product and technology innovation at one of India's leading AI-powered voice agent companies backed by Google, applying his decade of experience across global enterprise software to the frontier of AI-native customer experience.
Ping Wu
Ping Wu is the CEO of Cresta, a Sunnyvale-based AI company transforming contact centers with generative AI. Before leading Cresta, Wu spent 14 years at Google where he co-founded the Contact Center AI (CCAI) Solution and Vertex AI platform. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara and a BS from Fudan University. Under his leadership, Cresta raised a $125M Series D in November 2024 and quadrupled its ARR, serving enterprise clients like United Airlines and Cox Communications.
Dave Rhodes
Dave Rhodes is the Chief Executive Officer of Verint, the AI-driven customer experience automation company formed through the combination of Verint and Calabrio under Thoma Bravo. A career software executive, Rhodes spent 11 years at Autodesk as VP of the Americas before joining Unity Software as Chief Revenue Officer — where he scaled revenue from $130M to $600M — and later as SVP/GM of the Digital Twins business. He then served as CEO of Sauce Labs and CEO of Calabrio before taking the Verint helm in February 2026, leading one of the largest CX data sets in the world spanning workforce engagement, agentic AI, and customer analytics.
Dmitri Lepikhov
Dmitri Lepikhov is the CEO of MightyCall, a San Francisco-based cloud call center and VoIP platform built for small and mid-sized businesses. Since taking the helm in 2015, he has grown the company by over 500%, landed it on the Inc. 5000, and earned recognition from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as one of America's most innovative small businesses. A CPA by training with roots in auditing and corporate finance at firms like Deloitte and Severstal, Lepikhov has positioned MightyCall as a G2 Leader in Contact Center Solutions and expanded its engineering footprint to Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Michael Gold
Michael Gold is the Chairman and CEO of Intermedia Intelligent Communications, a Sunnyvale-based AI-powered cloud communications company serving over 150,000 businesses through a network of 7,500 channel partners. Since co-leading Intermedia's acquisition in 2011, Gold has grown the company's revenues and profits more than 7x, transforming it from a hosted email provider into a comprehensive UCaaS and CCaaS platform. A Stanford MBA and electrical engineer by training, Gold is a veteran cloud services operator who previously founded Zlago, led Sphera (acquired by Parallels), and served as SVP at Qwest Communications. His signature strategy - selling through partners who resell under their own brands - has made Intermedia a quiet powerhouse behind some of the biggest names in business communications.
Sushil Kumar
Sushil Kumar is CEO of Cyara, the AI-powered customer experience assurance platform trusted by global enterprises to test and monitor over 350 million customer interactions annually across 135+ countries. A builder with 25+ years scaling category-defining platforms, he co-founded RelicX.ai (acquired by Harness), scaled Oracle Enterprise Manager into a $1B+ business, and led CA Technologies' $500M AIOps division and Broadcom's $200M+ DevOps portfolio before taking the helm at Cyara in December 2025 to lead the next phase of AI-driven CX assurance.
Ashish Nagar
Ashish Nagar is the Founder and CEO of Level AI, a Mountain View-based enterprise AI company that has raised $73.1 million to transform how contact centers operate. Armed with a B.Tech in Applied Physics from IIT Delhi, a Stanford MS, and a Stanford GSB MBA, Nagar cut his AI teeth building the Alexa Prize at Amazon — a project to make Alexa hold a 20-minute conversation on any topic, collaborating with researchers from MIT, CMU, Stanford, and Oxford. He founded Level AI in 2019 after recognizing that the same ambient AI breakthroughs powering voice assistants could be turned toward the unglamorous but massive world of customer service. The company's vertically integrated, CX-native large language model now analyzes 100% of customer conversations for enterprises like Affirm, Penske, and Carta, detecting seven distinct emotions, cutting call handling time by 10-25%, and onboarding agents 30-50% faster.