Tagged: customer-experience
30 results
Matt Clare
Filmed on the expo floor of CCW 2026, this CX Today conversation with UJET's Matt Clare cuts against the deafening tradeshow chorus of 'automate everything.' Instead of using AI to stop customers from reaching out, UJET's newly acquired Spiral analyzes 100% of customer conversations to explain WHY customers are calling, so companies can fix the underlying problem. Clare argues that people still trust people, that AI's real job is to superpower human agents rather than replace them, and that customers deserve choice in how they get help. The talk touches on UJET's brandable mobile and chat SDK, its analytics-to-action loop, and the emerging world of agentic experience orchestration.
Stop Building AI Walls. Fix the Reason People Call.
Spiral by UJET is an AI-powered conversational analytics platform that uses Deep AI Research to autonomously analyze 100% of customer interactions across voice, chat, email, surveys, social media, and reviews. Rather than deflecting customers with AI walls, Spiral finds the root cause of why people contact support in the first place and helps teams eliminate avoidable contacts at the source. Founded by Elena Zhizhimontova and acquired by UJET on November 18, 2025, Spiral continues as a standalone product while feeding conversational intelligence into UJET's cloud contact center platform.
100% of Agents Use AI Every Day. Zero Think It's Essential.
UJET's Agent Survey Report, 'The Agent and AI Disconnect,' surveyed 250 U.S. frontline contact center agents at mid-market and enterprise companies to compare AI hype with the daily reality on the call center floor. The findings reveal a striking paradox: while 100% of agents use AI every single day, 78% say those tools are not transformative, 93% are confident they could do their jobs without them, and not a single agent considers AI critical to their success. The report argues that immature, bolt-on AI — especially chatbots layered onto legacy systems — is deflecting customers rather than helping them, leaving agents to clean up failed bot interactions. It closes with a seven-pillar blueprint for turning AI from a liability into a genuine agent co-pilot.
The Underdog That Refused to Retrofit
UJET is a cloud-native, mobile-first, CRM-native contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) platform positioning itself as the modern 'Experience Center' alternative to legacy giants like Five9, NICE, Talkdesk, and Genesys. Built around enterprise-grade AI, a zero-PII-storage architecture, and two-month deployments, UJET has raised roughly $231M across five rounds at an estimated ~$500M valuation. This story sizes up where the underdog actually stands in a consolidating CCaaS market where every vendor is shouting the same AI promises.
Freshworks
Freshworks is a cloud-based business software company that builds easy-to-use customer service, IT service management and CRM tools for companies that found legacy enterprise software too complicated and too expensive. Founded in Chennai in 2010 as Freshdesk, it became the first India-born SaaS company to list on Nasdaq in 2021 and now serves tens of thousands of customers worldwide with an AI assistant, Freddy, woven through its products.
John Paul
John Paul is a Paris-based premium concierge and customer-loyalty company that operates white-label services for luxury brands and enterprises. Founded in 2007-2008 by David Amsellem, it pairs human concierges with a proprietary CRM platform to manage the relationships brands have with their most valuable clients and employees. After merging with US rival LesConcierges in 2015, it was acquired by AccorHotels in 2016 and now runs as a business accelerator inside the Accor group, serving clients such as Visa, Hyundai, Orange and luxury houses across automotive, finance, fashion and travel.
Webex
Webex is the collaboration platform born from one of the web's first conferencing companies and now run by Cisco. It bundles meetings, calling, messaging, webinars, contact center, and a line of conference-room hardware into a single suite, layered with AI for transcription, real-time translation across dozens of languages, and agent assistance. It serves enterprises, governments, schools, and hospitals that need secure, large-scale communication for distributed teams.
Ashraf Karim
Ashraf Karim is Senior Vice President of Connected Customer Experiences & Technology at ServiceNow, where he leads the charge on transforming how enterprises engage customers through AI-powered digital workflows. With over two decades spanning engineering, product management, and executive leadership at Google, PayPal, Affirm, and Cisco, Karim bridges the gap between deep technical fluency and strategic business thinking. He is known for championing simplicity-first design, advocating that reducing cognitive load at every customer touchpoint is the defining discipline of great product leadership.
Oracle Sales Cloud
Oracle Sales Cloud (CX Sales) is Oracle's enterprise-grade cloud CRM platform that combines sales automation, AI-driven forecasting, configure-price-quote (CPQ), and subscription management into a single suite. Built on Oracle Fusion Cloud, it connects directly with Oracle ERP and supply chain data, letting sales teams quote accurately, close faster, and forecast confidently - without the integration tax that plagues competing platforms. With 5,500+ enterprise customers and $57.4 billion in annual parent revenue, Oracle Sales Cloud targets large organizations that demand reliability, data depth, and AI at scale.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a Chicago-based marketing automation platform that helps over 180,000 businesses in 170+ countries connect with their customers through email marketing, CRM, SMS, and AI-powered automation. Founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom - who bootstrapped it solo for 13 years before raising $360M - the company reached a $3B valuation in 2021 and now generates $250M+ in annual recurring revenue. Its platform is particularly strong for small and mid-sized businesses that need sophisticated automation without enterprise-level complexity or cost.
Adam Justis
Adam Justis is VP of Solution Marketing & Evangelism at Adobe, where he leads go-to-market strategy for Adobe Experience Cloud. With 20+ years spanning digital advertising at Microsoft, web analytics at Omniture, and more than a decade at Adobe, he sits at the intersection of AI, personalization, and customer experience. He is a speaker at Adobe Summit, an instructor at UC Irvine's Digital Marketing Certification Program, and a prolific author on Adobe's business blog. Based in Sandy, Utah, he is one of the faces Adobe puts in front of enterprise marketers to explain what modern customer experience looks like.
David Tokheim
David Tokheim is a senior executive at Adobe where he has served since 2013, most recently elevated to SVP, CXO Americas Industry and Canadian Sales (April 2026). Previously VP of Experience Cloud leading the Media & Entertainment, Communications, and Travel/Hospitality verticals, he has spent his career at the intersection of digital media, advertising technology, and enterprise software. Before Adobe, he was EVP & GM at Six Apart Media (growing its blog audience to 220 million monthly uniques), SVP at Fox Interactive Media overseeing monetization across MySpace and IGN, and VP of Marketing at IGN Entertainment where he built strategic programs for brands like Pepsi, EA, and Walmart. A UCLA English grad turned ad-tech veteran, he champions AI-driven personalization and content velocity as the defining imperatives of modern customer experience.
Devasena Rajamohan
Devasena Rajamohan is Corporate Vice President of Dynamics 365 Customer Experience Applications at Microsoft, leading global teams of product managers, engineers, and data scientists driving innovation across Customer Insights, Sales, Customer Service, and Copilot. With a career spanning over two decades in enterprise CRM and cloud software—including senior leadership at SAP and early engineering roles at TATA Infotech—she has shaped how large organizations deliver AI-powered customer engagement. Under her leadership, Microsoft earned recognition as a Leader in both the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center and The Forrester Wave Customer Service Solutions Q1 2026.
Duncan Egan
Duncan Egan is Vice President of Enterprise Marketing at Adobe, leading the Digital Experience business across Asia Pacific and Japan from Sydney. A Silicon Valley transplant who grew up near Adobe's founders, he has spent 25+ years driving marketing-led growth at enterprise software companies including ServiceNow, Oracle, Taleo, and TIBCO - helping build the playbook for B2B marketing in the Asia-Pacific region before the rest of the world caught up.
Jennifer Burke
Jennifer Burke is an Area Vice President for Digital Experience in the Media & Entertainment vertical at Adobe, where she leads enterprise sales and customer engagement for one of the company's most competitive industry segments. Based in Gainesville, Georgia, she brings over three decades of high-stakes commercial experience spanning retail, CPG, and enterprise technology - from rising through Catalina USA's brand development ranks to closing strategic accounts at Microsoft before joining Adobe's go-to-market machine. She is currently at the sharp edge of Adobe's push into agentic AI, championing AI-driven customer experience products to some of the largest media and entertainment companies in the world.
Mala Anand
Mala Anand is Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer at Microsoft, leading the Customer Experience & Success division. A 25-year technology veteran who immigrated from Mumbai at 17 on a Rotary Youth Exchange Scholarship, she has shaped enterprise software at Cisco, SAP, and Microsoft, driving AI-powered transformations that measurably improve how customers get support. She is also executive sponsor of Women at Microsoft and an independent board director at Agilent Technologies.
Matt Lombardi
Matt Lombardi is the Global Vice President of Customer Experience at ServiceNow, where he leads the company's CX strategy for one of enterprise software's fastest-growing platforms. With over 17 years in business management and 9+ years specializing in customer experience, he has built and scaled CX programs across Fortune 500 companies including ADP and SAP Concur. In 2025, he was named to the Forbes World's Most Influential CMOs list, recognized for his work connecting customer satisfaction metrics directly to retention and revenue growth.
Nicholas Kontopoulos
Nicholas Kontopoulos is the Vice President of Marketing for Asia Pacific & Japan at Twilio, the cloud communications platform. Based in Singapore, he brings over 30 years of marketing and business leadership experience across APAC, with prior senior roles at Adobe (DX), SAP, Magento, and Capita. A recognized thought leader in customer experience and AI-driven marketing, he is a frequent speaker, published author, and LinkedIn Power Profile holder known for challenging marketing orthodoxy across the region.
Dennis Fois
Dennis Fois is the CEO of Bloomerang, the leading nonprofit donor management and CRM platform serving over 26,000 organizations across North America. With more than 25 years of international leadership in CRM and customer experience technology - spanning roles at Copper CRM, NewVoiceMedia (sold to Vonage for $350M), Rant & Rave, eGain, Barclays, and ADP - Fois brings a rare combination of high-growth SaaS playbook execution and genuine conviction about the nonprofit sector's transformative potential. Based in San Francisco, he joined Bloomerang in January 2023 to lead the company's next phase of growth, overseeing a strategic investment from Warburg Pincus in 2024 and the acquisitions of Qgiv and InitLive to build what he calls the 'First Giving Platform.'
Dennis Woodside
Dennis Woodside is the CEO and President of Freshworks, a Nasdaq-listed SaaS company serving 75,000 customers worldwide with AI-powered business software. A Cornell rower turned Stanford lawyer turned McKinsey consultant turned tech executive, he has spent two decades building and scaling iconic companies - leading Google's EMEA sales engine, running Motorola Mobility after its $12.5B acquisition by Google, scaling Dropbox from $250M to a $1B+ IPO, and betting on plant-based food at Impossible Foods before landing at Freshworks in 2022. Off the screen, he is a 15-time Ironman Triathlon finisher who qualified for the World Championship in Kona, Hawaii.
Birdeye
Birdeye is a Palo Alto-based customer experience and reputation marketing platform used by more than 150,000 businesses to manage reviews, listings, surveys, messaging, and social presence. In 2025 the company repositioned itself as the first 'Agentic Marketing Platform,' launching a suite of autonomous AI agents (BirdAI) that handle reviews, social, listings, and search visibility for multi-location brands.
Cresta
Cresta is a generative AI platform built for the contact center, unifying human and AI agents on one system to coach reps in real time, automate post-call work, and turn millions of conversations into measurable revenue, retention, and compliance outcomes.
Taylor Carlson
Taylor Carlson is an Area Vice President at Adobe overseeing Customer Experience Orchestration, leading enterprise sales teams focused on AI-driven journey management and digital experience solutions. With a career arc spanning QA engineering at GameHouse to top-performing enterprise account executive at Bizible to VP leadership at Adobe, Carlson has built a reputation for closing complex enterprise deals and scaling high-performing revenue teams. Based in New York, they hold a BS in Information Science and Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington and a Certificate of Negotiation Mastery from Harvard Business School Online.
Narvar
Narvar is a San Mateo-based enterprise SaaS platform that owns the 'post-purchase' moment for retailers - the stretch between checkout and a customer's next order. Its software powers order tracking, delivery notifications, returns, exchanges and fraud prevention for 1,500+ brands including Sephora, Gap, Patagonia, Home Depot, Levi's and Sonos, and has handled billions of consumer interactions across 38+ countries.
Numa
Numa is the leading AI platform for automotive dealerships, powering customer operations across 1,300+ rooftops in the U.S. and Canada. Founded by the team behind Location Labs (acquired by AVG for $220M), Numa's AI agents handle calls, texts, appointments, and customer satisfaction monitoring - reducing response times from 24 hours to 20 minutes and driving measurable increases in dealership profitability and CSI scores.
Amit Sharma
Amit Sharma founded Narvar in 2013 to fix the most overlooked moment in e-commerce: the anxious gap between clicking 'buy' and the package arriving at the door. Drawing on years spent optimizing supply chains at Williams-Sonoma, Walmart, and Apple, he built a post-purchase experience platform from a bootstrapped garage operation into a market leader serving 650+ retailers - including Sephora, Home Depot, LVMH, and Patagonia - before stepping back from the CEO role in October 2024 to an advisory position.
Anisa Kumar
Anisa Kumar is the CEO of Narvar, a retail technology platform serving 1,500+ global brands with AI-powered post-purchase experiences. With over 23 years across Target, Walmart.com, and Levi Strauss where she helped lead the company's IPO, she became Narvar's Chief Customer Officer in 2021 and was elevated to CEO in October 2024. Under her leadership, Narvar launched its IRIS AI engine - analyzing 42-74 billion consumer interactions annually - to transform the moment after checkout from a cost center into a growth engine.
Clay Bavor
Clay Bavor is Co-Founder of Sierra, the AI customer experience company he launched in early 2023 alongside Bret Taylor. Before Sierra, Bavor spent 18 years at Google, where he rose from product manager to VP leading Google Labs — overseeing Google's AR/VR efforts (including Cardboard, Daydream, ARCore, Google Lens, and Project Starline), and before that running product and design for Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Workspace. Sierra has raised $1.585 billion in total funding, most recently a $950M Series E at a $15.8 billion valuation in May 2026, serving over 40% of the Fortune 50 with AI agents that resolve 50–90% of customer inquiries.
Naveen Gupta
Naveen Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Birdeye, a Palo Alto-based AI-powered customer experience platform that serves over 100,000 businesses globally. Inspired by a personal struggle to find a quality surgeon for his mother at Stanford, Naveen and his brother Neeraj built Birdeye in 2012 to help businesses manage their online reputation and grow through customer feedback. Under his leadership, Birdeye crossed $100M ARR in 2023, raised over $93M in total funding, and pioneered what Naveen calls 'Experience Marketing' - the discipline of turning customer satisfaction into organic growth. A veteran of Yahoo and RingCentral, he brings deep product and operational expertise to one of SaaS's quietest success stories.
Nehal Shaikh
Nehal Shaikh is the Chief Executive Officer (India) at Front, the customer operations platform headquartered in San Francisco. Front helps more than 8,000 companies manage customer communication across email, SMS, live chat, and other channels through shared inboxes, AI-powered automation, and real-time analytics. Backed by $338M in total funding and valued at $1.7B since its 2022 Series D, Front crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue in 2025. Based in Maharashtra, India, Shaikh leads Front's India operations as the company scales its AI-driven customer service platform globally.