From the executive suite to the front lines, the 2026 Genesys Orchestrators Innovation Awards winners in the four “Orchestrators of the Year” categories are redefining what it takes to deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences. Discover how these CX standouts combine leadership, innovation, empathy and AI to solve challenges, deliver measurable impact and offer lessons others can put into practice.
Exceptional customer experiences don’t happen by accident. Behind them are people who challenge what’s possible; inspire their teams; and find new ways to combine technology, insight and empathy to make every experience better.
The 2026 Genesys Orchestrators Innovation Awards features four “Orchestrator of the Year” categories. The winners are customer experience (CX) standouts whose impact reaches from the executive suite to the front lines and behind the scenes. Their roles might be different, but their stories share a common thread: They’re raising the bar for what great customer and employee experiences can be.
Read on to discover the approaches, ideas and lessons behind their success — from how they’re putting AI and technology to work, to how they lead, collaborate, solve difficult problems and deliver measurable results.
“Our commitment to investing more and innovating more will only go up from here.”
Vijay Narsapur
SVP & Global Head, Customer Experience Independent Unit, Infosys BPM
C-Suite Winner: Vijay Narsapur, SVP & Global Head, Customer Experience Independent Unit, Infosys BPM
Vijay Narsapur sees customer experience as a business growth engine. His approach to experience leadership reflects that belief — connecting strategy, technology and people to drive measurable outcomes across customer satisfaction, employee engagement and business value.
His strategy for AI transformation builds on the same principle: AI should create meaningful value for customers, employees and the business.
As SVP and Global Head of the Customer Experience Integrated Unit at Infosys BPM, Narsapur leads more than 13,000 customer experience (CX) professionals across 47 delivery centers in 16 countries. His organization serves more than 120 global clients, supports 33 languages and manages more than 36 million transactions annually. At that scale, transformation is complex — but continual innovation is essential to keep pace with clients’ needs and their customers’ expectations.
Narsapur anchors that innovation in AI-first transformation that’s practical, outcome-driven and human-centric. He connects CX initiatives directly to business priorities, such as revenue growth, profitability, efficiency and customer loyalty. And he does this all while investing in the skills that employees need to succeed as technology reshapes their roles. Today, 35% of the unit’s projects are AI-driven.
One major CX transformation illustrates his approach.
When client experience metrics remained stagnant despite operational investments, Narsapur engaged with his teams to uncover friction points and refocus the initiative around experience orchestration and employee enablement. The result: improved customer satisfaction, reduced agent effort and greater adoption of digital tools.
That focus on measurable outcomes is paying off across the business. Under Narsapur’s leadership, the Customer Experience Integrated Unit achieved 21% year-over-year revenue growth and a 21% efficiency improvement in fiscal year 2026.
To maintain that momentum, Narsapur encourages his teams to start with real client challenges, test ideas through pilots and then scale what works. He has established a dedicated transformation team and created opportunities for cross-functional teams to experiment with AI, automation and experience orchestration.
“We synthesize ideas, put a proper plan together and make course corrections as we move forward,” he said, adding that the unit works diligently to maintain “a strong balance between being action-focused and outcome-focused.”
AI plays a central role in that approach. Narsapur uses AI-driven insights to understand customer sentiment, identify operational bottlenecks and guide decisions around capacity, automation and experience investments. He also champions capabilities, such as Genesys Cloud™ Agent Copilot, to help employees work more effectively while delivering more consistent customer experiences.
In one case, AI uncovered a disconnect between customer expectations and scripted responses. Narsapur sponsored a redesign of conversational flows using AI-driven recommendations, resulting in more empathetic and personalized interactions while improving agent confidence, reducing handling time and increasing customer satisfaction.
But for Narsapur, transformation succeeds only when people succeed with it. He maintains regular leadership forums, town halls and skip-level conversations while investing heavily in his teams’ career development and AI skills. A quarter of its leaders have completed strategic AI programs.
“We did not lose sight of the human dimension of transformation, be it for the employees themselves or for our end customer,” Narsapur said. “Employee and customer satisfaction are always important parameters in judging the success of all our efforts.”
The results of his approach extend well beyond operational improvements. Under Narsapur’s leadership, the percentage of clients willing to serve as references has risen from about 8% to 40%, while the business added new customers and secured renewals in fiscal year 2026. Client transformations have delivered results ranging from a 19% improvement in customer satisfaction and a 34% improvement in first-contact resolution for one investment company to a Net Promoter Score (NPS) increase from -27 to +54 for a large telecommunications company.
Receiving a 2026 Genesys Orchestrators Innovation Award has reinforced Narsapur’s conviction in the path his organization has chosen: “Our commitment to investing more and innovating more will only go up from here.”
“QUOTE TO COME”
Pamela Bou Zeid
Head of Shared Services & CX, Al Wathba Insurance
CX Leader Winner: Pamela Bou Zeid, Head of Shared Services & CX, Al Wathba Insurance
Pamela Bou Zeid believes exceptional experiences start with the people who bring them to life — from the frontline agents serving customers to the teams building the tools and applications that support them. Give employees the confidence to challenge what isn’t working, the opportunity to help shape what comes next and the technology to enable them, and better customer experiences follow.
As Head of Shared Services and Customer Experience at Al Wathba Insurance, Bou Zeid leads a cross-functional division spanning the contact center, business support and CX, business process excellence, and quality awards. Her responsibilities extend from setting CX strategy and overseeing end-to-end service delivery to improving processes and embedding a culture of continuous improvement across the organization.
That broad remit has positioned her at the center of a significant transformation. Al Wathba Insurance has expanded beyond calls and walk-ins, adding and connecting an AI bot, live agent chat and email to create an omnichannel customer experience. Along the way, Bou Zeid has led the redesign of numerous customer-facing processes around critical moments in the end-to-end journey.
Her approach is grounded in a simple conviction: Employees should help create transformation, not simply adapt to it.
“It’s a whole organization learning to work differently together,” said Bou Zeid. “Team members who once hesitated around new technology now step forward to help build our applications and reshape our journeys. That shift from uncertainty to ownership… adds up to something really big.”
Bou Zeid creates that ownership by giving her teams a voice in operational improvement, encouraging them to challenge established processes and empowering them to pilot new ideas. She complements that freedom with frequent coaching and development, including monthly performance reviews, structured one-on-one syncs, team meetings and workshops. The result has been strong retention in a contact center industry known for high turnover.
AI has become another important part of employee empowerment.
“I see AI as an augmentation to what we do,” said Bou Zeid. “AI-powered tools support our team’s judgment in real time rather than replacing it, so they can move faster without losing the human touch that our customers need and rely on.”
One of the clearest examples is Al Wathba Insurance’s AI-powered First Notice of Loss (FNOL) process. Previously, approximately 6,000 losses each month moved through an entirely manual process. Bou Zeid championed a redesigned journey that uses AI for automated claim registration and damage assessment, eliminating manual registration work, addressing multiple identified process gaps and reducing overall processing time by at least 80%. Customers get a faster, more seamless claims experience, while employees are freed from manual tasks to focus more of their time on empathy, judgment and resolution.
That human focus is particularly important at the start of a claim — a critical moment of truth when customers may be anxious, vulnerable, and looking for clarity and support.
“Every interaction is a chance to turn a stressful moment into a reassuring one,” Bou Zeid said. “In insurance especially, people don’t call us on their best days. Getting to be the calm, reassuring voices that make things better — and building a team that does that consistently — is energizing.”
That combination of operational excellence, technology and empathy has helped Al Wathba Insurance scale rapidly. The company has maintained customer satisfaction of at least 94% year-over-year, quadrupling insurance revenue between 2024 and 2026 while optimizing its operating model to ensure maximized productivity while scaling sustainably.
For Bou Zeid, receiving a 2026 Genesys Orchestrators Innovation Award validates not only the results, but how her team achieved them.
“For me personally, it’s a validation that leading with empathy and technology together works,” she said. “For my team, it’s recognition that the hard and unglamorous work of change — learning new tools, rethinking processes and customer journeys, and participating in enhancing customer experiences — actually does pay off.”
Perhaps the clearest sign of that progress is the mindset shift Bou Zeid has helped cultivate. AI has evolved from something employees were uncertain about into something they increasingly understand, embrace and help shape. And that is creating a foundation for Al Wathba Insurance to take what the division has learned and apply it more broadly.
“Receiving this recognition raises the bar for what I ask of myself and my team,” said Bou Zeid. “If that is what’s possible across one function or division, imagine what’s possible across the whole organization. We don’t just want to keep pace with change. We want to set the pace.”
“What I enjoy most is seeing that the features I develop actually help the advisors in their daily work. I also see how DNB, as an organization, becomes more efficient with its contact center using new technology — especially AI.”
Eystein Kylland
Tech Lead, Contact Center, DNB Bank
Developer Winner: Eystein Kylland, Tech Lead, Contact Center, DNB Bank
DNB embarked on a transformation that reimagined how nearly 3,500 advisors would serve millions of customers in the years ahead.
Helping lead that transformation was Eystein Kylland, Tech Lead, Contact Center at DNB. His technical expertise, curiosity and engineering discipline have helped establish how the bank operates on the Genesys Cloud™ platform.
Kylland immersed himself in the platform, taking ownership of everything from architecture and development to deployment and ongoing operations. Along the way, he championed engineering practices such as CX as Code, ensuring platform configuration is version-controlled, repeatable and scalable.
During the migration to Genesys Cloud, Kylland solved several architectural challenges that could have significantly delayed the initiative or increased costs. One example involved designing a scalable architecture that enabled multiple DNB business entities to operate securely within a single Genesys Cloud instance, eliminating the need for duplicate environments and additional licensing costs. He also developed solutions that simplified the migration to Work Automation while addressing complex compliance requirements around recording and transcription.
For Kylland, however, the technology itself has never been the destination.
“What I enjoy most is seeing that the features I develop actually help the advisors in their daily work,” he said. “I also see how DNB, as an organization, becomes more efficient with its contact center using new technology — especially AI.”
That customer- and advisor-first mindset has shaped some of his most important technical decisions. One recent milestone was the rollout of AI-powered call summarization through Genesys Cloud Agent Copilot. Kylland notes that it’s essential to consider advisors’ and customers’ needs when determining how best to use AI.
“We started implementing Copilot to summarize phone calls, which has helped the advisors a lot,” said Kylland. “We also built a secure customer identification solution integrated with Genesys Cloud. These have been huge steps for both the advisors and the customers.”
Beyond developing solutions himself, Kylland has helped build the technical foundation for innovation across the organization. He has led training sessions, onboarded new engineers, created extensive technical documentation and established CX as Code practices that enable other developers to confidently build on his work long into the future.
Receiving a 2026 Genesys Orchestrators Innovation Award has given Kylland an opportunity to reflect on the team’s remarkable journey, as well as focus on what’s next.
“It shows that what we’ve accomplished implementing Genesys Cloud at DNB has been noticed by others. It has truly been a team effort, and I’ve been lucky to be part of it,“ he said. “Winning this award motivates me to continue learning about Genesys Cloud and all the new AI capabilities that are coming. I want to help DNB continue moving forward into this new world.”
“What I enjoy most about working with AI is that it helps me support customers more efficiently without losing the human touch. It helps me find information quickly and handle repetitive tasks, which gives me more time to better understand each customer’s needs and provide more personalized support.”
Maribeth Lagman
Customer Experience Agent, Trademark Global
Agent Winner: Maribeth Lagman, Customer Experience Agent, Trademark Global
For many frontline customer experience (CX) professionals, success is measured in speed, efficiency and quality scores. For Maribeth Lagman, success means ensuring that every customer feels heard, understood and supported.
“What I enjoy most is helping people and making a positive difference in their experience,” said Lagman, Customer Experience Agent at Trademark Global. “I also love working with my team. They make this job so enjoyable that it doesn’t even feel like work.”
That mindset has made Lagman a standout member of the CX organization at Trademark Global, a consumer products company. She’s become one of the company’s most trusted frontline experts, known for handling even the most complex situations with empathy, confidence and remarkable efficiency.
Her performance is exceptional. Lagman maintains an average handling time that’s 40% faster than the team average — while managing 45% more interactions than her peers each month. She pairs that productivity with a 98% average quality assurance score, including a recent three-month streak of perfect scores.
One customer interaction has stayed with her. “One of my favorite moments was when a customer thanked me for going the extra mile and said my support made a stressful situation much easier,” said Lagman. “He even asked if he could speak to my CEO to recommend that I get a raise. Knowing I was able to turn the experience into a positive one is always the most rewarding part of the job.”
Lagman’s influence extends well beyond the customers she serves.
Colleagues describe Lagman as someone who never settles for simply answering the question in front of her. She anticipates what customers might need next, shares troubleshooting resources before they’re requested and looks for opportunities to reduce future effort. She also serves as a trusted mentor, helping new team members build confidence by sharing practical workflows, product knowledge and best practices.
And when the IT team shadowed her to better understand how exceptional customer experiences are created, they weren’t simply documenting workflows. They studied the subtle decisions she makes throughout every interaction, as well as her tone, empathy and communication style. Those observations became the blueprint for how the company’s AI chatbots communicate with customers.
AI has become a force multiplier for Lagman personally, as well, helping her combine efficiency with empathy in every interaction.
“What I enjoy most about working with AI is that it helps me support customers more efficiently without losing the human touch,” she said. “It helps me find information quickly and handle repetitive tasks, which gives me more time to better understand each customer’s needs and provide more personalized support.”
Winning a 2026 Genesys Orchestrators Innovation Award has reinforced Lagman’s commitment to continuous growth. “Winning this award motivates me to keep learning, embracing new challenges and striving for excellence. It inspires me to continue making a positive impact, supporting my team and our customers.”
