Meet the Genesys Orchestrators Innovation Awards judges

As Senior Manager, Customer Query Management, Global Commercial Banking, at HSBC, Laura Clelland focuses on transforming customer and employee experience through strategy design and implementation of Cloud, AI and Gen AI technologies.

Brian Jones is Ascension Technologies Senior Specialist, Core Technologies. He received the 2025 Genesys Orchestrator of the Year award for best team leader and was honoured as the 2025 Genesys Community Member of the Year. Jones is also a member of the distinguished Genesys Amplifiers Class of 2026.

Jones has been with Ascension since 2011 and has more than 25 years’ experience in Customer service and technology roles, with previous positions at companies such as Lucent Technologies, WellPoint and Express Scripts. He is ITIL & Six Sigma Green Belt certified, which he received as a result of leading the implementation of Genesys and integration with the ServiceNow CRM.

Jones has an MBA from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. He is a Deacon at New Hope Christian Church in Whitestown, Indiana, and a proud father of two remarkable young ladies, Ireland (20) and Vayda (16).

Lorena Lovrić is a Director of Customer Experience at Aterian with over seven years of experience leading global CX operations and building AI-driven support ecosystems. She specialises in Genesys Cloud architecture, Workforce engagement strategy, and large-scale omnichannel transformation across international teams. Her work focuses on unifying technology, automation, and operations to create scalable, high-impact customer experiences.

Lovrić is a recipient of the 2025 Genesys Orchestrators Innovation Award for her work in AI-powered CX transformation. She is also pursuing a Master of Liberal Arts in Finance at Harvard Extension School, with a focus on the intersection of analytics, technology, and business strategy.

Having grown up in Nevada, Rachel Papka, Chief Innovation Officer at SDMI, brings a deep understanding of the local community and decades of professional insight to her work. Her career in Health Information Technology (HIT) began in 2002, where she built extensive expertise in Health Information Systems, including Health Information Exchange (HIE), before joining SDMI in 2014.

At SDMI, Rachel has played a pivotal role in implementing emerging technologies by observing workflows, collaborating with staff, and developing innovative solutions to reduce inefficiencies and streamline processes. Her contributions to the field have been widely recognized, including receiving the 2018 Top Tech Award and the 2025 Genesys Orchestrators Innovation Award for her leadership and forward-thinking solutions.

Rachel holds a master’s degree in Healthcare Administration with a concentration in Informatics and a bachelor’s degree in Business Management. This strong academic foundation supports her commitment to advancing healthcare technology and operations.

Beyond her professional achievements, Rachel is passionate about mentoring others, public speaking, and promoting fitness as a tool for maintaining mental and emotional balance. Her greatest priority, however, is her family. As a proud parent of four, she treasures the “sweet moments” of life—those small, joyful experiences that make everything worthwhile.

Whether at work or at home, Rachel strives to lead with purpose, innovation, and heart.

Tessa Riley is a customer experience leader driven by a genuine passion for service and leading with heart. Based in Dunedin, she is a Team Manager in Customer Experience at ACC, where she has spent the past eight years supporting frontline teams to deliver empathetic, consistent and high‑quality service through complex and often life‑impacting interactions. A core part of Riley’s work at ACC includes shaping staff onboarding, learning and development, helping to lift capability, reflect best practice and strengthen how people show up for customers.

In addition to this, Riley brings more than a decade of leadership experience across the retail and hospitality sectors, shaping her belief that staff deliver outstanding CX when they feel valued, trusted and supported to do their best work.

Kaleb Stunkard is President & CEO of Lighthouse Central Florida and its social enterprise, Lighthouse Works, where he leads scalable, mission-driven business operations that deliver high-quality services while creating competitive employment for people who are blind or visually impaired. He oversees Lighthouse Works’ Contact center, aligning operational excellence, technology, and performance accountability with measurable social impact.

Lucas Woodward is a Principal Software Engineer at OVO, where he focuses on building and supporting the digital journeys of OVO’s customers. He specialises in the Genesys Cloud ecosystem, where he develops and shares CX solutions – from observability pipelines to open-source tooling – that aim to make complex technology feel more seamless and human for the thousands of people who interact with them.

Christine Arnold is an accomplished contact center, customer and employee experience strategist with almost three decades of experience designing, leading, and optimising complex contact center environments across Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. She brings deep expertise in contact center technologies and operations, underpinned by strong capability in enterprise and solution architecture.

As a Principal Consultant, CX, EX and Contact Center Strategy, Technology Architecture and Transformation, at ARZO, Christine partners with organisations of all sizes – from major enterprises to small not-for-profits – helping them get the most out of their existing technology while strategically guiding them towards the platforms best suited to their future business objectives. Her approach blends technical precision with a strong focus on business outcomes, enabling clients to align technology investments with customer and operational goals. Christine is known for her strategic mindset, relationship-driven consulting style, and ability to bridge the gap between business ambition and technology execution – empowering organisations to create customer-centric, future-ready contact center ecosystems.

Mila D’Antonio is a Principal Analyst on the Omdia Customer engagement team, specialising in enterprise applications that drive personalised and connected customer experiences. She provides in-depth analysis of key developments in customer engagement technologies, including AI-powered technology, customer engagement platforms and customer journey orchestration. Her research focuses on emerging innovations that enhance customer interactions and enable relevant, data-driven engagement strategies.

Before joining Omdia (formerly Ovum) in 2017, Mila served as Editor-in-Chief at 1to1 Media. She holds a degree from the University of Pittsburgh, where she studied English, journalism and political science.

Spencer Izard is a leader and strategist with almost 30 years of experience helping senior leaders and CxOs evolve how they operate their businesses. Focused on the role of technology in creating pioneering ecosystems and operating dynamics within and across industries. His most recent role, prior to PAC, was as CIO at Kineo (a corporate learning software company). Before this, he has held roles at an industry think tank as a Lead Researcher, at ServiceNow as an Executive Strategy Adviser, and at Ovum (now Omdia) as the Chief Analyst for their global CxO practice. Before joining Ovum, he led both IDC’s European CxO and retail practices. Spencer has previously worked at several international client-side organisations, both directly and indirectly, within CIO strategy and architecture functions, developing and delivering IT strategies to bridge business demands and IT capability, creating and managing architecture teams, and establishing IT best practices.

Ian Jacobs is VP, Lead Analyst for Opus Research. For more than 30 years, Ian has helped brands generate better customer experiences through his research, consulting, writing, and speaking. As an analyst, he has been at the forefront of research on conversational AI, covering the technology and its applications in customer service since 2005. His research dives into the powerful crossroads of technology and its real-world impact on employees and consumers. Ian’s research also covers workforce engagement tools, contact center outsourcing, and the uses of AI in analytics and employee augmentation.

Previously, Ian headed the teams researching conversational AI, conversational commerce, conversational intelligence, digital customer service, and core contact center at Forrester. He headed up the company’s Digital Business and Strategy product. As an individual contributor before that, he was “the chatbot guy” at Forrester. He has held senior roles at several analyst firms, including 451 Research and Ovum. At Genesys, Ian was the customer experience evangelist, connecting technology to people’s lived experiences. Ian is an award-winning columnist and is widely quoted in publications ranging from The New York Times to Wired.

Steve Leaden is Founder and President of Leaden Associates, Inc., an independent communications and IT advisory firm with more than 30 years of helping enterprises navigate complex technology decisions.

For over three decades, Leaden and his team have helped advise organisations architect/assess, procure, implement, and facilitate lifecycle optimisation for mission-critical CX, contact center, agentic AI, LLM, Unified Communications, VoIP, converged networks, and cloud solutions – without vendor bias and with a relentless focus on measurable business outcomes and ROI. Leaden’s team focus is not simply on technology – it is on aligning communications architecture to core business strategy, driving operational efficiency, and enhancing customer and patient experience.

Leaden Associates supports enterprises across healthcare, education, manufacturing, financial services, publishing, and government, helping leadership teams execute large-scale communications and CX transformations while minimising risk and maximising ROI.

Leaden is a nationally recognised industry authority and frequent speaker at Enterprise Connect and other major industry conferences, a contributor to No Jitter and UCStrategies, and serves as President of the Society of Communications and Technology Consultants (SCTC), an international association of independent consultants whose membership requires strict adherence to ethics, objectivity, and vendor neutrality.

In an era defined by AI acceleration and CX transformation, Leaden and team are known for independent guidance that protects enterprise investments and delivers tangible results.

Elena Marcelle is a Customer Experience and Digital Transformation Strategist. She specialises in shaping omnichannel experiences within regulated environments, where digital decisions, automation and compliance constraints directly influence customer perception and operational coherence.

She approaches CX as a strategic discipline that connects automated decision systems, transparency and trust within AI-enabled customer journeys. With hands-on experience in complex transformation programmes, Elena bridges customer ambition and operational reality, ensuring that digital initiatives are coherent, scalable and sustainable over time.

Nigel Medforth is a Principal Consultant at the Davies Group, specialising in customer experience and contact center operations. During his 6 years as a Davies Consultant he has worked across multiple industry sections, including insurance, banking, retail, healthcare and travel. He is a consultant with the ability to translate complex IT concepts into understandable business terms, and act as the interface between business and technology helping explain business requirements in technical terms. He has over 30 years’ experience developing IT strategies and devising change transformation programmes. He leads competitive tenders (RFPs) for multinational companies and organisations across multiple sectors including charities, delivering new contact center cloud technology, CRM platforms, and telecommunications infrastructure.  His IT knowledge and skills span a broad spectrum of technology and emerging industry trends. He continues to expand his knowledge through research into new technologies. Prior to Davies he worked at AIG and Lloyds Banking Group supporting and enhancing their Contact center solutions and infrastructure.

As research manager for AI-Enabled Sales, Customer Service and Contact Center Strategies, Michelle Morgan monitors the evolving impact of AI on sales, contact centres, and customer experience operations. In particular, she examines how emerging technologies, such as AI, shape customer-facing business processes, workforce dynamics, and customer experience.

Morgan has a deep experience in both quantitative and qualitative research, holding strategic positions at global market research firms, such as Nielsen and GfK, for more than a decade. She is a naturally curious researcher, eager to “read between the lines” to uncover insights that help organisations translate research into actionable strategy that fuels growth and innovation.

World Series Winner of CX Professional of the Year 2022 and Virgin Funded Founder, Clare Muscutt is human-centric design geek with 15 years leadership experience in FTSE 100’s including Whitbread, Sainsbury’s and Compass Group. She’s a global keynote speaker and consultant who made it her mission to support other women in her industry to rise-up. She believes in the power of collaboration over competition, investing in people, co-design and that the future blueprint for customer experience lies in bringing together diversity of opinion, experience and expertise.

As part of Omdia’s enterprise IT team, David Myron focuses on Contact Center as a Service, workforce engagement management, and AI solutions, as well as agent staffing trends. He provides insights into these topics for vendor and enterprise clients through research, consulting, white papers, webinars, and blogs.

Myron is a multiple award-winning writer who began covering the contact center industry in 2001 as the customer service and support editor at CRM magazine. He later served as the publication’s editor-in-chief and editorial director for more than a decade. While there, he also worked as the editorial director of Speech Technology magazine and the founding editor of SmartCustomerService.com. David holds a Bachelor of Arts in communication (with a concentration in journalism) from Hofstra University.

Will Patchett is a Lead Consultant specialising in Customer Experience transformation, with extensive expertise across the full CX ecosystem including CCaaS strategy, procurement, customer journey design, and service operating model development.

Since joining StableLogic in 2015, he has worked across both public and private sector contact center and voice environments, helping organisations modernise customer operations and deliver measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, NPS, and operational efficiency.

Patchett combines deep technical knowledge with strategic consulting capability, leading complex multinational CX programmes, cloud contact center deployments, and business transformation initiatives. His work spans technology, service design, and operational change – ensuring organisations align their customer experience strategy, platforms, and processes to deliver scalable, high-performing customer service outcomes.

Alpa Shah’s professional and volunteer experience includes communications, business and strategy planning, product and vertical market analysis, growth consulting, event planning and execution, sales and marketing, writing growth opportunity insights, and most importantly, creating and inspiring teams to be best-in-class.

She currently leads Frost and Sullivan’s global CX (customer experience) research team, runs customer surveys on the latest digital transformation technologies, supports customers’ brand and demand efforts, obtains customer viewpoints via one-on-one conversations at customer events, and moderates webinars and event panels.

Before joining Frost and Sullivan, she worked for Smith Barney in its accounting division, handling incentive compensation plans. She also worked as an account executive at Edward Jones, a brokerage company.

In her personal and professional life, she served as the VP of Communications on the boards of PAMP (Parent’s club of 2,000+ members), PTAs, and Frost and Sullivan’s GLOW (Growth and Leadership of Women) team.

Sharang Sharma is a Vice President at Everest Group, where he leads research and advises clients on customer experience (CX) strategy and transformation. He works closely with enterprises and service providers to benchmark CX maturity, redesign service delivery models, shape go-to-market strategies, and identify growth opportunities). Sharang also heads Everest Group’s research on CX technology, covering areas such as contact center as a service (CCaaS), conversational AI, workforce engagement, and other innovations transforming customer operations.

Rebecca Wettemann is CEO and Principal of Valoir, a technology analyst firm providing research and advisory services to leaders with a focus on the value of technology. Founded in 2019, Valoir has deep expertise in the value of CRM, HCM, customer and employee experience, and enterprise applications. Valoir helps clients understand and maximise the returns from their technology investments.

With deep expertise in HCM, employee experience, CRM, customer experience, cloud, AI and analytics, and enterprise applications, Rebecca’s team combines primary research and unique insights to help clients understand and maximise the value of technology. Rebecca is widely viewed as an expert in technology ROI and has helped hundreds of organisations build the business case for their technology investments.

Rebecca is a sought-after speaker and resource for the press, as well as financial analysts and VC firms seeking to understand the value of emerging applications and sectors. She has led the market in its understanding of cloud computing, employee and customer engagement, digital transformation, AI and productivity.

Rebecca has authored numerous reports including “The State of Digital Transformation,” “Assessing the Value of AI and Automation,” and “Is HR ready for AI,” as well as numerous return on investment studies and reports on enterprise applications, CRM and CX, and HCM and EX.

Rebecca brings more than 20 years of industry experience to Valoir, with previous leadership roles at Nucleus Research and IDC. Her practical experience includes tenures at the International Telecommunication Union and the United States Information Agency, where she led digital transformation initiatives and related projects to help governmental agencies bridge the digital divide.

Rebecca holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science and a Bachelor of Arts degree in French from Oklahoma State University, where she was honoured as a Distinguished Alumna in 2022. She also holds a Masters of Law and Diplomacy degree with a focus on technology policy and finance from the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Audrey William is the Founder and Principal Analyst at CrayonIQ, a research and advisory firm focused on the evolving landscape of customer experience (CX), employee experience (EX), and enterprise collaboration. With over 25 years of experience in the industry, Audrey has worked with some of the world’s leading research firms, supporting senior executives, CEOs, and boards of directors in making informed strategic decisions during times of disruption and change. Her domain expertise is in the Contact Centre and Enterprise Collaboration industries.

Over the course of her career, Audrey has worked with a wide range of global and regional vendors, including Cisco, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft (Nuance), Genesys, Twilio, Avaya, NICE, Verint, Twilio, Sprinklr, NEAT, Zoom, Alcatel-Lucent, Datacom, Sprinklr, Talkdesk, Optus, Telstra Enterprise, Uniphore, IR (Prognosis), Uniphore, IPscape, SecureCo, Zendesk (Local Measure), Khoros, Nexon, NTT, HP (Poly) MaxContact, and many other leading brands. These collaborations have informed her deep understanding of market dynamics, buyer needs, and the competitive landscape of the industries.

She is also a sought-after keynote speaker and frequently presents at industry conferences and executive briefings. She has also moderated many panel discussions and roundtables. In recent years, she has provided guidance during closed-door sessions to CEOs and their leadership teams, sales teams, and partner teams , helping them devise the best sales strategies to succeed in the market. Audrey has spoken at numerous vendor partner summits, and she has been invited to be part of sales kick off (SKO) sessions.

Through her work at CrayonIQ, Audrey continues to help businesses navigate complexities with clarity, drawing on decades of research experience and a sharp understanding of where the market is heading next.

Angelo Arezzi, VP, Workforce Management and Support Services, at Genesys, is a seasoned support leader with over 20 years of experience driving customer-centric innovation and operational excellence. At Genesys, he leads Support Services with a focus on elevating the customer experience. He has held leadership roles at top global brands and holds advanced degrees in computer science and a doctorate in Business Administration.

Bridgette Bell McAdoo, spearheaded the company’s first Chief Sustainability Officer role. She crafted a holistic sustainability management approach for Genesys, optimizing its economic, social and environmental impact across diverse functions and regions. Bridgette continues to leverage advanced sustainability metrics to deliver integrated analysis to stakeholders and refine sustainability initiatives in real time. As a hands-on, cross-departmental leader, Bridgette places great emphasis on stakeholder engagement and education.

Bridgette is a seasoned executive with over two decades of experience in executing strategic outcomes for esteemed companies like Yum Brands, UTC and WWF.

Bridgette holds a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University and an MBA in Strategy from Claremont Graduate University.

Currently serving as SVP, Customer Success Renewal Management at Genesys, Holli Bingham is a high-impact leader with 20+ years proven expertise in building renewal teams focused on strategic growth, including increased bookings, renewals, and retention rates. Bingham is results-oriented – with a focus on customer success–related objectives that drive adoption and value realisation. She enjoys and excels at mentorship, as well as coaching sales and renewal experts.

Laura Lucia leads HR Strategy, Transformation, and Operations at Genesys. In that role, Lucia is responsible for leading a team that designs, builds, and implements innovative and scalable HR solutions that foster organisational agility and people engagement, essential for Genesys’ ongoing growth and transformation.

Lucia has over 25 years of international experience in HR leading global and companywide HR transformations in the high tech and software industries. Over those years, she has led HRBP and People Operations teams across many countries, with a focus on the continuous improvement of the employee experience and the strategic alignment with business priorities. Lucia is also a founding member of Hacking HR’s Expert Council, a leading HR global community, where she contributes to the discourse of HR innovation, sharing insights that help shaping the future of work.

Lucia holds a bachelor’s degree in political science, and MBA in Strategy, and completed postgraduate studies in Corporate Innovation at Stanford University.

“How can I help?” is generally the first response you’ll receive when contacting Genesys SVP of Product Support, Dominic LoBosco. Leading the Support Organisation allows him to connect uniquely with Genesys customers because, like them, he is one. He is a constant learner with 15+ years of experience growing and scaling Support organisations.

Mike Szilagyi is a seasoned software executive with over two decades of leadership experience spanning product management, engineering, operations and technology strategy. As SVP of Product Management for Genesys Cloud CX, he leads product strategy and product management for the company’s flagship cloud-based, AI-powered experience management platform. Mike has a proven track record of bringing disruptive technologies to market, with prior leadership roles at Motorola and a Chicago-based equity market-making firm, where he oversaw development and IT operations. His expertise bridges deep technical fluency with enterprise-scale product delivery. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering technology and computer science from Purdue University.