Join host Russ Fordyce as he sits down with Franck Leveiller, Chief Scientific Officer and Global Head of R&D at Alcon, the 2026 BIG Innovation Awards Overall Winner.

Discover how Alcon's Unity VCS console is revolutionizing operating room efficiency by combining two separate surgical systems into one modular platform with over 12 first-ever innovations. Franck shares insights on co-creating with 2,500 surgeons worldwide, leading a 2,000-person R&D organization, and addressing the global eye care capacity crisis.

In this conversation, you'll learn:

• How Alcon developed the Unity VCS through extensive surgeon collaboration
• The eye care crisis: demand for cataract procedures will triple by 2050
• Why patient-centered innovation requires discipline, talent, and heart
• Alcon's approach to balancing internal innovation with strategic partnerships
• What it takes to maintain scientific rigor while scaling breakthrough products

Whether you're in product development, healthcare innovation, or leadership, Franck's approach to human-centered R&D offers valuable lessons on creating meaningful impact.

Subscribe to Winner's Circle for conversations with business leaders driving real innovation.

Guest: Franck Leveiller, Chief Scientific Officer & Global Head of R&D, Alcon

About Alcon:

• $10 billion revenue company
• Global leader in eye care
• Serves 140+ countries
• 2026 BIG Innovation Awards Overall Winner

Key Topics Discussed:

• Unity VCS Console Innovation [2:15]
• The Global Eye Care Capacity Crisis [6:30]
• Co-Creation Model with 2,500+ Surgeons [9:13]
• Leading 2,000-Person R&D Organization [22:03]
• Balancing Internal & External Innovation [24:29]
• Patient-Centered Product Development Philosophy

Featured Innovation: Alcon Unity VCS

• First console combining front-of-eye and back-of-eye procedures
• 12+ first-ever innovations
• Improved workflow efficiency for surgeons and OR nurses
• Physiological intraocular pressure reduces patient pain
• Modular design for rapid maintenance

Key Statistics Mentioned:

• 1.6 billion patients suffer from dry eye
• 1.8 billion people affected by presbyopia
• Current demand: 30 million cataract procedures annually
• By 2050: 100 million procedures needed (projected)
• U.S. surgeon workforce declining 12% by 2035
• 90% of people need cataract surgery after age 60

https://www.bintelligence.com/news

Innovation, Healthcare, Medical Devices, R&D Leadership, Product Development, Eye Care, Alcon, Business Awards, BIG Innovation Awards

0:00 - Introduction & Welcome
0:11 - Meet Franck Leveiller, Alcon's Chief Scientific Officer 2:15 - What is the Unity VCS Console?
6:30 - The Eye Care Capacity Crisis
9:13 - Co-Creating with 2,500 Surgeons Worldwide
15:39 - Managing Portfolio of Innovation Projects
22:03 - Leading a 2,000-Person R&D Organization
24:29 - External Innovation & Startup Partnerships
26:35 - The Importance of Recognition & People
27:33 - Closing Thoughts

In this Winners Circle episode, host Russ Fordyce sits down with Amanda McGuckin Hager, CRO and CMO of TrueDialog, to unpack the future of business texting and why SMS remains one of the most intimate and powerful communication channels brands have. Amanda explains how cultural shifts away from phone calls and email are driving a surge in business text messaging, especially among students and younger audiences who live in their messaging apps. She breaks down how TrueDialog’s enterprise platform lets organizations text directly from tools like Microsoft Teams and CRM systems, creating seamless experiences where calls and texts share the same number and context.

The conversation dives into the mechanics and compliance backbone that keep SMS from turning into the next spam filled inbox, including 10DLC registration, carrier level authentication, opt in rules, and TrueDialog’s True Delivery feature that tests messages against carrier filters before campaigns go live. Amanda and Russ also explore the rise of RCS as a kind of HTML for texting, with rich media, carousels, buttons, and verified brand senders poised to transform what business messaging looks like on both Android and Apple devices.

From there, Amanda shares how AI fits into this ecosystem, not by writing messages for brands, but by recommending responses, assisting agents with one click replies, and soon providing deeper insights on send times, engagement patterns, and campaign performance based on more than a billion messages sent. She talks about True Connect, a hub style integration that synchronizes SMS activity across Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, Dynamics, HubSpot, and more so sales and marketing see the same conversation trail and do not overwhelm prospects.

Finally, Amanda reflects on her own path from long time B2B demand gen marketer to CRO, why she raised her hand to rebuild the sales organization from the ground up, and how aligning sales and marketing around clean data, clear processes, and respectful use of an intimate channel like SMS leads to stronger revenue outcomes. If you care about revenue intelligence, compliant messaging, RCS, and the balance between AI assistance and human connection, this episode offers a practical, down to earth look at where business texting is headed next.

Summary

In this conversation, Russ Fordyce and Eliana Starbird discuss the importance of awards in branding and employee recognition, particularly in the context of the upcoming 2026 budget season. They explore various award categories, including Best Places to Work, AI Excellence, and Sustainability Awards, emphasizing the strategic benefits of each. The discussion highlights the role of employee satisfaction surveys, the significance of advisory boards in shaping award programs, and the overall value of winning awards for organizations. The conversation concludes with a call to action for increased engagement and recognition of employees.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Welcome

02:12 2026 Budget Season and Awards Overview

05:26 The Importance of Awards for Branding

08:27 Innovation Awards: A Unique Approach

11:14 Best Places to Work Awards: Employee Engagement

14:12 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards: Evolving Categories

24:25 Navigating Award Categories in AI

27:25 Fortress Cybersecurity Awards

30:31 Sales and Marketing Awards

33:58 Stratus Awards in Cloud Computing

34:27 Horizon Awards: Inspiring Stories

37:00 The Big Awards for Business

38:22 Enhancements in Awards Programs

39:17 Digital Certificates and Blockchain Recognition

41:27 Advisory Boards: Shaping Future Programs

42:55 Certificate in Award Marketing

44:00 Recognition as a Service

45:46 Documenting the Value of Winning

49:54 Maximizing the Winners Package

53:10 The Importance of Employee Recognition

#Budget #Recognition #Marketing #ROI

Chief Commercial Officer Laurie Oswald joins host Ruth Redding on Winners Circle to talk about leading commercial transformation at two century old companies, C and D Technologies and Trojan Battery Company, while championing women in leadership and global diversity.

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Laurie shares how she oversees sales, marketing, product, customer service and inside sales across both businesses, powering critical infrastructure like data centers, telecom networks and utilities on the C and D side, and motive applications like golf carts and aerial work platforms on the Trojan side. She explains how these companies are modernizing with new battery chemistries, a globalized portfolio and digital initiatives including Trojans first B2B ecommerce platform and AI powered analytics to improve customer experience and responsiveness.

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The conversation dives into:

How C and D and Trojan are preparing for the next 100 years of market leadership while serving booming segments like data centers and motive power.

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The role of batteries in ensuring uptime for AI driven data centers and other critical infrastructure amid rising expectations and high profile outages.

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Using AI in commercial teams for analytics, CRM upgrades, partner portals and sales enablement, while keeping the human factor firmly in the loop.

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Laurie also opens up about her own journey, from funding college through service in the U S Air National Guard to 20 plus years in critical and digital infrastructure, then stepping into a global commercial leadership role that spans very different markets and product sets. She talks about learning a new industry as CCO, relying on a strong team and transferring technology and insight between stationary power and motive power businesses.

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A major theme of this episode is the global mindset. Laurie describes how moving into a global role early in her career shaped her approach to building diverse leadership teams, standardizing tools and processes worldwide and respecting regional requirements like environmental conditions for battery performance. She argues that diverse, global teams are more creative, more thorough and better at solving complex problems.

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For women in tech and aspiring leaders, Laurie offers three pieces of advice:

Embrace your authentic value, including empathy, instead of trying to be one of the guys.

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Take your seat at the table and use your voice, especially when you are the only woman in the room.

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Build and leverage your network, championing other women and colleagues as you climb the spiral together instead of competing for a single seat at the top.

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She closes by reflecting on where her drive comes from, a competitive spirit, a deep desire to contribute and a commitment to building strong, collaborative and diverse teams. Roughly half of her current leadership team are women. For Laurie, true leadership means helping people grow into their next role while driving business transformation in an era defined by AI, changing markets and constant disruption.

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If you care about women in leadership, commercial transformation, AI in sales and the future of critical infrastructure, this Winners Circle conversation is for you.

Modernizing with AI is not just about more GPUs or chatbots. In this Winner’s Circle episode, host Russ Fordyce talks with all star judge and Cloud Engagement Manager Krish (Radhakrishna) Banavalikar about what real transformation looks like when you blend data, AI, and human insight. Krish shares his journey from an Indian village to leading global cloud and AI programs, and why he calls himself a “serial learner and unlearner.”​

He explains how he helps enterprises move from experiments to value, using agentic AI to design products, shape campaigns, and feed customer feedback back into the loop. The surprising blockers are not usually technology, he notes, but compliance, privacy, and governance that slow deployment and force teams to rethink how they handle customer data. Krish breaks down practical patterns like medallion architectures and data mesh that turn messy operational and transactional data into AI ready assets, and why operational signals often matter more than traditional summaries for understanding real customer behavior.​

A highlight of the episode is Krish’s passion for multilingual AI and underrepresented Indo Aryan languages such as Hindi, Marathi, and Sanskrit. He explains why today’s large language models, while seemingly multilingual, still struggle with culture, humor, slang, and mixed language content, and how his own research, including a 97 percent accuracy sentiment analysis project on biased Amazon reviews, points to the need for better datasets and benchmarks beyond English centric standards.​

Throughout the conversation, Krish returns to people and careers. He talks about mentoring more than 300 professionals into cloud and AI roles, the impact of early mentors on his own path, and how he tracks job market signals and hype cycles to decide which skills to build for the next three to five years. Russ and Krish close by looking ahead to the massive AI infrastructure build out, the potential shock of quantum computing, and why many enterprises today are simply “keeping up” – caught between old playbooks and a fast moving agentic AI future.​

What happens to sales when AI can flood every inbox, feed, and phone line, but real human attention is scarcer than ever? In this Winners Circle episode, Russ Fordyce sits down with Sammy Award winner Chris Sorensen, CEO of PhoneBurner, to unpack what “responsible dialing” really means in 2025 and why authentic conversations still win.

Chris explains how PhoneBurner helps quota carrying reps hit their numbers the old fashioned way, by having real, one to one calls with people who actually pick up, while using modern infrastructure, analytics, and AI to keep answer rates high. He pulls back the curtain on what happens between the moment you hit dial and when or if a call reaches a mobile phone, from carrier filtering and “spam likely” labels to silent blocking deep in the network. Over half of PhoneBurner’s team now focuses purely on call delivery and reputation, working closely with tier one carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and T Mobile to ensure that legitimate calls show up with clean caller ID instead of being treated like robocall noise.

The conversation dives into why spam flags and call blocking have become such a massive issue and why many outbound teams are making it worse. Chris breaks down the hidden cost of bad tactics like number rotation, where organizations blast prospects from dozens of different phone numbers in the hope that one gets through. Carriers can now fingerprint this behavior quickly, he explains, which not only torpedoes answer rates but also destroys the long term value of your phone numbers, much like burning through disposable email domains. Instead, he shares a practical framework for getting back into double digit answer rate territory: start with high intent leads, stop rotating numbers, register where appropriate, and treat frequency and follow up like a relationship, not a game.​

Chris also introduces ARMOR, Answer Rate Monitoring, Optimization, and Remediation, PhoneBurner’s end to end program for diagnosing and improving outbound performance. By analyzing SIP signaling data, carrier reputation signals, call durations, and even whether calls are getting returned, ARMOR helps separate delivery problems from behavior problems and gives teams clear steps to “nurse back to health” their outbound strategy. Looking ahead, Chris and Russ explore a near future where AI agents sit on the network itself, screening calls before a human ever hears a ring. In that world, integrity based practices, clean data, honest caller identity, thoughtful cadences, will not just be ethical choices, they will be survival requirements.

For sales leaders, revenue teams, and marketers, this episode is a masterclass in how to keep the phone a trusted, high value channel in an AI saturated landscape: use technology to protect and amplify human to human conversations, not to overwhelm them.

Herizon Award winner Daria Leshchenko, CEO of SupportYourApp, joins Russ Fordyce on The Winners’ Circle to share how she built a global “support-as-a-service” company that blends human empathy with AI-driven efficiency. Starting as a customer support rep herself and becoming CEO at 24, Daria grew SupportYourApp from a small team serving Mac developers in Ukraine into an international operation supporting software, e-commerce, telecom, and more in 60+ languages, 24/7. Along the way, she led through COVID, war, and rapid expansion into markets from Argentina to West Africa.​

Daria opens up about what it really takes to scale a remote-first service business: hiring for values and “energy fit,” learning from failed market entries like the Philippines, and keeping people engaged for 7–14 years in a constantly changing company. She explains why loyalty is no longer a buzzword but the byproduct of continuous growth, new challenges, and genuine care for her team’s development.​

The conversation dives deep into AI in customer support. Daria shares why SupportYourApp has spent five years investing in AI frameworks for email, chat, and voice, and why she treats AI like a knife: incredibly powerful if used correctly, dangerous if deployed blindly. She breaks down how they measure AI impact through deflection rate, why clean, constantly updated documentation is the real bottleneck, and how humans must stay in the loop to check tone, handle edge cases, and bring empathy where models fall short.​

Russ and Daria also explore her philosophy of experimentation, tolerating smart failures, and introducing AI gradually—start with one use case, test, refine, then expand—rather than trying to automate everything at once. For leaders, founders, and CX professionals, this episode offers a grounded playbook for combining human talent and AI in a way that protects customer experience while unlocking real scale.​

In this episode of The Winners’ Circle, host Russ Fordyce sits down with Ravi Bhushan, founder and CEO of Brightchamps, to explore how AI is reshaping what kids learn, how they learn, and who gets left behind when education does not keep up.​

Ravi shares the origin story of Brightchamps, founded in 2020 at the peak of the pandemic to give kids around the world access to “new age skills” that traditional K–12 systems were not designed to teach. From technology and coding to financial literacy, robotics, public speaking, and now math taught through adaptive AI, Brightchamps focuses on building real, marketable skills rather than just test scores.​

He explains why core areas like money, automation, and communication are still mostly missing from formal curricula, and how institutional inertia makes it hard for schools to update content at the same pace the world is changing. Ravi argues that this growing gap is exactly where AI can be a “savior,” enabling rapid content creation, true personalization at the level of each child, and one to one style practice that adjusts in real time.​

Ravi and Russ dive into how Brightchamps is using agentic AI not only in the learning experience but across the company: tailoring questions based on a child’s specific mistakes, adapting explanations to analytical versus creative learners, monitoring millions of classes for teaching quality, and even having AI “mentors” proactively reach out to parents when engagement drops.​

You will also hear Ravi’s personal take as a parent, including how he uses nightly “why” sessions with his son and tools like ChatGPT to keep curiosity alive, and why he believes AI, used well, is less a shortcut and more a powerful curiosity engine in every kid’s pocket.​

Key discussion themes:

• Why skills like technology, financial literacy, robotics, and public speaking belong in foundational education
• How fast the skills gap is widening between what schools teach and what the world demands
• Practical ways AI can deliver truly personalized, non boring learning at scale
• Using agentic AI to detect disengagement, support teachers, and improve class quality
• Reframing AI from “cheating tool” to universal teacher and curiosity amplifier for kids and parents alike​

Stay to the end to hear Ravi’s vision of a future where AI does more “heavy lifting” inside education companies, freeing humans to focus on empathy, motivation, and designing better learning journeys

Sophie Reymond, founder of SRPR and Coworker, joins Russ Fordyce on The Winners' Circle to explore how mentorship and AI are shaping modern communication careers. Sophie shares her journey from corporate burnout to leading a boutique PR consultancy focused on AI-driven tech startups, and how she helps professionals integrate AI in ways that enhance creativity and efficiency.

She also introduces Coworker, an upcoming global mentorship platform designed to connect women across industries for guidance, support, and career growth. Born from Sophie’s own challenges in navigating male-dominated workplaces without mentorship, Coworker will use a matchmaking approach to foster meaningful connections.

The conversation delves into how AI is transforming PR while maintaining the essential human touch. Sophie discusses the challenges of AI training data, the need for regulation, and practical ways organizations and individuals can adapt to this fast-evolving landscape. She offers advice on storytelling as a tool to make technology relatable and impactful.

Topics covered include:

• Sophie’s path to becoming her own mentor with AI training at MIT and hands-on experience
• The vision and mission behind Coworker as a space for women to connect and thrive
• Balancing multiple roles in communication, community building, and technology
• Insights for communication professionals starting out or embracing AI
• The art of crafting stories that bring complex technology to life
  This conversation offers fresh perspectives on navigating the evolving worlds of AI, communication, and professional growth. Sophie’s insights illuminate the ways technology can empower creativity and community while highlighting the importance of support and connection in career journeys. Whether you’re a communication professional, entrepreneur, or simply curious about the intersection of AI and mentorship, this episode provides valuable inspiration for adapting and thriving in today’s fast-changing landscape.

Join Harshit Kohli, Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS and recognized expert in data analytics and enterprise IT, for an insightful conversation about what’s truly shaping the future of business and technology. In this episode, Harshit shares his unique journey through the cloud ecosystem, moving from hands-on problem solver to trusted advisor for leading organizations embracing next-generation AI and big data.

Get ready to hear how the role of “big data” has evolved from just another buzzword to the engine behind digital transformation, with Harshit clarifying why actionable insights—not just data volume—drive success. He unpacks how generative AI is changing the business playbook, but explains that true innovation still depends on human trust, governance, and a willingness to learn continuously.

Listeners will gain candid advice for building teams that thrive in a fast-moving world, strategies for keeping ethics and customer trust at the center of tech initiatives, and real-life examples of cloud innovation in action. From the importance of cross-training and accessible STEM education, to the AI trends most likely to reshape industries, Harshit offers practical recommendations for both business leaders and technical professionals.

If you want to learn what’s actually required to drive meaningful business results—and why the human element still matters most—this episode delivers the expertise, stories, and fresh perspective you’ve been looking for.