Recognizing the heroes of CX Industry

The customer experience industry is full of talented people doing remarkable work. The QA managers, insights analysts, and digital transformation leads who are modernizing CX from the inside out, every single day.

With an aim to celebrate these brilliant leaders, Level AI launched CX Heroes. It was our way of putting a spotlight on the operators and team leads in the experience industry who are rewiring how CX works, not from a stage, but from inside their organizations.

Over the course of the campaign, we received nominations across three categories: The Quality Commander, The Insight Illuminator, and The Agentic Pioneer. These are the 2026 honorees.

Every winner received a CX Hero digital badge, a credential that reflects real operational impact. And every winner gets a platform, starting here.

Category 1: The Insight Illuminator

Meet our grand winner, Corinne Flanagan:

Corinne delivered 100% QA coverage and agent coaching tools for more than 150 agents, but that's only half the story. By leveraging Level AI across 300,000+ interactions a year, she built a clear, actionable Voice of the Customer program at both the macro and micro level. Those insights now influence Smartsheet's product roadmap and arm CSMs with the intelligence they need to serve millions of customers.

While others had high nomination volumes, Corinne was the most well-rounded advocate, making her win a grand prize worth a $1000!

Hannah delivers insights across Dick's Sporting Goods using both VOC and ad hoc analytics and she does it in a way that makes the contact center the most-read source of customer intelligence in the building. When people talk about turning a "contact center" into an "insights center," Hannah is the daily proof that it's more than a tagline.

Karen restructured Top Hat's entire Voice of the Customer program and the impact didn't stay in the contact center. Customer bugs have decreased 30% since inception. Her AI-powered competitive analysis now drives both the SEO and AEO strategy for the full marketing team, and based on internal testing, Top Hat's brand is more consistently recommended than its competitors.

Andrea transformed FCP Euro's onboarding from a qualitative, gut-feel process into a data-driven one built on structured assessments. The result: every new hire in 2025 was onboarded on time, with 90% fully into production within 30 days of their start date. A standard that's now measurable, repeatable, and raising the bar.

Mia uses AI to surface insights in near real-time identifying business themes, pain points, and friction areas across thousands of interactions in minutes. Work that used to take a team days now happens before the morning standup. That speed isn't just efficiency. It's a competitive advantage.

Category 2: The Agentic Pioneer

Prasanna helped shepherd Wayfair's AI automation and CX intelligence work at enterprise scale by improving service quality and operational efficiency at the same time. In a space where most leaders treat those two goals as a trade-off, Prasanna found the architecture that delivers both.

Nigel took the chat virtual agent from launch to production and then set his sights on the harder problem: voice. His methodical, detail-oriented testing approach, paired with clear requirements documentation and defined success indicators, is turning one of the most complex AI deployments in CX into a high-level success story.

Category 3: The Quality Commander

PK consistently demonstrates what QA looks like when it's built for growth, not compliance. By leveraging QA analysis to identify common high-performance behaviors and shift the performance curve upward, he's turned quality review into Oak Street Health's most reliable coaching engine.

Anastasia is rebuilding AG1's QA from the ground up, taking it from manual and channel-based to automated and journey-based. Her goal isn't just better scores. It's a quality program that maps to how customers actually experience the brand, reduces lift on the contact center, and surfaces problems that random sampling would never catch.

The work doesn't stop here.

These nine leaders aren't the exception, they're the signal. CX is being rewired right now, not by platforms or products, but by the people inside organizations who see what's broken and fix it.

The 2026 CX Heroes campaign has come to a close, but the work these leaders are doing continues. We're proud to have had the chance to recognize them, and we look forward to celebrating the next generation of CX Heroes in the years to come.