WINNERS' CIRCLE

Rebuilding Customer Support Around AI: Inside Lenovo's Sub 5% Transfer Rate | Jack Zhang

Jack Zhang, Global Head of AI Transformation and Worldwide eSupport Strategy at Lenovo, just won Executive of the Year at the 2025 BIG Awards for Business. On this episode of The Winners' Circle, he walks through how Lenovo got its chat agent transfer rate under five percent, a number most technical support teams would treat as a great week, not an everyday baseline.

How Steelhead Productions Rebuilt Trade Show Exhibits Around Rentals to Cut Waste | Rhiannon Andersen

The trade show industry builds beautiful things and then throws most of them away. Rhiannon Andersen, CMO and owner of Steelhead Productions, decided that was a solvable problem, and she built an entire business model around solving it. Her company just won a Business Intelligence Group Sustainability Award for the Exhibit Happy initiative, and the numbers behind it are genuinely surprising.

Being the Answer: How S&P Global Reinvented B2B Marketing for AI Search | Chyna Murphy

Chyna Murphy and the marketing team behind S&P Global Market Intelligence just won a 2026 Sammy Award for CapIQ Reinvented, a campaign that put a 60 year old financial data brand on the Nasdaq Tower and inside Reddit threads in the same quarter. In this episode they break down what actually drove revenue, why they started building for AI answers before anyone asked them to, and how a seven person team pulled it off mostly in house.

Why the Fastest Megawatt Is the One You Don't Use: Encycle's 21-Year Data Advantage | Ana-Paula Issa

Encycle CEO AP Issa joins Russ Fordyce to talk about the energy crunch almost nobody is pricing in yet. She explains why utilities missed the data center wave while preparing for EVs, how 21 years of rooftop HVAC data became Encycle's moat, and why the equipment building owners already have is the only lever they can pull this quarter. Encycle won a 2026 Sustainability Leadership Award from Business Intelligence Group for AI-driven HVAC optimization that requires no new hardware.

No-Code RCS: How True Dialog Put Rich Messaging in Marketers' Hands Without a Developer | Amanda McGuckin Hager

Amanda McGuckin Hager is helping brands use business texting as a high-value, high-trust marketing and customer engagement channel. At True Dialog, Amanda works with colleges, universities, retailers, financial services companies, and brands across many industries to connect with people through SMS, RCS, CRM integrations, APIs, and emerging AI-driven messaging tools. True Dialog recently won a SAMI Award for its work in SMS and business messaging. In this episode, Russ and Amanda discuss why SMS has become such a powerful channel. Unlike email, text messaging lives next to messages from family, friends, and the people consumers trust most. That makes the channel incredibly valuable, but only when brands respect the opt-in, keep lists clean, and send messages people actually want.

Pay First, Collect Later: Rewiring the Electronics Trade-In | Roger Brown

Most trade-in programs ask you to mail your phone into a black box and just wait. Roger Brown and the team at Allstate Protection Plans decided to do the opposite with Staples Canada, paying customers up front and letting the device follow. It won them a 2026 Sustainability Award, and the reason it works has almost nothing to do with recycling.

How Atlantic.Net Transformed 24/7 Cloud Support During a Live Data Center Migration | Chris Shyrock

Atlantic.Net's Director of Support Services, Chris Shyrock, inherited a team in the middle of a massive data center migration and turned it into a Transformation of the Year. Here's the operational playbook behind a support overhaul that actually moved the Trustpilot needle, shifted queue ownership to shift leads, and kept customer impact at zero through one of the riskiest infrastructure moves in the company's 32-year history.

The Real AI Infrastructure Bottleneck Isn't Chips, It's Electricity | Selva Murali

Everybody's talking about GPU shortages, but according to one of our own award judges, that's not really the story anymore. He builds the chips going into AI factories at AMD, and he told us plainly what's actually running out first. Spoiler, it's not silicon.

Why "Not If, But When" Is an Excuse: Building Identity-First, Proactive Cyber Defense | Chris Schueler

Chris Schueler is helping large, complex organizations rethink cybersecurity for an AI-accelerated threat environment. At Cyderes, Chris leads a pure-play cybersecurity company focused on managed security, transformation, operations, identity, non-human identity, and proactive threat defense. Cyderes recently won a Fortress Cybersecurity Award, with Chris recognized as an executive leadership winner. In this episode, Russ and Chris discuss how his early military experience building one of the first Army security operations centers still shapes how he builds security teams today, why the old mindset of "not if, but when" can become an excuse, and how Cyderes' Meridian platform stitches together cyber threat data with identity and non-human identity signals so organizations can prevent threats before they spread.

Why Non-Human Identity Security Is Cybersecurity's New Front Line | Keith Hollender

Fortress Cybersecurity Award winner Keith Hollender, CEO of Arcova, joins The Winners' Circle to unpack how AI is speeding up both attackers and defenders. He also explains why non-human identity security has quietly become the most urgent conversation in enterprise cybersecurity today.