Andy Lee takes over CEO role to scale Crescendo. July 16, 2026 Crescendo has announced the appointment of co-founder and hitherto Executive Chairman, Andy Lee, as its next Chief Executive Officer. He takes over the role from fellow co-founder, Matt Price. Price has stepped aside and will remain a strategic advisor to the Board. Price will support the leadership transition and continue to advise the company on its long-term strategy. The change in leadership comes as the organisation is preparing for a new phase of growth. Lee has deep experience in scaling organisations. Last year the company crossed the $100 million ARR threshold for the first time. Crescendo offers a next-generation AI-powered CX solution and is aiming to replace legacy CX solutions that many organisations still use. This transition has the full backing of General Catalyst, $50 million financing round in 2024. The company was then valued at $500 million. Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst, commented, "From the beginning, Crescendo has represented the applied AI transformation General Catalyst believes will reshape large, complex markets. Customer experience is one of the clearest examples of a system ready to be rebuilt for an AI-native future. Andy's experience scaling customer operations for enterprise organisations makes him the right leader for this next phase as Crescendo moves from proving the model to expanding its impact." Lee will take on the responsibility of leading the organisation as it scales. Aiming to help organisations transform from fragmented legacy CX solutions to a single AI-powered platform provided by Crescendo. There is room to scale for Crescendo. The customer Experience market is evolving rapidly with increased adoption of AI and AR technology. There is a growing focus on customer engagement, retention and loyalty across the numerous digital channels that customers use. This is according to Fortune Business Insights. The research firm also estimates that the Global CX market is valued at around US$26.11 billion in 2026. And will grow to US$84.22 billion by 2034, at a CAGR of 15.8%. For Crescendo, there is still a huge opportunity. Metrigy's CX MetriCast 2025 market study estimated that 34% of all companies use a CCaaS solution, of which 38.4% use on-premises platforms. Organisations are no longer considering a shift to just a cloud-based solution; instead, they are looking for one that is AI-native and combines the fragmented landscape of solutions that organisations have built over the last few years. Crescendo offers various products, including AI CX Assistants, Agent Assist, CX Insights, Managed AI Services, and Brand Aligned Support. Who is Andy Lee? Lee remains the Executive Chairman and now adds the CEO responsibilities. He has founded and led Alorica as CEO for 23 years and currently serves as Executive Chairman for that organisation as well. The two companies recently announced a strategic partnership that will see Alorica bring Crescendo's AI-native customer experience platform to all current and prospective clients. Lee founded Alorica, bootstrapping the company and building it to a multi-billion-dollar organisation with over 100,000 employees across 16 countries. It is that experience at scaling an organisation that Crescendo wants to take advantage of. As CEO, he will be better placed to help the company grow. Andy Lee, CEO of Crescendo, commented, "AI is not just another feature to be layered onto traditional Software. The companies that will get the most value from AI are the ones that radically rethink the foundation of their customer experience operations. Legacy CX stacks are fragmented and difficult to adapt. Crescendo is building for a future where AI-native systems can understand intent, coordinate work across channels, and continuously improve with every interaction. Crescendo looks to accelerate growth. Entering it's next phase, Crescendo shows strong evidence that its model works. It now supports more than 500 AI deployments worldwide. With customers including Airtable, Lovepop, Stewart Golf, Cuyana, Headspace, and Grindr. In one example, SQUIRE nearly doubled support volume to more than 17,000 conversations in six months without increasing case backlogs, while CSAT rose 15% year over year. This traction highlights why Crescendo is now focused on scaling its approach for more enterprise organisations under Lee's leadership. Since co-founding Crescendo in January 2024 with Anand Chandrasekaran, Matt Price and Slava Zhakov, Lee has helped define the company's full-stack, AI-native customer experience strategy. As CEO, he will focus on expanding the platform's enterprise reach. Also helping CX leaders address the infrastructure gaps left by legacy systems. Lee added, "The future of customer experience won't be built through incremental upgrades to legacy platforms. Organisations need a fundamentally different operating model. Crescendo has built that foundation, and our focus now is on helping more enterprises make the transition with confidence." Enterprise times: what does this mean. Having helped to co-found Crescendo whilst leading Alorica, Lee will now aim to build Crescendo into the next major player in the CX space. It will have one key advantage over other scaling firms. That is a very close relationship with a global services partner. Lee is now uniquely positioned to leverage his Alorica network to forge similar partnerships with other global SIs. Thus, accelerating Crescendo's enterprise reach. Price has helped grow the company rapidly using skills learnt leading the startup Multizone International and nearly 13 years at Zendesk. The transition makes sense, though, and may have been planned from the beginning. Lee has deeper experience during this scaling phase. With General Catalyst's support, he will now look to rapidly and sustainably scale the business further.

Sean McCaffrey appointed as Head of Growth at Crescendo. Congratulations to its client Crescendo for appointing Sean McCaffrey as Head of Growth. Crescendo is the only AI-Native Customer Experience solution built to run CX as one unified system. By combining autonomous AI with embedded CX expertise, performance continues to improve after launch. Founded in San Francisco in 2023, Crescendo powers 500+ AI deployments worldwide across retail, financial services, healthcare, technology, and consumer services. C1 Team: Terry Shaw & Jocelin Poon - 15 Jul 2026

Alorica and Crescendo partner to bring AI into live enterprise service channels. Published on July 15, 2026 By Nicole Willing. Reposted from CX Today. Alorica has teamed up with Crescendo to help enterprises bring AI into complex live-channel customer interactions, where human judgment, context and seamless handoffs remain critical. Alorica will offer Crescendo's AI-native customer experience platform to current and prospective enterprise clients, combining the BPO provider's global delivery scale with Crescendo's orchestration technology. Announced at Customer Contact Week (CCW) in Las Vegas, the partnership is designed to address the growing challenge in enterprise CX of deploying AI across voice, chat, and other live channels in a way that delivers measurable outcomes rather than fragmented automation. While many enterprises have experimented with AI in customer service, live interactions remain a sticking point, as they often involve complex customer needs, multiple systems, regulatory or emotional sensitivity and moments where escalation to a human agent is essential. Alorica and Crescendo argue that enterprises now require a unified operating layer where AI and human agents work together across the full customer journey, rather than more than isolated AI tools. Through the partnership, Alorica and Crescendo will co-develop an AI-native center of excellence within Alorica, create new market offerings for enterprise live-channel CX and enable Alorica to resell and deploy Crescendo's AI-native CX platform to enterprise customers. Crescendo customers will also be able to augment their deployments with Alorica's human agent workforce, which includes more than 100,000 employees across 16 countries. Moving from AI pilots to enterprise deployment. Although AI adoption has accelerated, many organizations still struggle to move from experimentation to production, particularly when deploying across multiple geographies, business units, channels and legacy technology environments. "The biggest barriers we see are fragmentation across legacy systems, data silos, and the difficulty of scaling consistently across geographies and channels," Mike Clifton, co-CEO at Alorica, told CX Today. "Companies are universally facing the challenges of having to source the right AI solutions and skilled technologists and then waiting through long deployment periods to get 'potential' results." Alorica and Crescendo aim to help clients address that by delivering fully managed and fully underwritten services through an outcome-based pricing model. Co-CEO Max Schwendner also pointed to the operational complexity of scaling AI across the enterprise. "Enterprises often struggle to move from pilot to production because of integration complexity and change management. Our partnership simplifies that journey by aligning the right blend of technology, people and process from day one - so organizations can operationalize AI at scale, not just experiment with it." Rather than positioning AI as a separate layer or a standalone tool, Alorica and Crescendo are aiming to embed AI into the way CX is delivered, monitored, and improved. How AI and human agents work together. In many customer service environments, AI can resolve simple requests independently, but problems often emerge when an interaction becomes more complex, requiring a handoff to a human agent or input from multiple teams. Poorly handled escalations can force customers to repeat information, create inconsistent experiences and reduce trust in the brand as well as the technology. According to Schwendner, the partnership is intended to address this by keeping AI active across the interaction, even when a human agent becomes involved. "The key is orchestration. AI doesn't replace humans; it augments them. In complex scenarios, AI continues to assist in the background by surfacing insights, recommending next best actions, and ensuring continuity across handoffs, so the experience feels unified rather than fragmented." Clifton added: "In practice, AI handles the heavy lifting upfront - understanding intent, resolving simple requests, and gathering context. When escalation is needed, that full context is passed seamlessly to a human agent, eliminating repetition for the customer and enabling faster, more informed resolution." Enterprises are increasingly looking for AI systems that can support agents in real time, maintain context across channels, and help manage customer journeys end to end. Why ai-native architecture matters. The partnership also highlights the growing use of the term "AI-native" in the CX market. For Alorica and Crescendo, the distinction is important because rather than adding AI functionality to existing CX systems, Crescendo's platform is positioned as having AI embedded at the foundation of the architecture. Clifton explained: "AI-native means AI is embedded at the core of the platform - not bolted on. This allows for real-time learning, continuous optimization and more seamless automation across the entire customer journey, rather than isolated use cases." Schwendner said this architecture is becoming increasingly important as customer expectations rise. "Legacy systems simply can't keep up with the speed and adaptability required. AI-native architecture enables organizations to be more agile, scale innovation faster and deliver more personalized, consistent experiences. It's something that's very difficult to achieve by layering AI onto older systems." The partnership positions Alorica and Crescendo to target enterprises that are no longer satisfied with limited AI pilots or point solutions, but still need the operational expertise, workforce capacity and implementation support required to deploy AI at scale. As pressure mounts to turn AI investment into measurable customer and business outcomes, Alorica and Crescendo are betting that enterprise CX will increasingly depend on orchestration between people, processes, and AI-native platforms. The promise is a more unified approach to live-channel CX in which AI handles intent recognition, automation, insight generation and continuity, while human agents remain available for moments requiring empathy, judgment or complex problem-solving.